The Duchess of Malfi (1172)

The Duchess of Malfi

By John Webster

The Real Duchess of Malfi

The Duchess of Malfi is based on the true story of Giovanna d’Aragona and her brothers Lodovico d’Aragona, Cardinal of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, and Carlo d’Aragona, Marquis of Gerace. Gionvanna was married in 1490 when she was about twelve years old. Her husband became Duke of Amalfi in 1493 and died in 1498.

Giovanna ruled as Duchess and at some point secretly married Antonio Bologna, the master of her household. They had three children and managed to keep this secret from her brothers until at least 1509, and probably until closer to November 1510, when she took a sudden pilgrimage to Loreto. It became clear that this was only a pretext for escape when she continued to Ancona to meet Antonio.

In 1513, Duchess and her two youngest children were probably murdered in Malfi, and soon afterwards, Antonio was killed in Milan. Their oldest child survived. There is no historical evidence that the Duchess’s brothers were involved in these killings, but there is evidence the Duchess had long feared their retribution. Lodovico d’Aragona continued to enjoy power and success as cardinal, and died in Rome in 1519.

This is essentially all that lies in the historical record, and Webster probably used literary sources, likely including the firsthand account in Bandello’s novella Il Signor Antonio Bologna Sposa la Duchessa d’Amalfi, e Tutti due Sono Ammazzati, which told the story in more, likely fictionalized, detail that largely matches the plot points in Webster's play. Ultimately, what has made this play timeless is as much the author's pervasive worldview and unflinchingly grotesque theatricality as much as its plot, suggesting that like his contemporary Shakespeare, the source was but the starting point for a larger contemplation of human nature.

Analysis-Act-One

The opening lines of The Duchess of Malfi set the tone for the struggle between good and evil that is to follow. Antonio, who we learn later in the scene is, by the Cardinal’s own judgment, too honest to spy on the Duchess, praises the French court for its lack of sycophants and corruption. Then the Cardinal and Bosola enter, and Antonio tells Delio that Bosola “rails at those things”--vices--”which he wants” (1.1.25), so not only is his appearance of virtue false, it is hypocritical and based around self-interest. The audience quickly realizes that these characters are the antithesis of the virtues Antonio praised as reflected in the French court. Further, in his private conversation, we learn immediately that Antonio is an archetypal man of virtue, one who not only lives honestly but esteems it in others. This analysis is validated throughout the play, and makes him something of an anomaly in this twisted court.

Antonio’s character sketches to Delio present a fuller picture of the Cardinal and Ferdinand’s evil--the Cardinal is cold and calculating, Ferdinand hot-tempered and deranged. There is nothing to temper these judgments--not one virtue is named for either character. In contrast, Antonio sees the Duchess as “right noble,” “full of rapture,” “divine,” and completely virtuous. Though this view of the Duchess will be complicated somewhat later in the play, the beginning of the first scene lays the ground for what will essentially become a battle of evil trying to corrupt and destroy good. 

It also quickly becomes clear that Bosola does not fit perfectly into this dichotomy. Antonio’s first description of him, combined with Delio’s information that he committed a notorious murder, would seem to place him firmly on the side of the brothers, but Antonio himself quickly says, “I have heard/He’s very valiant” (1.1.70-1), and worries that the Cardinal’s mistreatment of him will “poison all his goodness” (1.1.72). So Antonio, at least, believes him to have some goodness. Thus from the beginning the audience is given hints that Bosola is an enigma, and will represent the battleground where the fight of good versus evil will play out.

This contradiction is quickly made manifest when Ferdinand recruits Bosola to be his informer. When Ferdinand hands him gold, Bosola’s immediate reaction is to ask “Whose throat must I cut?” (1.1.240). That he immediately assumes he is being hired to murder says much about his character, but so does the fact that he says “must.” Until Act Five, Bosola’s defining trait, besides his cynical melancholy, is his unflinching loyalty to Ferdinand and the Cardinal. Here we see the first hint of this--having been handed a piece of gold, he already feels compelled to do whatever Ferdinand asks, whether he wants to or not. Considering that he remains not only uncompensated but also unthanked for whatever the murder he had previously committed for the Cardinal, the loyalty is all the more befuddling and interesting.

Bosola's situation is further complicated when he learns he is being hired not to murder, but to spy. This seems like a significantly less evil task, especially as Bosola has no particular loyalty to the Duchess, yet he is dismayed. Even though he has already murdered for money, he declares in reference to the coins, “should I take these they’d take me to hell” (1.1.257). Yet even against such strong reservations, Bosola gives in -- “I am your creature” (1.1.278). And “creature,” with its connotations of unthinking loyalty and inhumanity, is just the right word.

