Critical quotes

• "The Duchess, not her brothers, stands for ordinary humanity, love and the continuity of life through children" Irving Ribner
• "The radiant spirit of the Duchess cannot be killed." P.B Murray
• "The two brothers are not driven by any sense of possessive outrage, however warped, but a delight in malice itself, a "motiveless malignity" even against their own flesh and blood" Christopher Hart
• "The Cardinal's cool, unemotional detachment is more terrifying than Ferdinand's impassioned raving" Lee Bliss
• "a cautionary tale which shows what can happen when women marry without being granted the "proper" consent." Nanci Roider
• "The tragedy of a virtuous woman who achieves heroism through her death." R. S. White
• "She challenges Jacobean society's views regarding the representation of the female body and women's sexuality." Theodore A Jankowski
• "Jacobean society shared a modern abhorrence of incest combined with a morbid fascination with its machinations." Sarah Olson
• "Despite her political sovereignty, her brothers assume a patriarchal control over her body and her sexuality, an assumption which extends over her political state." Kate Aughterson
• "The Duchess of Malfi is an unusual central figure for a 17th-century tragedy, not only because she is a woman but also because, as a woman, she combines virtue with powerful sexual desire." Dympna Callaghan
• The Duchess of Malfi is a "play obsessed with secrets." Michael O'Neil
• "The world as seen by [Webster] is, of its nature, incurably corrupt. To be involved in it is to be inescapably involved in evil: all its apparent beauties are a snare and a delusion." David Cecil
• "It is essentially a feminist play about a woman who is fighting for her autonomy." Helen Mirren