malfi critics

Question 1

Dympha Callaghan 2017 (the Duchess)

Answer 1

• ‘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’
• ‘The Duchess thus transgresses her society’s notion of proper female conduct” by “choosing a husband who is her social inferior’

Question 2

Mathew Beaumont 2015 (sleepwalkers)

Answer 2

• ‘He is an outsider to the Duchess’s household, and he constitutes a constant threat to its order; at least, parasitic as he is, he rapaciously exploits the slightest sign of internal disorder, including his mistress’s concealed pregnancy’
• ‘The Duchess of Malfi, in common with other Jacobean tragedies, is a play in which the night exercises a dangerous, if not lunatic rule or lure’

Question 3

William Poel 1893 (Julia)

Answer 3

‘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’

Question 4

Peter B Murray (Julia)

Answer 4

‘The Duchess’s childbearing is thus set in the middle of Act II as a bright jewel against the dark foil of the false old woman and Julia’

Question 5

Kenneth Tynan 1960 (greed)

Answer 5

‘In the whole of Webster’s work, scarcely an act is committed that is not motivated by greed, revenge, or sexual rapacity’

Question 6

Emma Smith 2009 (the Duchess)

Answer 6

‘the Duchess is culpable of excessive sexual desire. The story is a moral one in which sexual desire, particularly women’s sexual desire, is punished’

Question 7

Michael Cordner 2011 (Bosola)

Answer 7

‘Bosola ‘is forged from contradictory imperatives … a craven need to be employed by those in power…matched with a deep revulsion from the kind of service that employment will entail.’

Question 8

Clifford Leech 1963 (Ferdinand)

Answer 8

‘The grossness of his language to her in Act 1 and the continued violence of his response to the situation’ is part of a long list of evidence for his incestuous desire.’

Question 9

Leah S Marcus 2009 (Ferdinand)

Answer 9

• ‘Webster’s portrayal of the Duchess’s twin brother Ferdinand also departs from the historical record in order to intensify the threat he represents’

Question 10

GK Hunter 1978 (setting)

Answer 10

A critic who argues the Italian setting in Jacobean drama is used ‘as a mode of human experience rather than as a country’.

Question 11

Emma Smith 2009 (Bosola)

Answer 11

‘Bosola’s terrible agency in the play is that of the malcontent, a distinctly early modern phenomenon, a product of massive increase in secondary education under the Tudors, an educated man who cannot get preferement, a clever, isolated individual whose intelligence is turned to malignancy, or more precisely, to amorality’

Question 12

Nigel Wheale (the Cardinal)

Answer 12

‘When the Cardinal launches on his career of warrior-priest in Act 3 Scene 3, he takes his orders from ‘The Emperor’ himself, Charles V, the most powerful monarch of the age, Spanish Catholic ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, and a perpetual threat to England during the reign of Henry VIII.’

Question 13

Frank Whigham (the Duchess)

Answer 13

‘privately assumes the unmistakably male tone of the Renaissance hero’

Question 14

Swetnam’s Pamphlets 1615 (women)

Answer 14

‘there is nothing more dangerous that a woman in her fury’
‘the answer of a wise woman is silence’
‘if she be rich and beautiful, then thou matches thyself to a she-Devil’

Question 15

Sean McEvoy (critics and Duchess)

Answer 15

‘it is strange that some critics have chosen to find Webster’s depiction of the Duchess’s healthy physicality as tinged with disgust’
‘she is brave, intelligent and vivacious’