Duchess of Malfi Critics Flashcards
(22 cards)
‘The nature of “female rule” is unnatural’
Knox, 1558
‘A sorry play’
Pepys, 1666
‘She is lived in horrors until she is become native’
Lamb, 1808
‘The horror is accumulated to an overwhelming and unsupportable height’
Hazlitt (senior), 1840
‘She speaks the dialect of despair’
Hazlitt (younger), 1857
‘They handle these horrors with little or no moral purpose, save that of exciting or amusing the audience’
Kingsley, 1890
‘He has to arouse terror and pity, not thought’
Kingsley, 1890
With Bosola ‘a fatal lack of clearness ruins everything’
Archer, 1893
‘Repulsive themes and characters’
Lee, 1899
‘Webster was much possessed by death/ And saw the skull beneath the skin’
T.S. Eliot , 1919
‘The Cardinal knows already that He is in hell’
Bradbrook, 1947
‘It is Ferdinand who is unsure of himself’
Calderwood, 1962
The Duchess’ marriage is ‘wilful and irresponsible’
Rabkin, 1968
‘The brothers’ picture of the Duchess is a projection of the evil in their own minds’
Brennan, 1963
‘Critics have found little to like or admire in Antonio’
Belton, 1967
The Duchess ‘seeks private happiness at the expense of public stability’
Bliss, 1983
‘The Cardinal’s cool, unemotional detachment is far more terrifying than Ferdinand’s impassioned raving’
Bliss, 1983
Julia ‘acts out the Renaissance court strumpet’
Whigham, 1985
‘The Duchess abandons her duties of her ‘body politic’ for those of her ‘body natural’ and for this she has to die’
Jankowski, 1990
‘Every setting, no matter how distant or exotic, is meant as analogous to London’
Locatelli, 1995
‘Her brothers assume a patriarchal control over her body and sexuality, an assumption which extends over her political state’
Aughterton, 2013
To ‘arouse terror and pity’
Kingsley, 1890
