Women and marriage

- ‘Diamonds are of most value, / They say, that have passed through most jewellers' hands’ (1.1.92-93) - The Duchess
• ‘Whores, by that rule, are precious.’ (1.1.292) - Ferdinand’s response
- ‘They are most luxurious / Will wed twice.’ (1.1.290-1) - Ferdinand
- ‘Let not youth, high promotion, eloquence— / [Cardinal:] No, nor any thing without the addition, honour, / Sway your high
blood.’ (1.1.288-9) - Ferdinand
- ‘forced to express our violent passions / In riddles and in dreams and leave the path / Of simple virtue which was never made /
To seem the thing it is not.’ (1.1.437-40) - The Duchess
- ‘Whether the spirit of greatness or of woman / Reign most in her, I know not, but it shows / A fearful madness. (1.1.492-94) -
Cariola on the Duchess’ marriage to Antonio
- Antonio’s allusion to Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, where women who insisted on chastity were transformed into barren, empty
things, while women who chose marriage and sexual union were transformed into things of much greater value. Bearers of fruit
= children
‘how Daphne, for her peevish flight, / Became a fruitless bay-tree
…turn’d / To the pale empty reed…frozen into marble, whereas those / Which married, or proved kind unto their friends, /
Were by a gracious influence transshaped / Into the olive, pomegranate, mulberry, / Became flowers, precious stones or
eminent stars.’ (3.2.23-31)
- ‘You violate a sacrament o’th'Church / Shall make you howl in hell for’t.’ (4.1.38-39) - The Duchess to Ferdinand, authorising her
marriage through the church after Ferdinand calls her children bastards and foreshadowing his transformation into a werewolf
- ‘You may thank me, lady. / I have taken you off your melancholy perch, / …and showed you game’ - The Cardinal to Julia (4.2)
- 'I account this world a tedious theatre, / For I do play a part in't 'gainst my will.’ - The Duchess (4.1)
- ‘I had a hope, / Had she continued widow, to have gained / An infinite mass of treasure by her death’ - Ferdinand (4.2)
- In 1.1 the Duchess switches (after being threatened by Ferdinand with a dagger) to a mood associated with romantic comedy
and its elements of festive anarchy and reversal - ‘she demands Antonio’s presence, teases him, woos and wins him, and
thereby excitingly reversing the gender-roles’ - B. Gibbons
- The Duchess is weakened by child birth - she gives birth in the dark and is suffering ‘the worst of torture, pain and fear’ - it is
not presented as a natural and happy part of love and marriage, but agonising and a dangerous threat to her secrecy
- Act 2 presents harsh images of woman’s physicality - old age (the Old Lady), heavy pregnancy (the Duchess) and sexual
wantonness (Julia)
- Ferdinand sees his own ‘imperfection’ in the Duchess: ’I could kill her now / In you, or in myself, for I do think / It is some sin in
us heaven doth revenge / By her.’ (2.5.63-66)
• ‘This intemperate noise / Fitly resembles deaf’s men’s shrill discourse, / Who talk aloud, thinking all other men / To have their
imperfection.’ (5.2.52-54)
• He attributes qualities to the Duchess that are actually his own, calling her children ‘cubs’ and ‘young wolves’
- ‘The marriage night / Is the entrance into some prison.’ (1.1.314-15) - The Cardinal to the Duchess
- ‘I am going into a wilderness’ (1.1.349) - The Duchess to Cariola
- ‘Let old wives report / I winked and chose a husband.’ (1.1.338-29) - choose blind, but also close eyes eat wrong - dismissing
moral condemnation as no better than the prejudice of old wives
- The Duchess conveys her wish for freedom in 3.5: ‘The birds that live i’th’field…live happier than we; for they may choose their
mates’ (3.5.17-20)

Love
- The Duchess declares her love, telling him: ‘go brag you have left me heartless, mine is in your bosom’ and ‘if you will know
where breathes a complete man – I speak it without flattery – turn your eyes and progress through yourself.’ (1.1.439–41)
- ‘we may imitate the loving palms, / Best emblem of a peaceful marriage, / That ne’er bore fruit undivided’ (1.1.485)
- ‘What’s laid up yonder for me…In heaven’ (1.1.364) - similarity to sixth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament
- ‘Bless, heaven, this sacred Gordian, which let violence / Never untwine.’ (1.1.468–69) - The Duchess when she is getting
married to Antonio

