Explore Websters presentation of obsessive love through the character Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi

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Explore Webster’s presentation of obsessive love through the character Ferdinand in ‘The Duchess of Malfi

The Duchess of Malfi does indeed have ‘plenty of blood’, but this is nothing unusual in Renaissance tragedies. Webster’s play is a tragedy about a forbidden love, more specifically a forbidden marriage, which leads ultimately to the deaths of the lovers and many others. Webster’s focus in his tragedy of love is class, or rank, to use a more authentically early modern term.

Both brothers are clearly furious at the news of the Duchesses marriage to Antonio, making explicit the kind of rank that Antonio is, and how he because of it is perhaps unfit for the Duchess. Both the Cardinal and Ferdinand vent to misogynist commonplaces, evident here:

Foolish men,
That e’er will trust their honour in a bark
Made of so slight weak bullrush as is woman,
Apt every minute to sink it! (2.5.33–6)

Here it can be seen that Ferdinand’s anger seems different in kind from the Cardinal’s. Indeed, the Cardinal is as shocked by his brother’s ravings, and his alarmed responses confirm that Ferdinand’s attitude to the Duchess is obsessive and pathological: ‘Speak lower’ (2.5.4); ‘Why do you make yourself / So wild a tempest?’ (2.5.16–17); ‘You fly beyond your reason’ (2.5.46); ‘Are you stark mad?’ (2.5.66).

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In Act 1, before the brothers gang up on their sister in an effort to bully her into submission, Ferdinand tells Bosola that he ‘would not have her marry again’ (1.1.262). This blanket hostility to a second marriage goes beyond anything voiced by the Cardinal, who is much more concerned about the prospect of an inappropriate union. In reply, Bosola says only ‘No, sir?’ (1.1.262), yet this unchallenging response is enough to spark the highly defensive ‘Do not you ask the reason, but be satisfied / I say I would not’ (1.1.263–4). Webster seems to be deliberately arousing our ...

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