The Duchess of Malfi

This collection of essays represents new scholarly work on John Webster’s
great tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi. The critical methodologies range from
historical contexts to feminist readings of agency and identity, to social
analyses of Jacobean culture. The play has rightly taken its place as one of
the greatest of the early modern period, and the Duchess is now seen as one of
the great tragic figures of the time—and along with Shakespeare’s Cleopatra,
one of the most powerful representations of a strong female character in
control of her own sexuality and her own destiny. The play also offers an
unusual range of villainous characters, from the Duchess’s two brothers—the
Machiavellian Cardinal and the deranged Ferdinand—to Bosola, who at first
seems to be a conventional Vice-like villain. Bosola commits terrible acts in
the play, and though he ultimately surrenders to his conscience and tries to
do good, this transformation comes too late, and the final set of murders
takes place in darkness—an apt symbol of the play’s disturbing moral universe.