Sexuality
- Julia - seduces Bosola at pistol point (5.2), suggesting an interest in ‘rough trade’ - Julia as a foil of the Duchess (1960
Stratford-on Avon production: Julia was given a red wig like the Duchess so they had a visual parallel, thus also suggesting
unrecognised incestuous tenancies in the Cardinal, and a close parallel between him and Ferdinand)
• 1960: mimed sexual coition, 1989: Julia advances on the Cardinal, raising her skirts and sitting astride a chair facing him
- In the Duchess’ case, erotic desire within marriage harmoniously includes the humane and the maternal.
- ‘Why should only I / Of all the other princes of the world / Be cased up like a holy relic? I have youth, / And a little beauty.
(3.2.136-39) - The Duchess, questioning Ferdinand’s admonishment of her remarriage
- ‘Damn her! That body of hers, / While that my blood ran pure in't, was more worth / Than that which thou wouldst comfort,
called a soul.’ - Ferdinand (4.1.118-19)
- ‘You may thank me, lady. / I have taken you off your melancholy perch, / …and showed you game, /…When thou wast with thy
husband, thou wast watched /Like a tame elephant - still you are to thank me. - The Cardinal to Julia (4.2)
- Ferdinand envisions Antonio as: ‘some strong thigh’d bargeman; / Or one o’th’ wood-yard, that can quoit the sledge, / Or toss
the bar, or else some lovely squire / That carries coals up to her privy lodgings’ (2.5.42-45) - but (as Elizabeth Oakes points out)
he is honourable and the brothers reject him as a spy because he is ‘too honest for such business’ (1.1.230)
- ‘What cannot a neat knave with a smooth tale / Make a woman believe? Farewell, lusty widow.’ (1.1.329-30) - Ferdinand to the
Duchess
- ‘Grown a notorious strumpet!’ (2.5.4) - Ferdinand
- Both Julia and the Duchess are likened to prostitutes: ‘She hath most cunning bawds to serve her turn’ (2.5.9) + Delio’s offer of
‘gold’ directly prior in 2.4
• ‘To purge infected blood, such as hers.’ (2.5.26) + ‘whores blood!’ (2.5.48)- Ferdinand
- ‘Talk to me somewhat quickly, / Or my imagination will carry me / To see her in the shameful act of sin.’ (2.5.39-41) - Ferdinand
- Freudian interpretations of Ferdinand’s treatment of the Duchess - return of the repressed
- Moral condemnation of the Duchess in the original source story - William Painter’s ‘The Palace of Pleasure’

Power
- ‘seeking to reduce both state and people / To a fixed order’, ’judicious king’ (1.1) - Antonio describes the French court to Delio
- ‘Consid'ring duly that a prince's court / Is like a common fountain, whence should flow / Pure silver drops in general, but if't
chance / Some cursed example poison't near the head, / Death and diseases through the whole land spread.’
- ‘Methinks you that are courtiers should be my touchwood, take fire when I give fire, that is, laugh when I laugh, were the subject
never so witty. (1.1.120-22) - Ferdinand to courtiers
- ‘the law unto him / Is like a foul black cobbled to a spider, / He makes it his dwelling, and a prison / To entangle those shall feed
him.’ - Delio on Ferdinand (1.1)
- ‘He and his brother are like plum trees that grow crooked over standing pools: they are rich, and o'erladen with fruit, but none
but crows pies and caterpillars feed on them.’ (1.1.48-50) - Bosola - corruption of the court of King James I
- ‘For know: an honest statesman to a prince / Is like a cedar planted by a spring; / The spring bathes the tree's root, the grateful
tree / Rewards it with his shadow. You have not done so.’ (3.2.258-61) - Bosola describes how court should work
- ‘so changeable a prince's favour!’ (3.2.265)
- ‘These factions amongst great men, they are like / Foxes: when their heads are divided / They carry fire in their tails, and all the
country / About them goes to wrack for it. (3.3.36-39) - Pescara on men in the court
- ‘Much you had of land and rent, / Your length in clay's now competent; / A long war disturbed your mind, / Here your perfect
peace is signed. (4.2.172-174) - Bosola denounces the Duchess’ power, saying the only real land she owns is the clay that
makes her coffin
- ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’ (4.2.134) - The Duchess before her execution — either an impressive, dignified response to a
horrifying situation or a moment where she is clinging to a title that imprisons her more than it gives her power
- ‘But I’ll see him hanged ere I’ll go down to him’ - Roderigo when the Cardinal calls out - consequence of ruling by fear
- Naked patriarchal power is shown when Ferdinand holds the dagger - ‘This was my father’s poniard: do you see?’ (1.1.320)
- Historical context: Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (1532)
- Theodora Jankowski:
• Duchess of Malfi = unusual play ‘because it explores questions of rulership as they relate to a female sovereign’
- 2018 RSC production: Focus on the consequences of unchecked masculinity
- ‘But I would ask what power hath this state / Of Ancona to determine of a free prince?’… ‘But by what justice?’ ‘Sure I think by
none / Only her brother’s instigation’ (3.4) - the pilgrims during the dumb show
• ‘What was it with such violence he took / Off from her finger?’ ‘’Twas her wedding ring’
- ‘I am chained to endue all your tyranny.’ (4.2.60) - The Duchess
- ‘The robin redbreast and the nightingale / Never live long in cages.’ (4.2.13-14)
- Ferdinand’s desire for power as linked to Jacobean interpretations of the nature of twins: first twin = more developed - need to
be superior
• The Duchess’ death in a dark room by strangling symbolises being killed by the umbilical cord in the womb
• Two diamonds who cut into one another: ‘Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust’
• Ferdinand is haunted by the shadow of the Duchess
- Production at Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (2014, Dromgoole) - emphasised how the Duchess was being psychologically
tortured by totalitarian despots

