The Duchess of Malfi (Further Reading)

Further Reading

• Bloom, Harold, ed., Elizabethan Dramatists, Modern Critical Views series, Chelsea House, 1986.

  This collection of critical essays includes two essays about The Duchess of Malfi as well as essays about Webster's most important contemporaries. In "Tragical Satire in The Duchess of Malfi," Alvin B. Kernan describes Bosola as the ideal, and one of the last, of the Elizabethan satirists. G. Wilson Knight contributes an essay called simply "The Duchess of Malfi," which examines image clusters in the play.

• Boklund, Gunnar, "The Duchess of Malfi": Sources, Themes, Characters, Harvard University Press, 1962.

  Boklund traces Webster's sources for the story of the Duchess, pointing out the places where Webster deviates from these sources to make the story his own. The characterization of Antonio as humble but honest, for example, is Webster's invention.

• Knight, G. Wilson, "The Duchess of Malfi," in Elizabethan Dramatists, edited by Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Views series, Chelsea House, 1986, pp. 85 – 107.

  Knight offers a close reading of the clusters of images and symbols in the play and argues that the coherence of the play is not to be found in the logical structure of the plot but in the non-rational resonance of the imagery.

• Rabkin, Norman, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of "The Duchess of Malfi," Prentice-Hall, 1968.

  This collection touches on the major critical questions about the play in ten critical essays, or "Interpretations," and fourteen brief excerpts, or "View Points," by scholars including T. S. Eliot and Northrup Frye.

• Thomson, Leslie, "Fortune and Virtue in The Duchess of Malfi," in Comparative Drama, Vol. 33, No. 4, 1999 – 2000, pp. 474 – 94.

  Thomson compares the play with medieval and Renaissance iconography illustrating the relationships between fortune, love, and death. She shows how the relationships between the Duchess (fortune) and Antonio (love) are derived from earlier morality plays and emblem books.

• Winston, Mathew, "Gendered Nostalgia in The Duchess of Malfi," in The Renaissance Papers, 1998, pp. 103 – 13.

  Winston sees in the play the longing of Webster and his contemporaries for Queen Elizabeth I, who had been dead for a decade when The Duchess of Malfi was first performed. The Duchess's death in act 4 is part of Webster's overall plan, which is to show in act 5 how the world decays when she is gone.