Status Updates From Three Plays: The White Devi...

For a reworking of Duchess of Malfi, it seems instead like Webster took his most popular play as it sat in the printing press, turned over the tray and grouped the type blocks in piles of misogyny and arrogance. This is the only way that the protagonist Romelio makes any sense, why his family are out to get him and the legal system bending over to protect his errant ways. Even his enemies can't die properly.

Rather than blaming wintry weather or the dullness of audiences at the Red Bull, Webster should rather take another look at the fetid world he created for the few female characters continually abused with unbecoming names. Most of the dialogue seems to be a Bob Dylanesque pastiche of many memorable lines from Titus Andronicus and Measure for Measure through to Othello and Pericles.

Going on a tip about the play being performed at the Globe, I decided to start reading The Duchess of Malfi to discover a wonderfully grim study in reality, madness and a cosmos thrown off-kilter (or righted to its heliocentric orbits) by the astronomer's looking-glass. As the Duchess is punished for her strong will, her brothers and heir hangers-on suffer for being weak in comparison; no ghosts but an echo.

Something inside me suddenly switched from a narrow focus on Shakespeare's plays to at least a few of his contemporary playwrights. Gunby is intent on raising Webster to on par with the Bard but I'd like to see more of what contemporaries thought of each other. This is gleaned at with Webster's praise for the "happy and copious industry" that got him to bring The Duchess over to the King's Men and the Globe.