Hell on Earth

• The Duchess of Malfi is a play replete with darkness, not literal and figurative.

• There are good figures and these characters are associated with light.

• On the other hand, the brothers, who exhibit unrelenting evil, are associated with motifs of darkness, fire, the devil , and sin.

• The idea that the brothers have unleashed hell on Earth is most apparent in the fourth act, which includes utter horrors like fake corpses, a severed hand, a plethora of madmen, and most centrally, the vicious mixers of the Duchess and her children.

• The Duchess, a symbol of motherhood and light is unfazed by these horrors because she believes her family already dead, but she does explain that ‘the earth’ seems made ‘of flaming sulphur’ (4.2.26).

• And when Bosola tells her she must keep living, she makes it clear that hell is truly on Earth - ‘That’s the greatest torture souls feel in hell,/ In Hell: that they must live, and cannot die.’ (4.1.70-1).

• The Cardinal and Ferdinand are particularly responsible for bringing this fire to her world.

• Ferdinand is constantly associated with fire, by others and in his own language.

• He says only the Duchess’ ‘whore’s blood’ can put out his ‘wild fire’ (2.5.46-7), he imagines killing her children by having them ‘burning in a coal-pit’ (2.5.69), lighting ‘them like a match’ -after dipping them in ‘sulphur’ (2.5.71-2).

• Additionally he is associated with salamanders - at the time of the play, thought to live in fire - multiple times.

• Both brothers are also even more directly connected to hell through constant associations with the devil.

• Antonio says ‘the devil speaks in’ the Cardinals lips, and Bosola describes Ferdinand’s manipulation as ‘Thus the devil/Candies all sins o’er’. These are but two several instances.

• This hell on Earth serves to emphasise just how virtuous the Duchess is, and how much better for the world her kind of domestic love and child-rearing is than the greed and selfishness of her brothers.

• The hell that they create in the end destroys them, too - as Ferdinand says, ‘Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust’.

• Ferdinand goes mad, the Cardinal loses all hope, and both die, leaving no legacy behind them.