The distinction between Bosola and his masters has in it a touch of class commentary. First of all, the depravity represented by Ferdinand the Cardinal is most contemptible because of the hypocrisy their positions add to it. That the Duke and the religious figure, both authority figures of 'high' birth, would be the most ugly ensures an ugly world beneath them. In the same way Antonio praised the French prince for inspiring goodness through his realm through his positive example, so is the poor example of the Malfi authorities somewhat responsible for the depravity of their court. In contrast, Bosola's depravity or evil is conditioned, as discussed above. He believes himself to have less agency than they do, which helps explain Antonio's view of him as one who is valiant but whose valiance could be compromised if he is treated poorly. In some ways, Bosola is the central character of the text - Webster lists him first in the cast list, a rare occurrence in the day for characters of low rank - and he survives longer than the Duchess, ostensibly the heroine. This fact further suggests the way that questions of class and rank, especially in contrast to an individual's natural, moral virtues, provide a means to understand the play's central themes.

The dialogue between the Duchess and her brothers contains much foreshadowing. Most obviously, it reveals their desire to control her, and their incredible degree of concern over her marriage situation. A threat of violence hangs over the scene, with Ferdinand’s pulling out a knife--”This was my father’s poniard” (1.1.322)--and the Cardinal’s warning, “Wisdom begins at the end: remember it” (1.1.319), which rings ominously with its reference to the end of life. 

This scene also hints, however, that the Duchess will not obey her brothers blindly. She uses her diamond analogy to argue that women who remarry are not so easily condemned or depraved, and when they ignore her, we see her impatience when she demands of them, “Will you hear me?” (1.1.292). The practiced rhythm of their lecture, which she points out to Ferdinand, suggests that the filial dynamic is long-gestating, and suggests that her willfulness to disobey them might have in it some share of petulance as well. Of course, even if this is the case, what is a game to her will soon be revealed as much more to them.

Her defiance is made much clearer once her brothers leave. Not only will she not be dissuaded from her planned marriage, she will “make them [her] low footsteps” (1.1.334), using them, in effect, to do what she wants in direct opposition to them. This is real defiance, not just of her brothers but of societal and religious mores of the time, and it is a first look at the Duchess’s great vitality, which is further reflected when she takes the lead in the proposal scene.

The marriage scene, in addition to contrasting the Duchess’s vivid personality with Antonio’s rather passive one, also foreshadows the tragedy to come. It opens with the Duchess telling Antonio she wants to write her will, immediately evoking the thought of death. The Duchess’s metaphors and allusions, too, often invoke death--she is not an alabaster statue kneeling at her husband’s tomb; she refers to her marriage to Antonio as a Gordian knot, a knot that could not be untied unless cut with “violence” (:470); and she says they can put an unsheathed sword between them in bed to keep them chaste, which introduces a weapon into their intimacy. Thus while this end of the act is largely happy, Webster gives the audience plenty of warning that such happiness will not last. The contradictions in the Duchess's character - between her valiant refusal to bow before social mores and her willfulness on directly and imprudently countering the protestations of her brothers - are summarized in Cariola's final soliloquy, which questions whether the Duchess is a model of greatness or simply a madwoman.

 

Analysis- Act Two

Act Two shows a new side to the Duchess that will become thematically very important--that of a reproductive figure and mother. This side of her stands in opposition to what her brothers would have her be, which is a monument, chaste, “alabaster,” representing a good reputation and nothing else. When she appears on stage, she is out of breath, and Bosola tells the audience that she

Is sick o’days, she pukes, her stomach seethes,
The fins of her eyelids look most teeming blue,
She wanes i’th’ cheek, and waxes fat i’th’ flank (2.1.60-2).

He is obsessed with her physicality, and soon afterwards she eats apricots greedily. Considering they have been ripened in horse dung, the apricots stand as a strong image of the Earth, she is now characterized not as "alabaster" or as the untouchable saint Antonio described in Act I, but as a woman very much in touch with the physical Earth. Her love for Antonio and its resulting pregnancy has brought her closer to nature.

The Duchess’s attempts to hide her pregnancy are a minor example of a theme that is significant in Act Two, that of disguising, of the contrast between being and seeming. In almost all cases in the play, this theme deals with the disguising of evil, and only with the Duchess and her family is this not the case. Rather, their disguising is necessitated by the evil of the characters around them and the way that eveil has warped the world. So depraved is the world that the truly good characters are forced to disguise their love and domestic bliss to protect them.

Bosola himself, who later wears multiple disguises, and as spy is constantly pretending, rails against having to disguise oneself in this act. For instance, he mocks the Old Lady for wearing makeup, leading him to scornfully meditate on how man delights “to hide” his true form “in rich tissue” (2.1.53-4). Immediately after, however, the audience sees his two-faces in stark clarity as he tricks the Duchess into eating apricots while showing his real motivations in his asides. Webster's use of asides, hidden characters, and disguises creates several levels of dramatic irony throughout the play that both raise the dramatic tension and elucidate his pessimistic view of human nature.