Deception
- ‘observe his inward character’…‘what appears in him mirth is merely outside’ - Antonio describing the Cardinal, then Ferdinand
(1.1)
- ‘He speaks with others; tongues, and hears men’s suits / With others’ ears’ (166-67) - Antonio on Ferdinand
- ‘He that can compass me and know my drifts / May say that he hath put a girdle 'bout the world / And sounded all her
quicksands.’ (3.2.83-86) - Ferdinand
- ‘Oh, this base quality / Of intelligencer!' (3.2.321-23) - Bosola after the Duchess has told him that Antonio is her husband
- Where I am a man / I’d beat that counterfeit face into thy other. (3.5.119) - The Duchess as she realises she has been betrayed
by Bosola and expresses her wish that she could beat the two sides (that Bosola says he has) into one another: his real self and
his ‘intelligencer self’
- ‘Think you, your / Bosom will be a grave dark and obscure enough for such a secret?’ - The Cardinal
• ‘It lies not in me to conceal it.’ (5.2.263-66) - Julia knows she cannot conceal the secret of the Duchess’ murder
- ‘Where he is jealous of any man he lays worse plots for them…he strews in his way flatterers, panders, intelligencers, atheists,
and a thousand such political monsters.’ (1.1.155-58) - Antonio describes the Cardinal to Delio
- ‘There are a many ways that conduct to seeming / Honour, and some of them very dirty ones. (5.2.298-99) - The Cardinal asks
Bosola to murder Antonio
- ‘In a mist: I know not how; / Such a mistake as I have often seen / In a play’ (5.5.93)
- Niccolo Machiavelli in The Prince (1532) outlines that every prince, in order to survive, must devise plots and practise deception
- from the beginning the Duchess lies to her brothers
- Ferdinand presumably watches throughout the Duchess’ death scene, and may even may have outside the door for all of Act 4
- The Duchess is the first to initiate spying - she makes Cariola stay when Antonio comes in in Act 1
- Cariola conspires benevolently with Antonio against the Duchess in 3.2
- ‘forced to express our violent passions / In riddles and in dreams and leave the path / Of simple virtue which was never made /
To seem the thing it is not.’ (1.1.437-40) - The Duchess
- ‘Keep your old garb of melancholy’ - Ferdinand to Bosola (1.1)
- ‘Be not cunning: / For they whose faces do belie their hearts / Are witches ere they arrive at twenty years, / Ay, and give the
devil suck.’ (1.1.299-302) - Ferdinand to the Duchess
- Antonio plots that ‘Jewels to the value of four thousand ducats / Are missing in the Duchess’ cabinet.’ (2.1.49-50) and will ‘give
out that Bosola hath poisoned her’ (2.1.163)
- Dramatic irony in 3.1: Ferdinand arranges a husband (Malateste) and doesn’t know the Duchess is married, the Duchess doesn’t
know he knows that she has had children, and Antonio doesn’t know whether Ferdinand knows that she has had children - ‘He
is so quiet / … Those houses that are haunted, are most still, / Till the devil be up’ (3.1.21-24)
- The use of wax figures: ‘she’s plagued in art. / These presentations are but framed in wax’ (4.2.108-9)
- ‘Who do I look like now?’ ‘Like to your picture in the gallery, / A deal of life in show but none in practise; / Or rather like some
reverend monument / Whose ruins are pitied.’ (4.2.30-34) - The Duchess and Cariola
- Bosola deceives Julia in pretending to like her to use her relationship to get to the Cardinal
- The Cardinal deceives Bosola, telling him to kill Antonio and pretending he didn’t know about the Duchess’ murder - ‘The
Cardinal is grown wondrous melancholy: / Demand the cause’ (5.2.195-6)
- ‘O this gloomy world! / In what shadow, or deep pit of darkness, / Doth womanish and fearful mankind live! / Let worthy minds
ne’er stagger in distrust / To suffer death of shame for what is just.’ (5.5) - Bosola
- Historical context: contrast between Basilikon Doron and the way James I’s court worked in reality

