CHARACTERIZATION IN JHON WEBSTER'S THE DUCHESS OF MALFI

CHARACTERIZATION IN JHON WEBSTER'S THE DUCHESS OF MALFI

        John Webster was an English dramatist best known for his tragedies. The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, which are often regarded as masterpiece of the early 17th century English stage. Jhon Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" is a dark and bloody tragedy that deals with the issue of political corruption, class conflict and gender. It is considered one of the great plays of the English Renaissance.
       The Duchess of Malfi is a fine and psychological Complex female character portrayed with great insight and poetic power. She is young and beautiful. She has unfortunately become a widow in the prime of life, when she is still in the full bloom of her youth. She has a charming and Fascinating personality. All who look at her are charmed by her. She is noble, innocent and gentle, dignified and graceful. In the very beginning of the play, we find Antonio praising her eloquently. In his opinion the Duchess is "The night noble Duchess" so very different in temper from her brother's say Antonio;
"You never fixed your eyes on three medals
Cast in one figure, of so different temper"
          The protegonist, sister to Ferdinand and the Cardinal. At the beginning she is a widow whose brothers take every precaution to keep from marriage, though later she secretly marries Antonio. Due to the marriage, her brother's arrange to have her strangled. She is witty and cleaver, helping her keep up with her brother's banter, and has a tenderness and warmth which they lack. She has three children, two sons and a daughter by Antonio.
     The character of Duchess is so important because she is young and beautiful and charming. She is the nobility of her nature that like sweet herbs. She is pious and religious minded. Her days are practised in such noble virtue that she inspires respect among her admires. In short;
"She stains the time past, lights the time to come"
           Antonio is the steward of the Duchess of Malfi. The best proof of his great worth and nobility of character is the fact that he inspires such friendship in Delio. Though he is below the rank of the Duchess, yet he is able to inspire love in her resulting in marriage. He does nothing on his own. He always keep a respectable distance from the Duchess. The marriage does not seem to have brought them closer together. As a Steward he still goes on managing her affairs, but when the presecution of the Duchess begins, it is Duchess who has to make all the decisions. At all other times, Antonio appears to be too passive even after his marriage with the Duchess. He seems to have little independence. It is Duchess who decides to send him to Ancona for his safety and the safety of children. Had he been a courier or a politician, and not kl a mere Steward, he would have taken in his hand the responsibility of protecting his wife and children.
         Antonio is intelligent and has a keenly observant eye. In the very first scene of the play we find that he has just returned from France and is precisely dressed. He is all admiration for the France court which has been purged of intrigue and corruption, and in this respect he is a spokesman of the dramatist himself. Antonio has great love for Duchess. In the very first scene of the play, he praises the Duchess in the following glowing words;
"Whilst she speaks,
She throws upon a man so sweet a look,
That it were able to raise one to a galliard
That lay in dead palsy, and to dote......."
      Duke Ferdinand is the brother of the Cardinal and the twin brother of the Duchess. He doesn't want his widowed sister remarry, in part because of his pride and his greed for her wealth, but also because he harbors his own incestuous desire for her. It is Ferdinand who places Bosola in the Duchess's employment and then hires Bosola to spy on her activities. When rumors reach Ferdinand of the Duchess possibly giving birth to children, his anger is so overwhelming that his violent outbursts about the horrible ways he plans to revenge himself on her are too much even for the Cardinal. When he finds out that she has secretly married Antonio and had three children, Ferdinand acts decisively : he has her imprisoned, tortured, and killed. He seems to enjoy the torture, and act as if the torture he makes her endure is just payback for torture that she has made him endure, though the clear implication is that the "torture" he experienced was his sexual jealousy of the Duchess. Upon seeing the Duchess's dead body, however, Ferdinand almost immediately feels remorse, and his guilt eventually drives him insane. In his madness he stabs the Cardinal and is killed by Bosola.
         Ferdinand is a man of turbulent, violent, passionate nature, who cannot his feelings and outbursts of passion are frequent with him. Bosola's letter announcing the birth of the Duchess child at once reveals his turbulent nature. It seems 'to have put him out of his wits'. In wild frenzy he rushes off to his brother's palace to tell him the news he has received. So frenzied is he that his brother, despite his own anger and resentment, loses all patience and condemns his mad violence with cold scron. Says Frederick Allen;
"In the furious colloquy between them, a tendency to a beastlike
madness is plainly to be seen in the duke's turbulent spirit;
and henceforth the dramatist is careful to trace the
insidious advance of his mental disease"
       The Cardinal is the brother of Duke Ferdinand and the Duchess. Though he is a religious figure, he is in fact just as immoral and descipable as his brother, facts made clear by his attempt to bribe his way into being pope, the fact that Bosola once killed a man on his orders, and the affair he carries on with Julia, castruccio's wife. Like Ferdinand, he tries to prevent the Duchess from remarrying in order to preserve his sense of his family's purity and honour as well his access to the Duchess's wealth. Unlike the wild Ferdinand, though, the Cardinal is careful, calculating, and controlled: he refuses to interact personally with the spy Bosola, and he threatens to walk away when Ferdinand becomes too overt about his plans for revenge on the Duchess. While it's never explained whether the Cardinal is upset by Ferdinand's violence or just trying to shut Ferdinand up in order to keep themselves looking clean while they plan their revenge, the fact that the Cardinal is entirely capable of murder he later poisons Julia, after all, when she learns his secrets suggests that it is the later.