Superstition is a motif throughout the play, and it is used in Act Two to both foreshadow what is to come and to further develop the characters. At the end of the second scene, Delio says, “How superstitiously we mind our evils” (2.2.73) before listing possible bad omens, but though he uses the first person plural, in this case the only character showing superstition is Antonio. 

In the very next scene, one of the bad omens Delio had just listed comes to pass--Antonio gets a nose bleed. Though he pretends that he is not affected by it, separating himself from “One that were superstitious” (2.3.43), his repeated insistence that “it merely comes by chance” (2.3.44), “mere accident” (2.3.47), shows that he is trying to convince and reassure himself because of how terribly the omen disturbs him. Further, this incident occurs while he is divining a horoscope for his son--another superstitious act. 

The audience’s knowledge that Bosola is a spy on the verge of discovering the Duchess and Antonio’s secret makes these superstitions more ominous, but Antonio’s superstitious nature itself is not meant to be admired, as it makes him appear weak and highlights his ineffectual nature. This also further distinguishes Antonio’s and the Duchess’s natures when, later in Act Three, the Duchess calls Cariola a “superstitious fool” (3.2.321), showing her disdain for such things. 

Act Two takes us from the pregnant Duchess and her worried husband in Malfi, all the way to Rome and the Cardinal’s sinful relationship with the married Julia, and finally to the evil brothers’ reactions to what they believe is the Duchess’s deep shame. This final scene strikingly presents the contrast between the characters, fully clarifying what each brother signifies—the hot-tempered Ferdinand, the cold and calculating Cardinal. 

Both brothers mention blood and use blood imagery throughout the scene. However, they use it very differently, in ways that represent the difference between their reactions to their sister’s behavior. The Cardinal says, “Shall our blood,/The royal blood of Aragon and Castile,/Be thus attainted?” (2.5.21-3). Here, he means blood metaphorically, as a stand-in for lineage, for family pride and honor, for rank. When Ferdinand speaks of purging “infected blood, such blood as hers” (2.5.26), he is not being figurative--he truly wants to spill her blood. His attitude is further emphasized when he says it is only her “whore’s blood” (2.5.48) “that shall quench [his] wild-fire” (2.5.47). He believes his rage can only be calmed by the spilling of her blood. Fire imagery is connected to Ferdinand throughout the play, and in this scene alone he connects his fire to her blood twice. Earlier, he says that only fire can purge the infection in her blood. These two lines together show that he has already determined she must die—to cure her, his anger must spill her blood, and to cure his anger, her blood must spill. Forgiveness, clearly, is impossible.

One is left to wonder about the sexual nature of Ferdinand's intense obsession with his sister, who is his twin. Where the Cardinal - an ambitious man who has used his conniving skills to try and be Pope, according to Antonio - thinks in terms of wealth and Earthly protection, Ferdinand has a moral tone in his disdain for his sister's impurity. Though incest is never mentioned explicitly, it is hardly a rare theme for Jacobean dramatists and can provide an interesting lens into the motivations that drive Ferdinand, as well as a lens into the theme of repression that equally helps understand the Duchess's desire to declare her independence through her marriage.

Analysis-Act Three

The theme of class becomes most developed here in Act Three. Interestingly, it is first explicitly discussed between Bosola and the Duchess, both of whom are speaking disingenuously in an effort to hide something from the other. They each thus end up acting as the other’s mouthpiece on the issue, as when Bosola berates the Duchess for saying of Antonio, “But he was basely descended” (3.2.160), in response to Bosola listing Antonio’s virtues, for those virtues, he says, matter more than “men’s pedigrees” (3.2.262). The ironic presentation does not mean that the opinions voiced are not honest considerations of the way people approach an individual's status.

When, as a result of Bosola’s protestations, the Duchess admits that she is married to Antonio, Bosola pretends to be filled with joy and admiration that the Duchess would look past rank and wealth to give a man his true due for his character alone. The audience knows not to trust his effusive praise, of course, but it is worth noting that the final tragedy for the Duchess and her family comes out of this very moment, when Bosola uses this praise of looking beyond rank to get her to admit who her husband is.

Yet, as is often true with Bosola, it is impossible to know just how much truth is mixed in with his lies. Once he is alone again on stage, he expresses some reluctance to give his new information to Ferdinand, even though it’s the very information he has been trying to get for about two years. This implies that there may have been some truth to his “friendly speech” (3.2.301), especially since his pervasive melancholy is centered on his own inability to improve his position, and now he sees, embodied in Antonio, that it is, in fact, possible to rise past what custom usually dictates.

Though this contradiction may indicate that Bosola has some respect for the Duchess’s choice in marrying Antonio, he does much to dispel such an interpretation later in the act. For once he has told Ferdinand about Antonio, and so can speak forthrightly without having to lie to try to ensnare the Duchess, he shows much more snobbery about class. For example, when Antonio refuses to act as Ferdinand, through Bosola, wants him to, Bosola says, “This proclaims your breeding/Every small thing draws a base mind to fear” (3.5.52-3). Ferdinand is an obviously dangerous figure, and his attempt to get Antonio to come to him has a double, threatening meaning which is barely even hidden. The Duchess, the embodiment of pedigree, is the first to notice this, and yet Bosola would have it that it is only Antonio’s lack of breeding that makes him fearful of it. 

