the white devil and the duchess of malfi

Early modern theatre companies, like Shakespeare's King's Men (the company that performed The Duchess of Malfi), seem to have enjoyed performing indoors because of the flexible conditions. In Jacobean indoor theatres, when it became dark outside it became dark inside, except for candlelight. The conditions of a theatre such as the Blackfriars enabled the torture scenes to pack the emotional punch that Webster intended. But this symbolic opposition between light and darkness also has some practical relevance in the indoor theatre. In this play, darkness is the enemy to virtue. He is lycanthropic, attacking his own shadow to show how darkness seems to emerge from within him.ĭarkness enables him to torment his sister with a dead hand and effigies of her family it is a tangible device used by Ferdinand to destroy his sister in his perverse quest to extinguish her light. She is a tower of light who 'stains the time past, lights the time to come'.Ĭharles Kay as Ferdinand in the 1972 BBC production One of the most complex female characters in early modern drama, the Duchess is not a virgin, but she is virtuous (virtue is often described in this period as that which 'shines forth') she is deliberately transgressive of social boundaries, she is secretive and deceptive, but also heroic. Significantly, the language of light surrounds the descriptions of the Duchess. He drops a few into the beginning of the play, when Delio and Antonio introduce us to the protagonists of the tragedy. Webster enjoyed writing 'Characters', a popular 17th-century genre which described a particular type in society, usually satiric in nature.

There are a number of uses that this range of patterns serves, one being to illustrate character.

These are manifest in a variety of image patterns related to witchcraft, diabolism, animals, night, astrology, knowledge, and female virtue. The Duchess of Malfi contains a network of imagery related to light and darkness. For many, the night was associated with horror. In The Terrors of the Night, the writer Thomas Nashe tells us that the 'night is the devil's black book, wherein he recordeth all our transgressions'.

The Duchess of Malfi contains a network of imagery related to light and darkness

The white devil and the duchess of malfi