The Duchess of Malfi

Publisher: London : J. M. Dent Publication date: 1900 Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.

Incredible characters, twisted plot and characters, and an admirable female protagonist with some great lines. ( )

This review contains spoilers.

That John Webster's birth records were quite probably destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666 is a fitting biographical fact in light of reading "The Duchess of Malfi." It perfectly highlights the senseless destruction, both physical and spiritual, that permeates this play. The duplicity, violence, and familial division rival anything that you can find in Shakespeare. While the poetry itself doesn't quite reach the Shakespearean firmament in its baroque floridity, the language is wonderful, and just as full of double entendre and puns as the greatest of Shakespeare's plays are.

The action is relatively straightforward. The Duchess of Malfi, whose overbearing brothers Ferdinand and the Cardinal insist that she never re-marry for fear that they might have to share her wealth with someone else, disobeys them and asks Antonio, one of her stewards, to marry her. Several years pass, during which the Duchess has two children by Antonio, while the brothers remain ignorant of the marriage, but they eventually find out. In an attempt to escape Ferdinand's wrath, Antonio flees to Ancona. Bosola, the Cardinal's goon, chases them in hot pursuit. The Duchess, her two younger sons, and her female servant are all killed on Bosola's instruction. Bosola, long upset by the Cardinal's venality, decides to revenge the Duchess and her children. The Cardinal, after murdering his mistress to keep her quiet, plans to kill Bosola, too, but instead kills Antonio who has since returned to Malfi. Just to drive home the idea of complete and utter wanton cruelty, the Cardinal, Ferdinand, and Bosola all die in a final melee. Just when you think all hope is lost, the Duchess' oldest son appears on stage in the final scene to take charge of a court that has destroyed itself because of its singular bloodlust. However, Webster leaves little room for the reader to imagine matters getting any better.

While Bosola seems like he might be the least interesting character because he has the least qualms with murder, he shows some interesting moments of moral ambiguity and even clarity, which makes his development interesting to watch. Needless to say, by the end, you're left feeling rent in two by the treachery, deceit, and duplicity of it all. The Duchess' son does not provide the necessary Aristotelian catharsis, and instead of a court being wholly purged of bad seeds, you feel that that he will end up a young victim in further machinations, another courtly pawn.

While others seem to not have appreciated the introduction and editorial notes, I rather enjoyed them and thought they shed some light on the production, composition, and historical background (yes, this is based on historical events - can you imagine?) As the footnotes are located at the bottom of the page, you don't have to flip back and forth between pages - one of my bête noirs when it comes to Penguin Classics editions. All in all, I look forward to reading more New Mermaids in the future, and I especially appreciate their effort at trying to revive Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. ( )

This is a review of the scholarly textual apparatus of the Arden edition of the play edited by Ms. Leah Marcus. It is not a review of the play itself.

School and university students: this is an edition full of useful notes and information and although irritatingly 'trendy' in parts it is the best current edition for you, as the footnotes are very extensive and the introduction has much that is useful.

Academics, researchers, specialists: a huge amount of work has of course gone into this edition and much of the work - indeed most of it - is useful and thorough. However, the negative aspects are so conspicuous that it is almost shocking that the edition was released without any publisher's final checking. I list below some observations about these faults, some of which are relatively minor and some egregious.

Style: a) LM indicates that writers were reserved about publicising their membership of livery companies (p4) but we have to wait for two pages to be told why;
b) appropriate formal style with sudden descents into bathos: Webster warns readers 'not to expect the play to conform to the classical rules ... because of his need to fit in to the scruffy venue of its performance.' (p7); the real duchess 'avoided the sexual profligacy that characterized the behaviour of some of her close relatives ... until she became front page news in Italy.' (p17)
c) LM draws our attention to 'the images of fragmentation and dismemberment [which] link up with contemporary issues like Protestant fear of engulfment by Catholicism ...' (p9) but then says nothing more about the matter.
d) LM frequently writes two paragraphs as one so that one finds oneself in the middle of the text suddenly being addressed about a completely new topic. The worst example is p44, 'Similarly ...' Judge for yourself.