After the sad parting of Antonio and the oldest son with the Duchess and the rest of the children, Bosola comes to take the Duchess into custody. In this powerful scene, Bosola holds up Antonio’s rank as reason enough for the Duchess to forget him completely—“Forget this base, low fellow” (3.5.116). This admonition is all the starker in juxtaposition to the sad leave-taking that preceded it, making Bosola’s directive, and thus his blind judgment based on rank, seem absurd. 

When the Duchess responds angrily, he doesn’t even bother to use a full sentence in his reply—“One of no birth” (3.5119)—as though his meaning is so obvious that he doesn’t even need to declare it. This leaves the Duchess an opportunity to stand up for Antonio, and for the unimportance of birth, and she does so beautifully, having the last word in the argument for the moment. Though she first defends him positively, explaining that since a man who is great for his own actions, not his birth, is happiest, then the reverse is also true—“So, to great men, the moral may be stretched:/Men oft are valued high, when th’are most wretch’d” (3.5.140-141). The fixation on Antonio’s rank in the third act, then, becomes also related to question of Ferdinand and the Cardinal’s evil. They have the birth, the power, and the standing that Antonio lacks, but they are the symbol of evil throughout the play. 

Act Three also further elucidates the stark differences between what the Duchess actually is, what Ferdinand believes her to be, and what he wants her to be. The image of the Duchess of a reproductive figure and mother that first came in Act Two is expanded here—one of the first things the audience learns in Act Three is that in what has been only moments in the time of the theater, the Duchess has had two more children--she has been an “excellent/Feeder of pedigrees” (3.1.5-6). 

In the next scene, the domestic bliss of the Duchess’s marriage is made clear. The Duchess, Antonio, and Cariola tease each other kindly in the Duchess’s bedroom while she prepares to go to bed. The simplicity and easy domestic happiness of this scene create a very different image than all of Ferdinand’s imaginings of the Duchess two scenes earlier, when he sees “her in the shameful act of sin” (2.5.41) in his mind, “Haply with some strong thighed bargeman,/Or one o’th’ wood-yard, that can quoit the sledge” (2.5.42-3). 

Ferdinand is incapable of imagining her in a loving relationship. If she has had a child, it must have been a product of her uncontrollable lust and resulting promiscuous behavior. The only other option he can imagine for her, that which he wants, is as a monumentalized figure, forever bowing chastely over her first husband’s tomb, “cased up, like a holy relic” (3.2.140). The irony is of course that for someone so harshly moral about sex, he is most fixated upon it, again a contradiction that can be seen through a lens of repressed incestuous feelings for his twin.

Antonio marks the distinction between this chaste, marble figure the Duchess’s brothers would like her to be and the more earthly figure she actually is when talking to Cariola: 

O fie upon this single life. Forgo it.
We read how Daphne, for her peevish flight,
Became a fruitless bay-tree; Syrinx turned
To the pale empty reed; Anaxarete
Was frozen into marble: whereas those
Which married, or proved kind unto their friends,
Were, by a gracious influence, transshaped
Into the olive, pomegranate, mulberry. (3.2.24-31)

The women who remain single are “fruitless,” “pale,” “empty,” “frozen,” “marble,” while the married women become fruit-bearing trees, both beautiful and nourishing to the world around them. This is so preferable to the marble women that Ferdinand and the Cardinal would have, and so far from the lusty widow that they believe the Duchess to be, that their evil against her and her family becomes all the more pronounced.

Finally, a word can be said about the inventive theatricality Webster employs to detail the Duchess and Antonio's banishment from Ancona. Performed as a pantomime dumb-show under a sung hymn, the scene has a great theatrical power both for its economy of storytelling and the irony of pilgrims celebrating through song such a perverse, demented, self-interested line of action.

Analysis-Act Four

In Act Four, the final showdown between the Duchess and Ferdinand occurs, acted largely through Bosola. In the most basic sense, Ferdinand is the victor--the Duchess is killed and so truly becomes a monument, a name only, with no domestic or life-bearing side remaining. The purity he demands of her will not again be compromised. The symbolic reality is more complicated, however, for Ferdinand fails to destroy her spirit, “to bring her to despair” (4.1.116), and his attempts to do so only further highlight how far her spirit rises above him. She does not die despairing, but bravely and honorably, and the only one truly brought to despair in this scene is he himself. 

