THE DUCHESS OF MALFI and THE MERCHANT'S TALE critics

THE DUCHESS OF MALFI

BILLINGTON

Argues that Webster uses the tragedy to offer a vision of human existence as chaotic and unstable.

“The play consistently argues that life is unstable, accidental, perhaps ultimately meaningless”

“Destructive lusts of sex and power”

“Comment on religious hypocrisy under the guise of attacking scarlet-cloaks cardinals”

CALLAGHAN

Dissects the Duchess in the context of contemporary drama, politics, and discourses about widows, and female sexuality.

“Webster’s Duchess exercises transgressive, independent sexual agency”

“Profoundly troubling to the patriarchal order” (the Duchess remarrying)

“Mouthpieces for the misogynist discourse of the era” (Ferdinand and the Cardinal)

“Her reasons for marriage are not dynastic but erotic”

MARCUS

“Marriage is an act of courage but also of folly”

“Ferdinand’s use of religion to cloak his political ambitions”

“Act of heroic resistance” (the Duchess’ marriage to Antonio)

“Claustrophobic aristocratic possessiveness” (Ferdinand)

WEBSTER

Explores the way that the shifts from a feudal society to a cash economy are reflected in The Duchess of Malfi. Considers Bosola’s role within the play.

“An outsider both literally and metaphorically”

“You are unlikely to attack a situation which benefits you”

“Without Bosola, The Duchess of Malfi would not be a revenge tragedy”

“Undergoes a crisis from which he emerges as moral crusader”

“Bosola’s situation foregrounds contemporary anxieties about the shifts from a feudal to a cash economy”

“Subjugates his own values to the needs of his master”

“Bosola plays all characters of a revenge tragedy”

“Bosola is forced to play any part he can in order to survive”
“A country notorious in the public imagination for its corruption and political intrigue”

DESMET

 “Jacobean drama also celebrates women who cross conventional lines”

“Barred from normal feminine experiences by her political position”

“Categorisation of women as angels or devils”

“The Duchess, a second Bosola, stands outside society’s boundaries”

“Patriarchal culture seeks to define the female ruler out of existence”

JANKOWSKI

“The nature of the Renaissance dynastic marriage served almost totally to objectify the woman”

“The Duchess is represented as being radically different from the traditional picture of the Renaissance wife.”

LUCKYJ

It is wrong to characterise Julia “as a wanton, promiscuous, morally reprehensible.”

Refers to “the Arragonian brother’s tyrannical moralism.”

“The dead duchess is recast into the body of Bosola.”

OAKES

“At the end she is, she says, the Duchess of Malfi, and with that title she negates her relationship with Antonio: she becomes the woman carved in stone that Ferdinand wanted her to be.” - Ferdinand 'wins'

POEL

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.”

DOLAN

“Throughout, the play depicts its characters trying, and failing, to confide their own secrets—not just information but also emotions, commitments and values—as well as trying, and failing, to grasp what others hold inside them.”

“The Duchess did not surrender power, status, title or name to her husband.”

SELTZER

Ferdinand – “fascination with blood and even his tendency towards incest are rooted in an obsession with rank.”

RSC 2018 PRODUCTION

The Cardinal rapes Julia

Ferdinand begins as a 'dapper figure' but 'soon turns into a tortured, and torturing, maniac: having revealingly imagined his sister enjoying sex with “some strong-thighed bargeman.”

THE MERCHANT’S TALE

KITTREDGE - some consider to be an outdated view of ‘The Merchant’s Tale’

·   “The Middle Ages delighted in stories that exemplify a single human quality, like valor, or tyranny, or fortitude”

·   “Vital importance of considering the Canterbury Tales as a connected Human Comedy”

·   “He is a stately and imposing person in his degree, by no means prone to expose any holes there may be in his coat. But he is suffering a kind of emotional crisis”

·   “The cynicism is the Merchant’s”

·   “Perfect expression of the Merchant’s angry disgust at his own evil fate and at his folly in bringing that fate upon himself”

·   “We should not forget that the satire is aimed at January rather than at May”

·   “That egotistical old dotard is less excusable than his young wife, and meets with less mercy at the Merchant’s hands”

·   “The Merchant is an egoist”

·   “The tone and manner of the whole debate between Pluto and his queen are wildly absurd if regarded from the point of view of gods and goddesses”

·   “He feels himself to be the dupe whose folly he depicts”

·   “The Franklin’s tale is a gentleman’s story”

WATKINS

·   “Medieval social values forced women to seek security in mercantilism”

·   “Her motives are strictly venal”

·   “Condemned by theologians as instruments of the devil”

·   “Love and loyalty in marriage were uncommon occurrences”

·   “They are never the object of mortal or divine punishment”

·   “The degraded social position of women in medieval society was real” - but Chaucer further satirises it

·   “Mercantilism should be examined as a reflection of a medieval social attitude”

·   “January chooses a wife as he would choose a horse”

·   “It is January who initially perverts the values of marriage”

·   “It is January who reduces May to a creature for use both sexually and procreatively”

·   “From January’s understanding we see that women are things, not human beings”

·   “Seeking young flesh that he can mold to his own desires”

·   “Chaucer builds such sympathy for her in the way January uses her”

·   “As soon as she begins to speak, we become less sympathetic to her”

·   “The Merchant does not understand that human relations have to come above the commercial to be meaningful”

KLERKS

·   “Relies openly on the antifeminist discourse of the Middle Ages”

·   “Setting up opposing paradigms of woman, and placing the figure of May in the category of the ‘bad’ woman”

·   “The woman-on-top is the inversion of what medieval society deemed appropriate female behavior, which was exemplified and exaggerated in a figure like the clerk's Patient Griselda” -> literary context

·   “Subversion of the female is achieved through the continuous undercutting of the image of the powerful female by affirming the ultimate control of the male”

·   “No happy medium between these strictly polarized concepts of woman”

·   “The role of the grotesque female appointed to the Merchant's wife in the prologue is reassigned to May, as another descendant of that archetypal (female) troublemaker”

·   “When she finally does appear, it is as a nameless, faceless, voiceless entity, whom January has chosen to be his bride”

·   “May literally becomes the woman-on-top when she climbs onto the back of her husband to reach her lover”

·   “She has served her purpose - the mockery of an old man foolish enough to believe in good women - and must now be returned to her rightful position below the male”