Malfi Critics

• Badenyuck - 'The Duchess is perfectly capable of dominance'
• Aughterson - The Duchess's 'justice, truth and morality on one hand, and corrupt religious, patriarchal self-interest on the other'
• T.S. Eliot - 'skull beneath the skin' 'webster was much possessed by death'
• Gibbons - 'each brother is driven by a different obsession: Ferdinand's is sexual, the Cardinal's is social rank'
• Bliss - The Duchess 'seeks private happiness at the expense of public stability'
• Wheale - 'mingling extreme horror with grotesque comedy'
• Smith - The Duchess is presented as 'victim and agent'
• Cecil - 'the world as seen (by Webster) is of its nature incurably corrupt'
• Almeida production - Brothers stood upstage in glass box observing the Duchess's action in Act 4.
• RSC 2018 production

  • So bloody audience were given protective blankets
• The Old Vic 2012

  • 'her first entrance, bathed in light, she offers a symbolic contrast to the rank gloom of court life'