Duchess of Malfi critics

T.S Eliot - Webster

Webster saw “the skull beneath the skin.”

Callaghan - The Duchess

“Webster’s Duchess exercises transgressive, independent sexual agency in defiance of social conventions not through infidelity but through marriage, or more accurately, remarriage.”

Possessed of a healthy sexual appetite, her desires are presented as completely natural.”

“The overwhelming weight of (male) critical opinion on the play held that The Duchess of Malfi lacked a centre and focus for it’s action because critics tended to equate tragic centrality with masculinity.”

Cauaghan - The Duchess

‘‘repeating historic transgression of Eve’’

Smith - The Duchess

‘‘the Duchess is both culpable and innocent’’.

Johnston Jones - The Duchess

deluded herself with a ‘‘sense of false empowerment’’ from her title

Jankowski - The Duchess

‘‘places her private desire…above her public responsibility as a ruler, an action that identifies her with her corrupt brothers’’

Lindsay - The Duchess and Antonio

‘‘witnessing the Duchess and Antonio fall in love is pure delight’’

Alexander Allison - Antonio

“He has been made to stand still and tremble.”

Ellen R. Belton - Antonio

“The philosophical centre of the play”

“Webster is praising a man whose victory consists not in killing his capacity to feel but in managing his feelings so that they do not ruin his life.”

Cowie

‘‘everybody is vile and deceitful to everybody else’’

Whigham - Ferdinand

the Duchess is ‘a symbol of his own radical purity’

Brabcova - Ferdinand

‘‘revenge of a husband for his wife’s adultery’’ - Ferdinand’s reaction is more like a vengeful husband rather than a brother.

Woolbridge - Ferdinand

ferdinand’s obsession with the Duchess’s body is ‘‘a disgust with sexuality more broadly’’ not drive by incestuous desire

Forker - The Cardinal

“The anonymity of the Cardinal confers a shadowy remoteness upon him … emerging as the most powerful but least knowable (least easy to understand) of the major figures”

Ralph Berry - The Brothers

The duchess of Malfi was distinctly old fashioned at the time of its appearance. Although the relationship between the Duchess’ body natural and body politic is one of the play’s concerns, it is the specific obsession of its villains.

Christopher Hart - The Brothers

the brothers are motivated by ‘‘by a delight in malice itself, a "motiveless malignity" even against their own flesh and blood’’

Janowski - Male characters

they contrast to the duchess’ transgression and “restores patriarchal order."

Luckyj - Julia + The Duchess

"Julia is designed as a set off to the Duchess; as an instance of unholy love in contrast to the chaste love of the Duchess"

She "appears to be a fulfilment of Bosola's and the Aragonian brothers' degraded vision of the Duchess."

Norton - The Women

They "are constructed as objects of male desire, but when they act on their own desires, they become objects of male disgust."