Revenge and Judgement

- ‘Well, good Antonio, / I’ll seek thee out, and all my care shall be / To put thee into safety from the reach / Of these most cruel
biters that have got / Some of thy blood already.’ (5.2.329-32) - Bosola + ‘I'll join with thee, in a most just revenge: / The
weakest arm is strong enough, that strikes / With the sword of justice.’
- Bosola before accepting gold from Ferdinand: ‘these cursed gifts would make / You a corrupter, me an impudent traitor, / And
should I take these they’d take me to hell,’ (1.1.255-57)
- ‘How comes this?’ - ‘Revenge for the Duchess of Malfi, murder'd / By the Arragonian brethren; for Antonio, / Slain by this hand;
for lustful Julia, / Poison’d by this man; and lastly for myself, / That was an actor in the main of all / Much 'gainst mine own
good nature, yet i'th' end / Neglected.’ (5.5)
- ‘O penitence, let me truly taste thy cup, / That throws men down, only to raise them up’
- ‘Oh sacred innocence that sweetly sleeps / On turtles’ feathers, whilst a guilty conscience / Is a black register wherein is writ /
All our good deeds and bad, a perspective / That shows us hell’
- Ferdinand’s madness:
• ‘I have this night digged up a mandrake.’ (2.5.1)
• ‘So wild a tempest’… ‘Have you not / my palsy?’… ‘there is not in nature / A thing that makes man so deformed, so
beastly, / As doth intemperate anger. Chide yourself.’ (2.5)
• ‘You fly beyond reason.’ (2.5)
• ‘this rage’
• ‘this intemperate noise’
- The Duchess’ children: ‘I intend, since they were born accursed, / Curses shall be their first language.’ (3.5.111-12)
- ‘I could curse the stars…And those smiling seasons of the year / Into a Russian winter, nay the world / To its first
chaos.’ (4.1.94-96) - The Duchess
- ‘a fire as great as my revenge, / Which ne’er will slack till it have spent his fuel’ (4.1.136-7) - Ferdinand to Bosola
- Bosola’s guilt:
• ‘a guilty conscience / Is a black register wherein is writ / All our good deeds and bad, a perspective / That shows us
hell’ (4.2)
- Ferdinand tells Bosola he should have ‘opposed thyself / With thy advanced sword above thy head / Between her innocence
and my revenge!’ (4.2.262-64)
- The Cardinal: ‘Oh justice! / I suffer now for what hath former been’ (5.5.53-4)
- ‘Now my revenge is perfect: sink, thou main cause / Of my undoing!’ ‘He kills Ferdinand’ (5.5.62-3)
- ‘My sister! Oh my sister, there’s the cause on’t / Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, / Like diamonds we are cut with our
own dust.’ (5.5.70-3)
- ‘How came Antonio by his death?’ - ‘In a mist: I know not how; / Such a mistake as I have often seen / In a play’ (5.5)
- ‘O this gloomy world! / In what shadow, or deep pit of darkness, / Doth womanish and fearful mankind live! / Let worthy minds
ne’er stagger in distrust / To suffer death of shame for what is just.’ (5.5) - Bosola
- ‘Let us make noble use / Of this great ruin..join all our force / To establish this young hopeful gentleman / In’s mother’s right’,
‘make them lords of truth: / Integrity of life is fame’s best friend, / Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end.’ (5.5) - Delio

