Duchess of Malfi
Duchess of Malfi
Duchess of Malfi
The revenge tragedy is a tragic play in which the tragedy results from the
revenge that is taken for some wrong or wrongs, either by the person wronged
himself or by someone else on his behalf. In fact, the revenge tradition keeps
back into the classical antiquity. The earliest recorded trilogy in Greek drama
has a core of revenge and many of the plays of Sophocles and Euripides deal
with the theme of revenge. From Hippolytus and Media to Hecuba have a strong
revenge motif. However in their tragedies there was nothing of that horror
element which soon came to be associated with the revenge play and which is a
marked feature of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy. It was Seneca, the great
tragic dramatist of ancient Rome, who introduced the element of horror in the
revenge play. In the Senecan tragedy, revenge is taken as a duty for the murder
of some close relative or friend. The fact of murder is revealed by the ghost of
the murdered person who enjoins someone close to himself to take revenge, and
to regard that revenge as a sacred duty. As the avenger proceeds to perform his
duty, horror is piled upon horror and in the end the stage is left littered with
dead bodies.
Throughout the golden age of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama from about 1587
to the closure of theatres the revenge drama predominated the place produced
during the period.
The Senecan revenge tragedy was the paradigm on which the Elizabethan
drama was modelled. The earliest writers of tragedy in the English language,
Thomas Sackville, and Thomas Norton, fastened on a story of revenge for their
Gorboduc, first produced in 1561. Since then, for another sixty years revenge
continued to be one of the popular themes for dramatic representation.
Gorboduc was significant in its day, not merely for its political overtones but
also, perhaps chiefly, for breaking fresh ground in dramaturgy. The play,
however, did not serve as a model for later writers of revenge plays. The authors
of Gorboduc were familiar with the translations of Seneca’s plays but they did
not induct into English drama all the conventions of Senecan Tragedy.
The influence of Seneca passed into the Elizabethan theatre through Thomas
Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Kyd was deeply influenced by Seneca and so he
provided a model of Senecan revenge tragedy to the English audience through
The Spanish Tragedy (1596). Since his days the features of revenge tragedy
came to be recognised as the following.
a) A shocking murder has been committed and it cries out for revenge.
b) Some person or persons take up revenge as a sacred duty.
c) The ghost of the murdered person stalks about asking for revenge or
providing the stimulus for revenge, alternatively there are omens and
presentiments.
d) There is a Machiavellian villain who, acting on his own behalf or for others,
causes widespread bloodshed.
e) The objects of revenge are often better than the so called avengers.
f) New-fangled tortures and horrors are introduced.
g) Some characters grow mad or feign madness.
h) There is a play within a play which often mirrors the core of the main
action.
i) And the imagery and language employed often suit the violence of the
action.
• In Melodrama, the horrors are introduced for their own sake. The
protagonist is absolutely good, and the villains are absolutely evil.
• Horrors have a symbolical significance, and the villain Bosola finally turns
into an instrument of moral triumph.
• Many critics are of the view that horrors in the play serve no useful
purpose.
• Horrors are introduced only to please the contemporary audience. They are
mechanical and brutal.
• But it is not true. Webster’s handling of these scenes is superb.
• Our attention is drawn not to the horrors but to the Duchess’s reaction to
them.
• Bosola helps the Duchess to overcome her womanly fears. He arouses the
spirit of greatness in her.
• His words – “the stars shine still” symbolize hope and moral triumph of the
Duchess.
• Charles Lamb has pointed out the supreme dramatic effectiveness of the
scene. He says,
“To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as
much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop ‘and
then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit; this only
Webster can do. Writers of an inferior genius may upon horror’s head
horrors accumulate, but they cannot do this. They mistake quantity for
quality, they ‘terrify babes with painted devils’, but they know not how a
soul is capable of being moved: their terrors want dignity, their
affrightments are without decorum.”
• There is a further point in which Webster scores over all the other writers of
revenge plays. And that is in his moral vision.