#duchess of malfi

[king-alfred]

Happy birthday David Dawson (b. 7 September 1982)! 👑

[rxnefairs]

Eve Best in Theatre x Polaroid Movie Posters

[hussyknee]

Just discovered these lines by John Webster from The Duchess of Malfi:

Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust,

like diamonds we are cut with our own dust.

That's what I call metal.

Also:

A politician is the devil's quilted anvil;

He fashions all sins on him, and the blows are never heard

Um. Hello?? Goddamn??

[spacesapphist]

i love being in a crowd of people experiencing a really old & fucked up play for the first time and having no clue what’s about to happen. the genuine shocked reactions to a full crowd watching the duchess of malfi?? UNBEATABLE

[eves-da-best]

I know the little rodent was in the audience (as a party-crasher, not a ticket-holder), but the thought of Eve being halfway through her death scene (which was incredibly intense, according to reviews), seeing a teeny mouse scurry across the stage in front of her, and THEN struggling to contain herself while continuing to “die” is sending me 😂😂😂😭 Because she loves small furry creatures (including but not limited to bumble bees)

[tuesdaysgirll]

consequences of my own actions

[my-burnt-city]

i know some people were a bit sad that the behind the mask documentary didn't include anything about the duchess of malfi, so it's a good job youtube already has y'all covered

[cringefailfagcat]

I love this pathetic old man <3

[weirdlookindog]

Henry Weston Keen (1899-1935) - Skull Crowned with Snakes and Flowers, 1930

illustration for John Webster's 'The Duchess of Malfi'

source

[lomopolar]

[uwuttaker]

production photos of jodie in the duchess by marc brenner

[nomilkinmyteaplease]

The cast of The Duchess in rehearsals

[toadminako]

The Duchess [of Malfi] at the Trafalgar Theatre is a rather messy adaptation that I wasn't super fond of. The semi-modernised dialogue felt impossible for the actors to deliver, the music was implemented clumsily (although I loved getting to hear Jodie Whittaker sing), and the mid-20th century setting just undermines the themes of the play IMO.

BUT THAT BEING SAID

You do also get to see Paul Ready with a clipped beard in various priest outfits delivering lines like:

"Turn around, bend over, touch yourself and tell me you love me more than him"

So uhhhhhh nevermind 10/10 show actually it was perfect no notes!

[kingslionheart]

David at the curtain call for The Duchess of Malfi - Shakespeare's Globe, 2014

[thetorturedlovergirl]

Yesterday, a coworker was going through all my lock screen pics and suddenly stopped on this one

slowly turned to look at me and said "oh my god you are SO gay”

[anghraine]

dontstandmedown replied to this post:

re:tags could you share the playwright you're talking about? :0

No problem! For others, the tags in question are this:

#thinking about this partly because the softer & gentler versions of fanfic discourse keep crossing my dash #and partly because i've written like 30 pages about a playwright i adore who was just not very good at 'original fiction' as we'd define it #both his major works are ... glorified rpf in our context but splendid tragedies in his #and the idea of categorizing /anything/ in that era by originality of conception rather than comedy/tragedy/etc would be buckwild

I am always delighted to share the good news of John Webster! If you're not familiar with him, he was an early seventeenth-century English playwright known for being a slow, painstaking, but reliable writer. He did various collaborations with other playwrights (and acknowledges a bunch of his peers in an author's note to The White Devil, including Jonson and Shakespeare) and wrote some middling plays in various genres that could be more or less termed "original fiction," but he's remembered for two brilliant, bloody tragedies.

The basic premises/plots of both of these were essentially ripped from the headlines of the previous century, and Webster makes zero attempt to conceal that fact.

I couldn't shut up about my guy so more under a cut!

The White Devil is based on the actual murder of Vittoria Accoramboni in the late sixteenth century and the characters in the play are generally given the same or similar names as the real life people in the story as known at the time, so there's no attempt to conceal the play's origins (the anti-heroine/villain???[debatable] is named Vittoria Corombona in the play, for instance).

The original production of The White Devil largely failed, which Webster blamed mainly on bad weather and an audience who just didn't get his ~vision and what he was trying to do. It would not be unsurprising for a contemporary audience to struggle with it given that it's a complicated play in which, among other things, Vittoria is put on trial and rhetorically shreds the underlying misogyny of the entire legal process.

The Duchess of Malfi, generally considered a still greater achievement, is based directly on the murder of Giovanna d'Aragona, Duchess of Amalfi by her brothers (it was presumed, likely correctly). Lope de Vega also wrote a play about this tragedy not long before Webster did, though the plays are very different and it's unlikely that Webster would have had the time or linguistic knowledge necessary to read Lope's version. Probably part of the reason for the differences between Lope's and Webster's takes is that Lope had to be careful about the reception by the Catholic Church given that one of the murderers was a cardinal, while obviously an English Protestant like Webster could say whatever he wanted about eeeeevil cardinals.

Webster takes a lot of artistic license, a normal approach at the time to adapting previously-established narratives, but the source material is very recognizable. One of the commendatory verses at the beginning of the play (blurbs in poetic form from other playwrights) is like "I'm sure the real duchess was cool but she couldn't be as cool as Webster's heroine, wow <3". (One of the other commendations is by another fave of mine, John Ford.)

Bosola, the historically mysterious minion of the Duchess's murderous brothers (=Bozolo in the historical narrative) gets an elaborate quasi-redemption arc in the play. And the play is extremely critical of various characters' obsession with and attempts to control the Duchess's sexual behavior (a fixation that is often extremely normalized in early modern British drama, but which comes off really badly here).

Ultimately this obsessiveness leads to her brothers, the Cardinal (=the historical Cardinal Luigi d'Aragona) and Ferdinand (=Carlo d'Aragona) orchestrating her torment and murder in which she emerges with her sanity and integrity intact and dies with dignity. Meanwhile, the Cardinal is exposed as a remorseless villain (he proceeds to murder his mistress with a Bible) and Ferdinand's already-shaky sanity snaps under the realization of what he's done.

Webster's Duchess is often considered the first real female tragic hero in British drama—the tragic is especially significant because tragedy was typically considered a higher art form than comedy and the truly great female characters from that era of drama are often restricted to comedies or secondary roles in tragedy (a marked trend in Shakespeare, for instance). The Duchess in the play is virtuous, strong-willed, witty, and fairly unabashedly sexual in the context of the time, a concept that several hundred years of critics have struggled with. (My favorite OTT complaint is from Martin Sampson, an early 20th century critic who lamented the conspicuous absence of a "strong active man, following righteous things" in Webster's work, to which I say l m a o.)

Anyway, among scholars of early modern British drama, Webster is often considered second only to Shakespeare as a tragedian, on the basis of those two plays. And the modern obsession w/ originality and novelty makes this kind of fascinating, given that his "original" work (in our sense—again, the original vs fanfic dichotomy was not a thing in that cultural context) is sort of meh but his work with pre-existing sources turns them into these staggering dramatic achievements.