Though, at the beginning of the act, the Duchess has been separated from her loving husband and oldest child, stripped of her wealth and power, and imprisoned, she bears it “nobly” (4.1.2). When Ferdinand cruelly tries to fool her into thinking she holds Antonio’s dead hand, the trick fails and she at first thinks it is Ferdinand’s own hand, and even after all his awful treatment of her, she shows worry for him, saying, “I fear you are not well after your travel” (4.1.52). Rather than be moved by this, Ferdinand takes the trick further, showing her the faked corpses of her family. That the Duchess stands for good and Ferdinand for evil is nowhere more clear than this.

At this moment, when the Duchess believes her family to be dead, she is now deprived of the last external thing she had to derive strength from—her hope. Her title, her standing, her freedom were gone, and now she truly has nothing left. But still, she shows profound strength in her death scene, which allows her to defeat the cruel machinations of her brothers, even in her death, for she never gives in to despair, never regrets her choice to marry Antonio and create a family, never is brought down to her brothers’ level in any way. 

The madmen surrounding her room only make her calmer, and those brought into her room only stand as an example of what she could have been brought to, and how very far she still is from that. When she learns that it is her time to die, she shows no fear, no anger, no remorse. The true courage this takes is made clear to the audience through the contrast of Cariola. Where Cariola at first showed bravely in insisting she wishes to die alongside her mistress, she acts quite differently in the moment, in which she begs, lies, delays, and fights physically to try to fend it off.

The grotesqueness of the theatricality surrounding the Duchess’s death also highlights her majestic nature. She is at peace while madmen dance and sing around her, while fake corpses surround her, while Bosola changes personas again and again, and while Cariola fights desperately for her life. Further, there is a great theatricality in the use of the madmen, whose several speeches creates a creepy theatrical atmosphere. Her ability to ignore them is another sign of her strength. The horrors surrounding her also serve to show that her dying is not synonymous with her being defeated by her brothers, for she is escaping this hell on earth that they have created, and into which they will fall prey to themselves during the final act. 

Act Four also serves as a turning point for Bosola. In keeping with the pattern of contradiction in his character, his showings of remorse are seemingly genuine, but far from pure. Within the course of one scene, he orders the Duchess’s murder, then her children’s and Cariola’s, without any hesitation or remorse. His regrets come only after Ferdinand has made it clear that Bosola will not be rewarded for these gruesome tasks. But even then, his remorse is not pure, for when the Duchess shows signs of life again, and he prays, “Return, fair soul, from darkness” (4.2.334), it is so that she can assuage his guilt, lead him “out of this sensible hell” (4.2.335), save him, not so that she can live for her own sake.

Bosola has, with Ferdinand’s regret at the sight of the Duchess’s corpse, lost his one excuse for all of his evil deeds. He has throughout the play “rather sought/To appear a true servant than an honest man” (4.2.324-5)—he has chosen to be loyal to Ferdinand and the Cardinal rather than act according to his instincts “to do good” (4.2.352). But Ferdinand, who most gained from this unblinking loyalty, berates him for it—“Why didst not thou pity her?” (4.2.265). Even this man who embodies mindless evil, who shows no remorse at the sight of two infant corpses, thinks that Bosola should have felt enough in himself to prevent him from following his orders. 

These contradictions reframe all of Bosola’s actions in the play, and makes it clear just how meaningless his expressions of remorse, of hesitation, of regret that he must do such evil action are, for he, in fact, could have said no, and if Ferdinand is to be believed, he would have been rewarded for that better than for going through with it. When Bosola tells Ferdinand he executed “this bloody sentence” (4.2.290) on Ferdinand’s authority, Ferdinand responds, 

Mine? Was I her judge?
Did any ceremonial form of law
Doom her to not-being? Did a complete jury
Deliver her conviction up i’th’ court? (4.2.291-294)

, completely dismantling Bosola’s attempts to believe that he was acting within a system, and that it was the system that was malicious, not he himself. It is a tribute to Webster's talent that we can both despise Bosola for his actions and pity him for his feelings of helplessness before social expectation, and all the while believe those contradictions.

Analysis-Act Five

The Duchess is unquestionably the heroine of The Duchess of Malfi, so many critics have questioned Webster’s choice to have her tragic, heroic death scene in the fourth act rather than the fifth. This placement leaves room for the play’s themes to be tied up, and for the tragic destruction of the Duchess and her family to be avenged through Bosola, who in this act finally gets to fight on the side of the good that he claimed to have had inside him all along. In many ways, this structure suggests that Bosola is the central figure of the play. Validating this claim is the fact that Webster listed Bosola first in the cast list, a rather rare occurrence in the day for characters of low rank.

The opening lines of the act underscore Antonio’s weakness. He does not yet know that his wife and two of his children are dead, but the audience has just seen them tragically murdered, so when he asks, “What think you of my hope of reconcilement/To the Aragonian brethren” (5.1.1-2), the dramatic irony paints him as not only only naive but horrifically callous. In his insistence on meeting with the Cardinal to beg peace, his ultimate ineffectiveness as a husband and father and protector of his family is made brutally clear, and the fact that even his death is no more than a tragic accident shows how he has never really been more than a frame to the vivacity, power, and courage of the Duchess. None of this is meant to negate his honor and goodness, but rather to suggest the ineffectiveness of such virtues in a world this corrupt.