Society, class, court and duty

- ‘Could I be one of their flatt'ring panders, I would hang on their ears like a horse-leech till I were full, and then drop off.’ (1.1) -
Bosola talks about how bad the princes and courtiers are
- ‘I am your creature.’ (1.1.280) - Bosola agrees to be Ferdinand’s intelligencer
- ‘This goodly roof of yours is too low built, / I cannot stand upright in't, nor discourse, / Without I raise it higher. Raise yourself, /
Or if you please, my hand to help you […] (1.1.408-411) - The Duchess to Antonio
- ‘I look no / higher than I can reach […] when a man’s mind rides faster than his horse can gallop, they quickly both
tire.’ (2.1.89-94) - Antonio telling Bosola that he should stop acting humble now he is provisor of the horse
- ‘’Tis a pretty art, this grafting. [Duchess: ‘’Tis so: a bett'ring of nature.’] To make a pippin grow upon a crab / A damson on a
blackthorn.’ (2.1.148-51) - Bosola uses the then-common metaphor of plant grafting for the mixing of social classes
- ‘Saucy slave I'll pull thee up by the roots!’ (2.3.36) - Antonio to Bosola
- ‘Here's a strange turn of state: who would have thought / So great a lady would have matched herself / Unto so mean a
person? Yet the Cardinal / Bears himself much too cruel. (3.4.23-26) - Pilgrims on the Duchess, providing an outsider
perspective of what ordinary 16th century people would have thought
- ‘places in the court are but like beds in the hospital, where this man's head lies at that man's foot, and so lower, and lower.
(1.1.65-67) - Bosola
• Historical context: Bosola as the ‘black malcontent’ - excess of black bile (humour)
- The Duchess of Suffolk famously married her servant (as a widow) in 1552
- ‘The misery of us that are born great, / We are forced to woo because none dare woo us’ (1.1.433-4)
- ‘the spirit of greatness’ (1.1.492) - Cariola on the Duchess
- ‘Consid'ring duly that a prince's court / Is like a common fountain, whence should flow / Pure silver drops in general, but if't
chance / Some cursed example poison't near the head, / Death and diseases through the whole land spread.’
• Historical context: Basilikon Doron
- ‘These factions amongst great men, they are like / Foxes: when their heads are divided / They carry fire in their tails, and all the
country / About them goes to wrack for it. (3.3.36-39) - Pescara on men in the court
- ‘In seeking to reduce both state and people / To a fixed order, their judicious king /Begins at home, quits first his royal palace /
Of flatt'ring sycophants, of dissolute / And infamous persons’ (1.1) - Antonio describes the French court to Delio
- ‘Though some o'th'court hold it presumption / To instruct princes what they ought to do, / It is a noble duty to inform them /
What they ought to forsee.’ (1.1.19-22) - Antonio says that courtiers aren’t only there for decoration
- ‘as we observe in tragedies / That a good actor many times is cursed / For playing a villain's part—I hate thee for’t; / And for my
sake say, thou hadst done much ill, well. (4.2.278-81) - Ferdinand turns on Bosola, saying his duty was to disobey him
- ‘I served your tyranny, and rather strove / To satisfy yourself than all the world; / And though I loathed the evil yet I loved / You,
that did counsel it, and rather sought / To appear a true servant than an honest man. (4.2.317-23) - Bosola talking about how he
regrets serving Ferdinand
- ‘I'll join with thee [Antonio] in a most just revenge: / The weakest arm is strong enough that strikes / With the swords of justice.
(5.2.335-37) - Bosola pledges to serve justice to avenge the Duchess
- ‘These chargeable revels; / A visor and a masque are whispering rooms / That were never built for goodness.’ (1.1.323-25) -
Ferdinand - the elaborate masques of the court of King James I were notoriously expensive
• Use of Italian settings to distance critique away from English court - Parasitaster, John Marston (1604)
• Guise of historic drama? - Giovanna d’Aragona
- ‘lay her general territory as waste / As she hath done her honours’ (2.5.20-21) - Ferdinand
- ‘Shall our blood, / The royal blood of Aragon and Castile, / be thus attainted? (2.5.22-24) - The Cardinal
- ‘Can this ambitious age / Have so much goodness in't as to prefer / A man merely for worth, without these shadows / Of wealth
and painted honours? […] rejoice that some preferment in the world can yet arise from merit.’ (3.2.272-82) - Bosola celebrates
the fact that the Duchess has married Antonio, despite the fact that he is her social inferior
- ‘By what authority dad’s thou execute / This bloody sentence? … Mine? Was I her judge? / Did any ceremonial form of law /
Doom her to not-being?’ (4.2) - Ferdinand to Bosola
- Possible Marxist readings: Ferdinand and Cardinal’s objection to Antonio can be viewed as aristocratic aversion to emerging
bourgeoise + would express sympathy for Bosola’s assertion that he acted ‘Much ‘gainst mine own good nature’ since
inequality breeds resentment and anti-social behaviour