He has perfect control over himself. He is quite type of man who does not fly into a rage or act passion like his brother Ferdinand. He can curb his feelings and keep them locked in his heart. He rebukes Ferdinand when he shouts and fulmiantes;
"This intemperate noise
Fitly resembles deaf men's shrill discourse
Who talk aloud, thinking all other men
To have their imperfection"
         Bosola is the most complex person in the play, and in many respects the most interesting. He is an intelligent, sensitive  and "melancholic" man who is said to have a measure of native goodness. His past is highly suspect in all contrast to the fundamentally honest Antonio, who tries to put all that he knows to the best use, Bosola has been an insincere student, using learning only to attain fame, and he is believed to have committed a murder at the Cardinal's instigation. At his first entrance, however, the most striking thing about him is not his reputedly violent character but his brooding over the disparity between merit and reward. The Cardinal has not paid him for his work. Bosola says, significantly;
"Miserable age, where only the reward
Of doing well, is the doing of it"
     Bosola becomes an "intelligencer" but his incipient sense of good makes him at first an unwilling spy, and it may be that the same vague ethical awareness lies behind his remarkable slowness to discover the identity of the father of the Duchess, children. His incompetence at his job is further emphasised by the Cardinal's impatient and very full answer to Bosola's inept question about tracing Antonio's whereabout: "But by what means shall I find him out?" As the horrors accumulate, Bosola gradually assumes some of the qualities of an agent of good. Although he is in-charge of the Duchess's execution, he has developed a certain amount of uneasy compassion for her and her children. Immediately after her death he becomes an avenger, though a rather unsatisfactory one. The ambiguity of his personality remains, and is reflected in the irony of his accidentally killing Antonio.
     Delio is Antonio's friend and is of the same social class. Totally loyal, he is privy to Antonio and the Duchess secret marriage, and he looks after Antonio's sole surviving son at the end of the play. In a break from the Shakespeare tradition of giving a play's closing lines to the highest ranking character, Webster gives Delio the play's final lines. Delio is also a former suitor of Julia. Castuccio is a courtier under Ferdinand, and Julia's older husband. He respresent the cuckolded fool. He is genial and easy going, attempting to stay on good terms with all.
    Julia is castuccio's wife and the Cardinal's mistress. Julia is the play's stereotypical fickle female, with constantly changing affections. Near the end of the play, she becomes enamoured with Bosola, who then uses her to get the Cardinal finds out that Julia betrayed him, he kills her by making her kiss a poison covered book, but not before Julia reveals that she betrayed him to Bosola.
    Cariola is the Duchess's maid and confidant. She is the witness to the Duchess's marriage to Antonio, and thus the first to know about it. She keeps the secret faithfully, and in the end is killed by Bosola for doing so.
      Malasteste is known for presenting himself as a soldier but avoiding any battles, and thus is scorned as a coward. Ferdinand recommends him to the Duchess as a suitable husband, but she scorns the idea.
      The Marquis of Pescara is a soldier, and the only courtier save Antonio and Delio who acts with any real honour. When Bosola attacks the Cardinal. He is the only lord to answer the cries for help, even at risk of being mocked for it.
     There is also a variety of minor roles including couriers, doctor, servants, officers, a mistress, the children, executioners, etc. They further the plot or perform small tasks that cannot be accomplished by the principles.
     To conclude The Duchess of Malfi tells the story of the Duchess who is never named and her attempts to live in peace with her loving husband and children, attempts that ultimately fail due to the machinations and greed of her hostile brothers. Webster has used his characters very appropriately in this play, Duchess who is title character of the play is shown as innocent women falling prey to his brother's greed. She is described as a "sweetest innocent". Cardinal and Ferdinand are dark characters of the play they symbolizes villainy, greed and injustice and these traits eventually led to their own downfall. Antonio is an innocent Steward and a loving husband. Bosola is the most complex character of the play. He stared as Ferdinand's apprentice but the sight of dead Duchess changes his heart and he becomes hero and takes revenge for the Duchess. All in all Webster's characters in this play are very great and they make this play one of the best tragedy in English language.