This act also reveals the cracks in the seemingly all powerful Cardinal’s strength. He represents cold, calculating, removed evil, having managed to exert his will throughout the play while keeping his hands clean, and as such he has seemed indomitable. This illusion has been maintained partially by his brief presence on stage in the previous acts—he usually comes on, has a few lines and directives, and goes off again. In Act Five, however, he is more present, and he fails to maintain control when exposed for longer periods of time.

His first mistake is to believe that he can still control Bosola with the promise of rewards to come but never intended, as he and his brother have done all along. Though Bosola does accidentally kill Antonio, as the Cardinal wished, it was the opposite of his intent, and the Cardinal’s trust allows him to access the Cardinal alone and so kill him. The Cardinal also overestimates Julia’s love for him, and underestimates her cunning, and thereby exposes the secret that gives the hidden Bosola imperative to put the final chain of events in motion. These mistakes, and the fact that he signs his own death warrant in his schemes to keep the courtiers from coming to his chamber, show that his Machiavellian scheming is in fact short-sighted and fallible. 

The Cardinal and Ferdinand both, on different scales, show the destructive power that evil ultimately has on the very perpetrators of that evil. With Ferdinand, this is very obvious. Though he has shown some small signs of madness all along, and certainly irrationality, in the fifth act, he is completely undone, fighting his own shadow and digging up corpses, believing himself to be a wolf. Though there is foreshadowing of this lycanthropia throughout the play, the real turning point comes when Ferdinand is faced with the face of his sister’s corpse. Her goodness, and the price she paid because of his evil, is too much for him, and he goes off to hunt a badger—clearly an indication that his total loss of sanity has begun. One can also understand this from a psychological standpoint - if we think of his intense hatred of his sister's sexuality as symptomatic of repressed incestuous feeling, then his insanity here represents a transference of those perverted feelings once she has died and can no longer serve as a receptacle for his displaced feelings.

For the Cardinal, his self-destruction is more subtle, but still distinct. Besides the chips in his facade already mentioned and the mistakes that allow Bosola to kill him, in the last scene his spirit is diminished. The scene opens with him fearing hell, and what it has in store for him, and for the first time he shows signs of guilt for all of the evil he has done. In stark opposition to the Duchess and her calm, dignified death, he cries for help repeatedly as he is attacked. Bosola tells him, “Now it seems thy greatness was only outward,/For thou fall’st faster of thyself than calamity/Can drive thee” (5.5.42-44), and this is reflected in his powerlessness to draw aid, to help himself, and in his final, melancholic plea to “Be laid by, and never thought of” (5.5.89). 

The pattern of death in Act Five is utterly distinct from that in Act Four, further cementing the image of the courageous Duchess. The Duchess gets a long lead up, elaborate rituals, and her body is left isolated on the stage to set her apart, not to mention the courage and dignity with which she faces her executioners, and the hope with which she looks to the afterlife. In Act Five, however, Antonio dies in a case of mistaken identity, the Cardinal calls uselessly for help while both Bosola and Ferdinand attack him, Ferdinand gives Bosola his death blow seemingly at random—all is chaos, cowardice, and hopelessness in the face of death. For she who lived her life virtuously and in pursuit of her own happiness, a dignified death in possible. For most of us, who it seems Webster believes would live our lives mired in self-interest, deception, and cruelty, death will come in an undignified manner.

Though the play is mostly overwrought with evil, it does end on a hopeful note. One member of the Duchess’s family survives, her and Antonio’s oldest son. The representatives of evil have all destroyed each other, and “These wretched eminent things/Leave no more fame behind ‘em than should one/Fall in a frost, and leave his print in snow” (5.5.112-4) which will melt in the sun. They can do no more harm from beyond the grave, but though the Duchess is also dead, she can do good, for it is in the Duchess’s “right” (5.5.112) that Delio and the surviving gentlemen intend to raise the son, this symbol of hope, who the Duchess and Antonio created in and left as a testament to their love. The only dark spot on this otherwise hopeful ending is the worldview that Webster paints so vividly, one where evil and human self-interest is the status quo, and so even what starts pure has the potential to grow corrupt.

Major Themes

Hell on Earth

The Duchess of Malfi is a play replete with darkness, both 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 murders 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’s “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” (1.1.177) the Cardinal’s lips, and Bosola describes Ferdinand's manipulation as: “Thus the devil/Candies all sins o’er” (1.1.266-7). These are but two of several instances.

This hell on Earth serves to emphasize 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” (5.5.72). Ferdinand goes mad, the Cardinal loses all hope, and both die, leaving no legacy behind them.

Disguise

Disguise—masking reality, hiding one’s true intentions, presenting a false front—is a major theme in The Duchess of Malfi. The most obvious symbol of this is Bosola. The distinction between what he says and how he acts is so vast that even the audience, who is given access to his private thoughts through soliloquies and asides, has trouble understanding his motivations. 

