AO5 (12.5%)
Production Interpretation
1945 production at - Famous revival that was a catalyst for attitudes about the play changing for the better
the Theatre Total, - Exemplified the fact that in modern times the play has acquired more resonances
Haymarket [__ Since it opened at a time when the first reports of the survivors of Nazi concentration camps were being published in the papers, critics
Aldwych discovered a new seriousness in Webster's blood-soaked tragedy
production - The Duchess played by Peggy Ashcroft
This production embodied the various critical strands of the postmodern period
A reviewer wrote that Ashcroft’s performance of “gentle raillery, tremulous passion, melting womanliness and utter certainty are blended into
something of fragile and almost untouchable beauty”
BBC 1972 dir. - Starts w/ Purcell's 'Funeral March of Queen Mary’
James MacTaggart - Performance was the subject of acclaim by Raymond Williams in ‘The Independent’ in 1987. Williams expressed his appreciation for the
production performance avoiding the mid-twentieth-century tendency to show the action of the play as farce. He also dismisses the implication fo
Ferdinand’s incest as Freudian obsession and compliments the play’s sober recognition of anger, confusion and violence
Historical critical Interpretation
perspectives
Renaissance - Part of the reason that Webster did not gain prominence to rival Marlowe etc in his own time was that his detractors did not understand his
(1600s) intentions - he attempted to deliver scenes of great theatre, suffused with fine poetry, but was challenging the utilitarian rationalism of the time
that emerged with humanism
- Orazio Busino - objected to The Duchess of Malfi on religious grounds
- Middleton - one of Webster’s contemporaries, called the play a “masterpiece of tragedy”
18th century - Webster was largely ignored - unsurprising in an age whose art was characterised by civilised restraint in the handling of emotion and a
preoccupation with decorum (the subordination of every detail to the whole). A writer who excelled in scenes of stark mental and physical
anguish was unlikely to please
- The century is noteworthy for an attempt to adapt the play in accordance with prevailing taste: Lewis Theobald’s adaptation of TDOM called
‘The Fatal Secret’ was staged twice in Covent Garden in 1733
[__ Theobald regularised the plot: beginning the action after the marriage (thus omitting the wooing scene), fixing the setting as Malfi
throughout, omitting Julia and also the children born to Antonio and the Duchess. The dead man’s hand is replaced with Antonio’s ring and the
Duchess ‘dies’ off stage
- TMT Theobald could transform the whole play, adapting it so that the Duchess is not really dead because the corpse Ferdinand saw was
merely a wax effigy carefully substituted by Bosola → resurrected (along with Cariola) in the final scene and reunited with Antonio
, - The Duchess’s moralising statement to end off the play begins: “Some Tears are due / T’appease th’ offended Pow’rs”
Theobald in his preface to ‘The Fatal Secret’ (1735):
- “When I first read his Scenes, I found something singularly engaging in the Passions, a mixture of the Masculine, and the Tender, which
induced me to think of modernising them”
- On Webster - and his lack of obligation to turn a blind eye to his faults, though he has chosen to adapt his play: “he is not without his Incidents
of Horror … often rises into the Region of Bombast … As for Rules, he either knew them not, or thought them too servile a Restraint”
19th century The mode of criticism became more romantic and impressionistic than analytic and investigative
- New critical tone ushered in, specifically by Charles Lamb, who was enthusiastic about Webster, which pervaded the critical discourse and
made others view his work more favourably too. Lamb and his successors strove to come to terms with the horror in the tragedies, refusing to
set it down (as various later critics do), to the supposed barbarity of Elizabethan taste
[__ the portrait of Webster produced by the Romantic critics is of a metaphysical searcher, darkly pondering the mysteries of identity, free will
etc (this is still the widely accepted portrait today)
Lamb in 1808: the Duchess “speaks the dialect of despair”
- Much like in the 18th century, many productions are marred by adaptations or dilution
[__ a production at Horne’s at Sadlers Wells in 1950 is marred by cuts - this is a Victorian softening which blunts Webster’s edge. The
Athenaeum reporter Lewis asserts that “we have here not even Webster”
20th century - Moore recounts how a review in The Times of a stage production of the Duchess of Malfi in 1945 appeared (by a strange but telling accident)
immediately beneath some recent pictures of Nazi extermination camps. The world had become used to confronting situations of horror again,
and their perpetrators were modern Ferdinands and Bosolas
- The 20th century has been more sympathetic to Webster
[__ eg. T.S. Eliot’s remarks
- Angela Carter drew inspiration for her werewolf stories, The Company of Wolves and Wolf-Alice, in The Bloody Chamber from The Duchess
of Malfi, most notably the line "hairy on the inside", but also "the howling of the wolf is music to the screech-owl", and "I'll go hunt the badger
by owl-light. 'Tis a deed of darkness."
Critic Interpretation
Hazlitt 19th century critic
- In 1820 said that the Duchess of Malfi comes “the nearest to Shakespear of any thing we have upon record”, although the final scenes “exceed
the just bounds” of tragedy
Charles Kingsley 19th century critic
- Exemplifies the adverse comments on Webster’s “decadence and immorality”. Kingsley writes that the strength of his “confest mastership lies
simply in his acquaintance with vicious nature in general … handles these horrors with little or no moral purpose”
