The Duchess, strong-willed, brave, passionate, proud, and a loving wife and mother is the most psychologically complex female Character portrayed with great insight and poetic power. A noble and courageous Duchess is the source of all action in the play. Because of her beauty, boldness, sincerity, love, devotion, patience and tolerance, she is placed as one of the best and immortal characters in the world literature. She has a charming and fascinating personality.
The Duchess is the sister of Ferdinand and the Cardinal. She
is young and beautiful but unfortunately, she becomes a widow at the charming
period of her life. Her brothers warn her not to marry again. They threaten her
by saying that if she marries secretly, her marriage will be executed than
celebrated. But she doesn’t care about her brothers’ warning and she secretly
marries Antonio, her own steward.
Her beauty, boldness, sincerity, love, devotion patience and
tolerance are some of her natural or acquired virtues which place her among the
best and immortal characters in the world literature. Webster’s fame and
recognition as a dramatist can appropriately be said to have depended on The
Duchess of Malfi and its heroine, the Duchess.
Her brothers appoint Bosola as a spy in the guise of the
provisor of horses at the Duchess’ court. Bosola cunningly extracts the secret
of the Duchess and informs everything to her brothers. Then the Duchess is
arrested and imprisoned by Bosola under the instructions of her brothers. Once
Bosola comes to the Duchess to represent him as a tomb-maker. He says that he
has come to make her tomb. But the Duchess doesn’t forget her status. To
strangle the Duchess, the executioner led by Bosola enters the room with rope.
But she is not afraid of death. Instead of being frightened, she requests the
executioners to perform their job seriously. Even when she encounters her
executioners, sent by her brothers, she thinks of safety of her husband and her
children than her own life and sends Antonio along with her eldest child to
Milan for the same. Even on the verge of her death, she prays to God in
thankfulness.
The question is often asked as to
why the Duchess was murdered. Was she really lustful, immoral and irreligious
as her brothers think her to be? She was living in a corrupt court, and is
there anything surprising or unnatural if its general corruption has also
infected her? No concrete answer can be given to these questions but as there
is enough evidence in to play to show that she is chaste, virtuous, pure and
religious. Duchess’s ending is an affirmation that while power can destroy the
body, it is powerless against a dignified spirit. She dies "shaking off
her modernity" and embracing a timeless, tragic beauty that leaves the
world of Malfi dark, hollow, and haunted by her absence.
