In Delio’s concluding speech, Webster’s irony is at its peak when he encourages his audience to ‘make noble use / Of this great ruin’ and seems to present the play as a vehicle for moral instruction, defining in a final twist an ethics based on an ‘integrity of life’. Bloody sensationalism should therefore not eclipse what some critics saw as a drama of knowledge. Against Bosola, the figure of the malcontent who also embodies the typical early modern overreacher, the Duchess stands as a symbol of female transgression before she is eventually crushed by evil and male power. Webster’s drama has been labelled as baroque, grotesque, mannerist, gothic or feminist. Secrets, lies, dismembering, incest, madness, apparitions, mental torture, lycanthropia, brutal murders: there is little that The Duchess of Malfi (1614) shies away from, inflicting on its spectators a whirlwind of conflicting passions and emotions.
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