The Duchess Of Malfi as a Tragedy | Duchess of Malfi as a Tragedy pdf

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        The Duchess Of Malfi is written by John Webster, a famed dramatist of Jacobean Age about whose life almost nothing is known. He was perhaps a tailor in profession. As a tragedy writer he is assigned the rank only next to Shakespeare. 

      The Duchess Of Malfi inverts the usual structure of revenge tragedy.

Duchess-Of-Malfi-as-Tragedy
Duchess Of Malfi as Tragedy


    With the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, The Duchess Of Malfi returned to the stage with a performance on 30 September 1661 .

   The Duchess of Malfi is respectably ensconced in the cannon of English literature, appearing as the paradigmatic non- shakespearean Renaissance play. 


The Duchess Of Malfi as a Tragedy 

  Webster wrote his tragedies within an accepted classical tradition. As it's characteristic it had : 

    Five Acts, often with both a dumb - show and a play within a play continual recounting of off- stage horror and violence a match language of considerable brutishness and all the action climaxing into an unhappy ending.

    This "tragidies of blood" commonly dwelt on the idea of revenge, in corporating ghost , madness, dismembering and death. And almost organic concept within  tragedy is the combination of pity and fear, epitomized in this play by character interplay between the Duchess and her brother, in the end Bosola and the Duchess.

    The Duchess of Malfi incorporates comedy and death in what has been turned a significant comic- tragic relationship of laughing together ; a play where tragedy marches with an overcomes the humor humor of comic satire, where a corrupt society reflects the tragichoodness, reject society those values for itself and prefers to adopt a life, such a stand point leads in inexorably to darkness, confusion and exhausation :- "Ferdinand's sleep" 

    Tragedy is in evitable after that. Yet at the very human centre of it is restorative insight. The Duchess is all too human, too dignified. 

    She displays unattractive characteristics - disregurd for her princly duty, devousness, false accusations of her inferiors, greed, a questionable judgement (in a choice of Antonio) blaeshfany (cunning God) And passive abuse is the possible neglect of her oldest son. She is the personification of tragedy a tragic figure who rises to look tragedy family in her eye. 

    Rupart Brooke in his John Webster and the Elezabethian drama asserts 

    "Webster was a great writer ; and the way in which one uses great writers is two - fold. There is the exhilarating way of reading their writing ; and there is the essence of the whole man".

     Nowadays Webster is considered to be one of England most accomplished Renaissance playwright. What happens however, in peoples mind and heart shown to ask by what they say and what others say about them is awesome in its contemporary appositness. Some of the character watch and construct with reference to plot very intellectually and due to that they have not been properly appreciated but hate and others late go and love with reference to the story. 

    Similarly some are strong and some are weak, some present devilish cheek and some are just plain wrong. 

    We witness and experienced from this play that bad people serve bad people faithfully (Bosola and the Aragon brother) . We see good people let down by good people who in rare turn are let down by other good people (Duchess and Antonio and Delio).


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