Morality and sin

- ‘Must I see her again? […] Never in mine own shape, / That’s forfeited by my intelligence / And this last cruel lie. When you send
me next / The business shall be comfort.’ (4.1.128-33) - Bosola has reached the end of his tolerance of Ferdinands requests -
he can’t separate his work for Ferdinand from his own moral values
- ‘Miserable age, where only the reward / Of doing well is the doing of it.’ (1.1.31-32) - Bosola laments that you can do good
things but you won’t be recognised for it
- ‘I would have you curse yourself now, that your bounty, / Which makes men truly noble, e'er should make / Me a villain: oh, that
to avoid ingratitude / For the good deed you have done me, I must do / All the ill man can invent.’ (1.1.264-68) - Bosola
- ‘Can this ambitious age / Have so much goodness in't as to prefer / A man merely for worth, without these shadows / Of wealth
and painted honours? […] rejoice that some preferment in the world can yet arise from merit.’ (3.2.272-82) - Bosola celebrates
the fact that the Duchess has married Antonio, despite the fact that he is her social inferior
- ‘Why didst not thou pity her? What an excellent / Honest man might'st thou have been / If thou hadst borne her to some
sanctuary / Or […] opposed thyself / With thy advanced sword above thy head / Between her innocence and my
revenge!’ (4.2.263-68) - Bosola finds out that Ferdinand has no intention of rewarding him
- ‘Your brother and yourself are worthy men, / You have a pair of hearts are hollow graves, / Rotten, and rotting others; and your
vengeance, / Like to chained bullets, still goes arm in arm.’ (4.2.308-11) - Bosola on Ferdinand and the Cardinal
- ‘I stand like one / That long hath ta'en a sweet and golden dream: / I am angry with myself now that I wake. (4.2.312-14) -
Bosola stops serving Ferdinand
- ‘a guilty conscience is a black register wherein is writ all our good deeds and bad, a perspective that shows us hell’ (4.2.
346-49) - Bosola after the Duchess dies
- ‘There are a many ways that conduct to seeming / Honour, and some of them very dirty ones. (5.2.298-99) - The Cardinal asks
Bosola to murder Antonio
- ‘How tedious is a guilty conscience!’ (5.5.4) - The Cardinal
- ‘My sister! Oh my sister, there's the cause on’t! / Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, / Like diamonds we are cut with our
own dust.’ (5.5.70-72) - Ferdinand’s final words
- ‘The Lord Ferdinand’s chamber shook like an osier.’ - Roderigo
• ‘’Twas nothing but pure kindness in the devil, / To rock his own child.’ (5.4.19-21) - Malateste
- ‘Well, good Antonio, / I’ll seek thee out, and all my care shall be / To put thee into safety from the reach / Of these most cruel
biters that have got / Some of thy blood already.’ (5.2.329-32) - Bosola
- Some productions like the RSC productions of 1971 and 1989 stress the resemblance between the three siblings
- Bosola is the key to the play’s exploration of paradox - he is declared from the outset (by Antonio) to have goodness
- ‘like plum trees that grow crooked over standing pools’ => he imagines himself like a parasite hanging off the brother’s ears:
‘like a horse leech till I were full, and then drop off’
- At first Bosola rejects the gold from Ferdinand, saying the coins are ‘devils / Which hell calls angels’ then he caves in ‘Thus the
devil/ Candies all sins o’er’ (1.1.266-7)
- ‘For thee - as we observe in tragedies / That a good actor many times is cursed / For playing a villain's part - I hate thee for’t’ -
Ferdinand to Bosola (4.2)
- Antonio is honourable - the brothers reject him as a spy because he is ‘too honest for such business’ (1.1.230)
- Ferdinand’s violence:
• ‘When I have hewed her to pieces.’ (2.5.31)
• ‘I could kill her now / In you or in myself’ (5.2)
• ‘I would have their bodies / Burnt in a coal pit with the ventage stopped, / That their cursed smoke might not ascend to
heaven.’ (5.2)
• ‘boil their bastard to a cullis’ (5.2.71)
- ‘Talk to me somewhat quickly, / Or my imagination will carry me / To see her in the shameful act of sin.’ (2.5.39-41) - Ferdinand
- Bosola’s goodness: ‘Faith, ed here / And go no farther in your cruelty.’ (4.1.113-4)
- Ferdinand will only see the Duchess in the dark: ‘he comes i’th’night’, ‘He dares not see you.’ - biblical allusion: John 3:19 -
‘men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil’ - he doesn’t want to look on her/his sin
- The mad men mirror the scenes of Webster’s characters: fantasies of witchcraft, lust and corruption
- ‘O this gloomy world! / In what shadow, or deep pit of darkness, / Doth womanish and fearful mankind live! / Let worthy minds
ne’er stagger in distrust / To suffer death of shame for what is just.’ (5.5) - Bosola
- Historical context:
• Moral degeneracy after the ‘Golden Age’ of Elizabeth + threat of Machiavellianism (+ violence common in popular drama)
• Immorality of the case of Lady Arabella Stuart (James I’s cousin) - believed to be inspiration for the Duchess (‘I’ll starve
myself to death’) - she languished in prison for her relationship with William Seymour - a combination of grief and
malnourishment killed her

