Critical AO5 - TDOM

• "Ferdinand's dirty-minded jokes suggests an obsessive hatred of sexuality which sees all courtship as deception"

  Kathleen McLuskie
• "It is Ferdinand who is unsure of himself, not Webster. Ferdinand's brusqueness here suggests a lack of self-awareness, not so much an irritation by being questioned as a failure ever to have asked himself the same question"

  James L Calderwood
• "[Ferdinand's] future degeneration into the form of madness of lycanthropia can be seen as a mental refuge from accepting responsibility for his own actions"

  R.S White
• "In the play the Cardinals hypocrisy is clearly exposed to the audience"

  Roshan Doug
• "Bosola can not be said to be merely greedy for gain we need to understand what we wants"


  Frank whigham
• "The Cardinal's cool, unemotional detachment is more terrifying than Ferdinand's impassioned raving"

  Lee Bliss
• "[Ferdinand and the Cardinal's] destruction of her is out of all proportion to the faults she has committed."

  Philip Allan
• "The timings of these entrances effectively flag up the relationship between Bosola and the Cardinal; the corruptor and the corrupted"


  Jeanette White
• "[Bosola] knows he doesn't want to change the society he despises and which excludeds him; he wants to become embroiled with it"

  Lucy Webster
• "Bosola 'ironically voices an attitude which will more and more become a sign of the hypocritical court itself"

  R.S White
• "Without Bosola TDOM would not be a revenge tragedy, it is not until he has carried out his job that there is a death to avenge"


  Lucy Webster
• "[Bosola] participates in the viciousness and self-seeking of the world he rails against"


  David Gunby
• "The duchess's marriage to Antonio seems far more pure and sanctified than cardinals religiously justified but evidently hypocritical behaviour"

  Roshan Doug
• "The Duchess is thought to be contributions to the debate about the nature and status of woman"

  Nigel Wheale
• "[The Duchess] was never given a personal name, her private person is suppressed in her public role"

  Murial Bradbrook
• "To some sections of Malfi society, it seems that moral considerations are irrelevant. The Duchess does not demur at accepting a servant who has been in the galleys"


  Martin Wiggins
• "Ferdinand tries to suggest that he was motivated by greed when he ordered the execution od the Duchess"

  Louise Powell
• "[Bosola has a] Compulsivity seeking to be paid, recognised, acknowledged, and identified"


  Frank Whigham
• "In dramatizing a woman's sexual choices in a notably sympathetic manner, this tragedy articulates perennial questions about female autonomy and class distinction."

  Emma Smith
• "The Duchess feels haughty, prideful, distant"


  Emma Smith
• "The plays inconsistent attitude towards the Duchess suggests its own struggle with what she represents and its struggle with the impossibility of reconciling her own aspirations for self governance with the patriarchal world in which she and her Jacobian audience live in"

  Emma Smith
• "the norm of tragedy was the fall of an initially heroic man or the rise and fall of a great villain"

  R. White
• "The play toys with the interest in consequences"


  Emma Smith
• "The Duchess's body is threatening to male rule" 

  Lifson
• "The play has inconsistent attitudes towards what the Duchess represents"


  Emma Smith
• "The two brothers are not driven by any sense of possessive outrage, however warped, but by a delight in malice itself, a 'motiveless malignity' even against their own flesh and blood."

  Hart
• "Whether Antonio's motives for marrying the Duchess are ambitious is arguable and that his managerial abilities match those becoming increasingly important to upwardly mobile men in society in C16 England"

  Mary Rose Beth
• "An inabilitgy to arrest the actions mirrors perfectly the helplessness that would have been expierenced by the Jacobean public to stop the real abuse of their rulers"


  Jeanette White
• "In this play darkness is the enemy to virtue"

  Dr Farah Karim-Cooper
• "webster is a particular master at mingling extreme horror with grotesque comedy and shows characters who are probably closer to the muddled, selfish, intractable, people most people encounter"


  Nigel Wheale
• "Creating such complex parts as the unnamed Duchess, and placing them in the title roles of their plays, webster is contributing powerfully to the debate over power and gender"


  Nigel wheale
• "[The Duchess is] Repeating the historical transgression of Eve"

  Dymphna Callaghan
• "Social hierarchies, fashion, relationships, even family bonds, are seen and described as hypocritical and claustrophobic."

  Kate Aughterson