Anomalies: a) LM tells us that the Duchess is a 'relatively good' person (p15), but on the next page she is 'an exemplar of heroic constancy.'
b) UK readers - this is a British edition from a UK publisher - do not need to be told that a 'pavement' is a 'walkway' (note to 5.ii. 317); in fact they may be confused by such a note. Also, the word 'moot' (t.n. to 1.ii.297) has an opposite meaning in Britain to that prevailing in the US.

c) LM quotes two sententiae (p51) which she describes as 'conflicting moral adages'. They are not. Judge for yourself.

d) the 'they' of t.n. to 5.i.6, ' 'cheat', has no obvious referend. The lands? The letters?

Absurdity: a) LM's commitment to a feminist reading of the play leads her in strange directions. Evoking parallels between the eponymous heroine and Chaucer's Griselda, she argues that allowing her brothers to abuse and vilify and ultimately murder her, far from being any kind of weakness, is triumphantly assertive. Thus, she says of Griselda that 'she never says no to him and therefore never allows him to override her own wishes. [No reader since 1400 has ever suggested that the supposed murder of her children by her husband was in accord with G's 'wish'; this is extreme nonsense.] Griselda therefore deconstructs the power of the tyrant by showing it to be without limits. Similarly, paradoxically, the Duchess preserves her identity and self-mastery precisely through her constancy and her acquiescence in her brothers' long list of torments.' (p38) By what grostesque intellectual contortions, initiated by the necessity to follow the latest academic fad, however lunatic, can a university teacher allow herself to pen such fatuous statements? We do not, in the real world, in a lawcourt for example, argue that a murderer has been worsted by her victim.
But it gets even worse, for the paragraph ends with the view that the tormenting brothers are actually themselves the victims: 'they vicariously punish their own unacknowledged appetites by tormenting her.' (p38) [Actually, they are indulging those appetites ...] This is bad even by the standards of American anti-intellectual christo-fascist ideology.

b) Webster's play reflects details about the 'real' duchess' story which he could not easily have known. LM suggests this explanation: 'perhaps he was so preternaturally attuned to the Duchess' story that he "invented" circumstances that were, unbeknownst to him, supported by the historical record.' This is shocking drivel, even for someone living in a supernaturalist theocracy.

Textual: a) the discussion of Q2's deviation from Q1, the base text, involves farcical over-reading of the differences. See p85 ff.
b) Q4's emendation of 'they'd take me hell' (1.ii.183) to insert a 'to' is ignored by LM; her reasons are flimsy.
c)

Errors: a) a 'roaring boy' (t.n. to 2.1.18) does not mean someone 'foppish' - quite the reverse, it's much closer to British English 'yob'
b) LM's paraphrase of 5.ii.96-7 is wrong. 'For, though I counselled it,/ The full of all th'engagement seemed to grow/ From Ferdinand. ' does not mean that the Cardinal is 'disclaiming responsibility for the precise method employed in the Duchess' death' (t.n.) but that Ferdinand was more energetic and forceful it putting the plan into operation.

Plagiarism; scores of notes are borrowed from the 1964 Revels edition of J R Brown, without acknowledgement. Many are almost verbatim. See, for example, LM's t.n. on 'Switzer' (2.ii.37) which is almost identical. LM mentions Brown's edition at the start of her lengthy acknowledgements (xvi-xviii) but does not indicate that she has received any help, guidance or information from it. This is the worst, and most outrageous aspect, of LM's edition. ( )

A classic play featuring the typical tragedy storyline with the slight twist that the Duchess is widowed at a young age and must remarry in secret due to her brother's completely insane objections and desire for her to remain single. I found it neither unjoyable nor enjoyable, just a typical tragedy play with a heavy undertone of Catholicism.

For my full review, see: http://wp.me/pp7vL-qU ( )