Temptation and ambition

- ‘I must confess, I had a hope, / Had she continued widow, to have gained / An infinite mass of treasure by her death’ -
Ferdinand (4.2)
- ‘in all our quest of greatness, like wanton boys whose pastime is their care, we follow after bubbles blown in the air. (5.4.64-66)
- Bosola questions ambition
- ‘This goodly roof of yours is too low built, / I cannot stand upright in't, nor discourse, / Without I raise it higher. Raise yourself, /
Or if you please, my hand to help you; (1.1.408-411) - The Duchess to Antonio
- ‘Ambition, madam, is a great man’s madness’ (1.1.410)
• Clear contrast: Castruchio’s ambition and Bosola’s instructions on how to satisfy it
- ‘I look no / higher than I can reach […] when a man’s mind rides faster than his horse can gallop, they quickly both
tire.’ (2.1.89-94) - Antonio telling Bosola that he should stop acting humble now he is provisor of the horse
- ‘How fearfully / Shows his ambition now’ (2.4.80-81) - Delio on Antonio
- ‘I would have you curse yourself now, that your bounty, / Which makes men truly noble, e'er should make / Me a villain: oh, that
to avoid ingratitude / For the good deed you have done me, I must do / All the ill man can invent.’ (1.1.264-68) - Bosola
- ‘Thy curiosity / Hath undone thee.’ - the Cardinal to Julia

Religion
- ‘Yet stay, heaven gates are not so highly arched / As princes' palaces: they that enter there / Must go upon their knees.’ [Kneels]
(4.2.222-24) - The Duchess as she is about to be executed
- ‘I do not like this jesting with religion, / This feigned pilgrimage.’ - Cariola
• ‘Thou art a superstitious fool!’ (3.2.314-16) - The Duchess
- ‘You violate a sacrament o’h’church / Shall make you howl in hell for’t’ (4.1.38-39) - Duchess to Ferdinand because he says that
her ‘cubs’ are ‘bastards’
- ‘I am puzzled in a question about hell: / He says, in hell there’s one material fire, / And yet it shall not burn all men alike. / Lay
him by. (5.5.1-4) - The Cardinal before their deaths
- ‘Come, I will swear you to’t upon this book.’ - The Cardinal
- ‘Most religiously.’ - Julia
- ‘Kiss it. [She kisses the book] / Thou’rt poisoned with that book’ - The Cardinal (5.2.266-69)
- ‘Security some men call the suburbs of hell, / Only a dead wall between.’ (5.2.327-28) - Bosola
- ‘I could kill her now / In you, or in myself, for I do think / It is some sin in us heaven doth revenge / By her. (2.5.63–6) - These
cryptic lines imply that Ferdinand’s savagery derives in part from a self-loathing which he projects onto his sister. As with Bosola
and Antonio, Webster seems keen to endow Ferdinand with a degree of psychological complexity.
- ‘Webster poses a general question about metaphysics in his play’s many references to saints, witches, devils, omens, ghosts
and shrines, which seem to be presented sometimes as superstition, sometimes as having the real efficacy attributed to them
by the old religion.’ - Brian Gibbons
• ‘My nose bleeds. [Takes out handkerchief and drops paper] One that were superstitious would count / This ominous’ -
Antonio
• The echo: ‘my wife’s voice’ becomes ‘ay, wife’s voice’ and ‘To fly your fate.’ becomes ‘O fly your fate.’
- The ruined cloister episode (5.3) + ‘Some reverend monument / Who ruins are even pitied’ (4.2.33-4) implicitly acknowledge the
conflicted cultural-political effects of Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church and the Dissolution of the Monasteries
- ‘The central concern in the play as a whole is with the opposed concepts of fate/accident, substance/emptiness, at a historical
moment when Christianity was in doctrinal crisis, when cultural values seemed at hazard
- Old Vic production, 2012: focus on central spiritual conflict
- ‘Be not cunning: / For they whose faces do belie their hearts / Are witches ere they arrive at twenty years, / Ay, and give the
devil suck.’ (1.1.299-302) - Ferdinand to the Duchess
- ‘What’s laid up yonder for me…In heaven’ (1.1.364) - similarity to sixth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament
- ‘Remember / You are a Christian.’ - Bosola, ’The Church endings fasting: / I’ll starve myself to death.’ - the Duchess (4.1)
- Historical context:
• Major religious conflicts: 30 years war (1618-1648), persecution of Catholics
• Fear of Machiavellianism undermining traditional religious values
- The Duchess’ ‘dog-fish’ parable (3.5) - biblical method of delivering profound spiritual insight
- Violation of religion through marrying too far above/below your rank - The Great Chain of Being

