Character Sketch of The Duchess

         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.