He is a spy, and is thus constantly disguising his motives and his true feelings. Further, in the fourth act, he literally disguises himself as an old man. However, he also repeatedly shows disgust for the act of disguising. He is reluctant to take on the role of spy, and notes that “the devil/Candies all sin o’er” (1.1.266-7), thus associating the act of disguising with evil, and he scorns how men “delight/To hide” (2.1.53-4) their “rotten and dead body” (2.1.53) “eaten up of lice and worms” (2.1.51) “in rich tissue” (2.1.54). Thus, he is both the character who most thoroughly employs disguise, and the one most aware of its sinful, unattractive nature.

Disguise is so prevalent in the play that even the Duchess, the paragon of light, must employ it. In her first appearance on stage, she tells her brothers, “I’ll never marry” (1.1.293), and then before the scene is even over, she has proposed to and married Antonio. Clearly, she had disguised her true intentions from them. She then manages to have three children with Antonio without ever revealing their marriage, and even when the discovery of the marriage becomes imminent, she quickly devises an excuse to send Antonio out of harm’s way. 

Yet this dishonesty is not meant to reflect poorly on the Duchess. Instead, it shows just how profoundly corrupt her brothers have made the world, in that the Duchess must disguise a good and pure love simply to survive. Her use of disguise reveals her energy and resourcefulness in her fight for what is good on this Earth.

The Fertile Woman

Evil in The Duchess of Malfi is a powerful and pervasive force that manages to destroy almost all that is good, but it is not all-powerful. At the end of the play, the Duchess's oldest son survives to carry on her and Antonio's legacy, which provides a symbol of hope tied in with the play's greatest force for good: the fertile and reproductive female.

Ferdinand and the Cardinal both express dark views on female sexuality. When they find out that the Duchess has a son, they cannot imagine this being the result of love, or of a legitimate marriage, but they instead imagine the boy as a product of wanton lust. Ferdinand goes so far as to describe the men he imagines having sex with his sister.

The reality of a woman's fertility, though, is the complete opposite. After Antonio and the Duchess wed, she says they can remain chaste if he wants, suggesting that their marriage is not based on an all-consuming lust. They do, clearly, sleep together and produce three children, but this reflects only the loving creation of family. The scene in which Antonio, the Duchess, and Cariola tease each other reveals a comfortable domestic bliss, not a hotbed of fiery passion. And, also in this scene, the goodness of such a love is emphasized when Antonio berates Cariola for wanting to stay single. He argues that in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, those women who scorned love and lovers were turned into barren plants or stone, while those who married became fruitful trees, bestowing gifts to the world. 

Though Antonio’s first description of the Duchess is arguably unrealistic, she is revealed through the play as figure very much of the earth. She is fat with pregnancy in the second act, “an excellent/Feeder of pedigrees” (3.1.5-6), and manages to birth three children over two acts. Even when she is about to die, rather than transition into a saintly figure, she retains her ties to the earth for one last moment, asking Cariola to give her son some cold medicine, and to let her daughter say her prayers. Her domestic duties remain paramount to her, even as she prepares to leave the earth forever.

Once all the evil has been done, all that remains of this family that had epitomized domestic bliss is its eldest son. In the midst of all the destruction, this product of love and the reproductive woman, will be raised as a testament to the goodness of his mother. Thus, her power as a good mother, in the end, is greater than her brothers’ evil.

The Perversion of Justice

In The Duchess of Malfi, justice fails completely as a force for good; instead, it is corrupted into a tool for Ferdinand and the Cardinal. The rules that govern their world are perverse and immoral, so the justice they seek to enact inherently becomes perverse and immoral itself. Delio prepares the audience for this in the first act, when he says of Ferdinand, 

Then the law to him
Is like a foul black cobweb to a spider:
He makes it his dwelling, and a prison
To entangle those shall feed him. (1.1.168-71)

The law, which should uphold peace and fairness, is instead a “foul” trap that Ferdinand uses to benefit himself.

Once the Duchess is dead and Ferdinand is overcome with regret, he himself points out how he has misused justice, when he asks, “Did any ceremonial form of law/Doom her to not-being?” (4.2.292-3). Bosola, to assuage his own guilt, has imagined the Duchess's murder as an officially sanctioned act. He describes himself as “the common bellman/That usually is sent to condemned persons” (4.2.164-5), as if she had actually been condemned by a judge or jury. When Ferdinand disabuses this notion by arguing he (Ferdinand) holds no authority with which to condemn the Duchess to death, Bosola says, “The office of justice is perverted quite/When one thief hangs another” (4.2.298-9). Only now, when it corrupted justice is working directly against him, does he realize how perverted their system truly is.