Death
- Ferdinand seeing the Duchess’ death as certain ‘Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young’ (5.2.250) - conclusive, yet
subverted a moment later when she revives
- The Duchess’ death ‘in terms of an inverted wedding celebration’ - Brian Gibbons
- The rope around the Duchess’s neck is ‘an emblem of Christian martyrdom not thee instrument of deserved punishment that
Ferdinand intends’ - B. Gibbons
- The noose is a ‘satiric-vengeful wedding ring of death’ - B. Gibbons - ‘consummation devoutly to be wished’
- Parallel of the Duchess’ death and what she said to Antonio: ‘This goodly roof of yours is too low built / I cannot stand upright
in’t.’ (1.1.406-7), ‘This is flesh and blood, sir, / ’Tis not the figure cut in alabaster / kneels at my husbands tomb’ (1.1.443-5)
- Cariola’s death and all those subsequent to the Duchess’ death (the main event of the play) are mirrors and echoes of the
Duchess’ death - ‘This makes the play into a kind of ars moriendi, a study of dying considered as an art, a theatrical explanation
of the Duchess’ mediation: ‘I know death hath ten thousand several doors / For men to take their exits’ (4.205-6)
- Cariola’s death is a cowardly betrayal - very different to the Duchess’ reaction to the bodies of her husband and children (which
the audience would have assumed were real)
• ‘I am not prepared for’t! I will not die!’ (4.2.230)
- The Cardinal’s epitaph is that he ends ‘in a little point, a kind of nothing’
- Bosola concludes: ‘We are only like dead walls, or vaulted graves / That ruined, yields no echo.’ (5.5.96-7)
- The echoes in 5.3
- In the 1980 Manchester production Bob Hoskins played Bosola and he died with a manic laugh
- ‘Doth not death fright you?’ - Bosola (4.2)
• ‘Who would be afraid on’t, / Knowing to meet such excellent company / In th'other world?’
• ‘I know death hath ten thousand several doors / For men to take their exits’
• ‘Tell my brothers / That I perceive death, now I am well awake, / Best gift is they can give or I can take.’
• Before: “Theres no deep valley, but near some great hill.” (3.5.140)
- The dead figures in 4.1: ‘the artificial figures of Antonio and his children, appearing as if they were dead’
- ‘Come, you must live.’ - Bosola
• ‘That’s the greatest torture souls feel / In hell: that they must live, and cannot die.’ (4.1.68-9)
• ‘Remember / You are a Christian.’ - Bosola, ’The Church endings fasting: / I’ll starve myself to death.’ - the Duchess (4.1)
- ‘Much you had of land and rent, / Your length in clay's now competent; / A long war disturbed your mind, / Here your perfect
peace is signed. (4.2.172-174) - Bosola denounces the Duchess’ power, saying the only real land she owns is the clay that
makes her coffin
- ‘Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body’ (4.2.119-120)
- Historical context: Jacobean mortality - high infant morality rates, low life expectancy, plague