Class

The importance of class and rank is questioned throughout The Duchess of Malfi. Those characters who place the most value on it are those who do the most damage to the world of the play, while the Duchess fights for the idea that a man’s worth is reflected by his actions and character, not by his title. 

The Duchess’s marriage to Antonio is clearly a happy one, at least until exposed to the machinations of her brothers. They have three children and a clearly-expressed love for each other. Ferdinand and the Cardinal’s disgust about her marriage is thus particularly repulsive, especially since their only specific complaint revolves around his lower class.

Ironically, Bosola is first to defend the Duchess’s choice to marry Antonio regardless of his class, although he is arguably lying when he does so. He takes it so far as to praise not just the Duchess, but their progressive age for allowing such a union, and he says that her example will spread hope to all those who aspire to rise above their natural station. His speech is tempered by the dramatic irony, the audience’s knowledge that he is being disingenuous, and indeed, his success in fooling the Duchess by lavishing such praise on Antonio is what inspires her to confess her secret to him, a confession that will cost her her life.

Once the need for deceit is gone, Bosola makes his true feelings known, and he, like the Cardinal and Ferdinand, thinks Antonio’s class make him an unworthy match for the Duchess. This gives the Duchess the chance to defend her choice, and in doing so she shows that not only does Antonio’s worth greatly exceed many men of higher rank—Count Malateste, for one—but many noble men are the “most wretch’d” (3.5.141), like her brothers. Nobility is not inherently evil, as the Duchess herself is noble, but it has “neither heat, nor light” (4.2.137), and thus isn’t inherently good, either.

The Costs of Evil

Evil is incontrovertibly destructive in The Duchess of Malfi, taking a loving family of five and reducing it to one young survivor. It is also, however, deeply destructive to those who perpetrate it, and not just their victims. Not only do the three pillars of evil in the play--the Cardinal, Ferdinand, and Bosola--all die by the end of the fifth act, but they also each pay a special penance that elucidates just how terrible evil can be to those who employ it. 

Ferdinand is the most obvious example. Throughout the play, his anger is so intense that he seems almost deranged, but he does not truly lose his mind until the murder of his twin sister. The change comes so suddenly after her death--he leaves the stage to go hunt badger--that it is clearly a result of the evil he has done. In addition, the form his lunacy takes--digging up corpses and believing himself to be a wolf--is also intricately connected to his guilt, as he says that “The wolf shall find her grave, and scrape it up” “to discover/The horrid murder” (4.2.301-3).

 

For the Cardinal, the costs are more subtle. He pays with his life, of course, but he also gives up what he values most throughout the play--his reputation. Whereas the cause of Ferdinand’s anger towards his sister is not entirely clear, the Cardinal's resentment is clearly based around the family’s reputation--“Shall our blood/The royal blood of Aragon and Castile,/Be thus attainted?” (2.5.21-3). When he dies, the state of their family is in such shambles that he wants to be blotted out completely--”I pray, let me/Be laid by, and never thought of” (5.5.88-9), and Delio makes it clear that he will get his wish, since the evil brothers have left nothing behind to be remembered. 

The price Bosola pays is more complicated, in the same way that his participation in the evil is more complicated. By the end, he wants to redeem himself, at least partially, for all he has done. Instead, he accidentally kills Antonio, destroying his last chance to perpetrate good. He does succeed in killing Ferdinand and the Cardinal, but arguably only because Ferdinand gets involved and wounds the Cardinal himself. Bosola has a small amount of peace in knowing that he loses his life in ending theirs, but because of the evil he has perpetrated, he finds no true peace, evidenced by his final speech, in which he reflects on the darkness he helped create in the world.

Thus, the characters who employ evil in the play ultimately pay for it with more than simply their lives.

Reputation and Legacy

The characters in The Duchess of Malfi are deeply concerned about reputation and legacy. Ferdinand and the Cardinal are obsessed with the Duchess’s reputation, and how it affects their own. When they warn her not to be a “lusty widow” (1.1.331) before leaving her alone in Malfi, they are driven by a fear that her behavior will “poison” her “fame” (1.1.299). Later, when they discover that she has had a child, it is partially the tainting of their “royal blood” (2.5.22) that concerns them. Ferdinand tells the Duchess that, having parted from her good reputation, he will never see her, his twin sister, again.

Yet because of their obsessive concern with their family’s reputation, the brothers ironically leave no legacy. The Cardinal’s very last words are a plea to be “never thought of” (5.5.89), and Delio explains that the brothers’ legacy will last no longer than a print in snow when the sun comes out. The Duchess, conversely, doesn’t care about her reputation or her family’s name, and her goodness creates a lasting and positive legacy that might outlive her and her brothers, represented in the care Delio and the others will take to raise her surviving son in her honor. This idea is so central to the play that it gets the closing lines--”Integrity of life is fame’s best friend/Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end” (5.5.119-20). The Duchess needed no shallow concern with reputation in order to ensure a noble legacy “beyond death,” but rather simply the “integrity of life” that she reflected.