A revenge tragedy, made popular in Elizabethan and Jacobean Britain, typically tells the story of a protagonist seeking revenge against the murderous actions of an antagonist. Shakespeare's Hamlet is probably seen as the most typical revenge tragedy of those times and the play that popularized many of the genre's conventions, including soliloquies, madness, action-packed scenes, bloody murders, important noble figures, suicide, and the use of disguise.
The Duchess of Malfi is also seen as a revenge tragedy, just not a typical one.
It is a revenge tragedy because, firstly, it features a character, Bosola, who seeks revenge for the murders of the play's most noble characters. Secondly, it features some of the genre's most typical characteristics: soliloquies, sensational murders, madness, and Machiavellian characters.
Soliloquies
Bosola is the only character in the play who gives the audience insight into his true state of mind by speaking his thoughts aloud. For example, at the end of act 4, he shows guilt for arranging to kill the Duchess of Malfi by telling the audience,
All our good deeds and bad, a perspectiveThat shows us hell! That we cannot be suffer'dTo do good when we have a mind to it!This is manly sorrow
Sensational murders
Perhaps the most sensational murder of many is when Bosola orders the executioner to kill the Duchess and her children at the end of act 4. Just before the executioner strangles her, the Duchess says,
What would it pleasure me to have my throat cutWith diamonds? or to be smotheredWith cassia or to be shot to death with pearls?I know death hath ten thousand several doorsFor men to take their exits. . . .
Dispose my breath how please you.
With the Duchess dead, Bosola tells his men,
some other strangle the children.
Madness
Like Hamlet loses his mind after the death of his father, the Duchess's brother Ferdinand loses his mind in act 5, scene 2 after the death of his sister. At one point he attempts to throttle his own shadow.
Eagles commonly fly alone: they are crows, dawsand starlings that flock together. Look, what's that follows me?I will throttle it.
Machiavellian characters
The Cardinal is probably the play's Machiavellian character and, though professing to be a man of God, kills his lover by tricking her into kissing the cover of a poisoned bible:
Now you shall never utter it; thy curiosityHath undone thee; thou 'rt poison'd with that bookBecause I knew thou couldst not keep my counselI have bound thee to 't by death
Where The Duchess of Malfi is different from most revenge tragedies is that the protagonist revenging the deaths of the principle characters, Bosola, is the one that either killed them or played a hand in their deaths. Not only that, but he doesn't decide to take revenge until the end of act 5, scene 4, when he says,
I have this cardinal in the forge already;Now I'll bring him to th' hammer O direful misprison.
Up to that point, the play could just as easily have been a tragedy in the vein of Romeo and Juliet.
It is indeed appropriate to describe The Duchess of Malfi as a revenge tragedy, albeit one that departs in some respects from the traditional definition. Nonetheless, most of the key elements are present. Let's now look at some of them in greater detail:
Horrors. There are numerous horrors in the play. One thinks of the scene where the Duchess kisses a dead man's severed hand, believing it to belong to the Duke. The grotesque spectacle of the wax figures of the dead bodies of Antonio and the children being presented to the Duchess is yet another particularly creepy example.
Madness. The Duke deliberately attempts to drive the Duchess mad, yet he is the one who ends up going insane. The theme of madness also feeds into the different angle on revenge presented by Webster, which departs from the traditional conventions of revenge tragedy. In The Duchess of Malfi it's the villains, not the heroes, who seek revenge. The Duchess's wicked brothers are effectively driven mad by their desire to get even; in that sense, they are the victims of their own revenge.
Characters of noble birth. According to the prevailing dramatic conventions, only the suffering of characters of noble birth were a fit source for revenge tragedy (or any kind of tragedy, for that matter). The nobility had more to lose and further to fall. Indeed, being brought low was in itself thought to be tragic for someone of noble birth such as the Duchess. Tragedy implies some kind of fall, and that's precisely what happens, not just to the Duchess, but also to her evil brothers, who are morally corrupted by their insane, all-consuming desire for revenge.
First, we should think about the definition of a "revenge tragedy." The term was first used by the American Shakespeare scholar Ashley H. Thorndike (1871–1933) in a 1902 article "The Relations of Hamlet to Contemporary Revenge Plays." It has since become a common term in literary criticism used to elucidate the common characteristics of many Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas. The characteristics include
a plot involving some form of revenge, usually for a past injustice
a convoluted and action-packed plot structure
madness
disguise or other forms of pretense
violent murders
many characters dying in the fifth act
extremely evil villains
cannibalism
highly wrought figurative language
exotic setting (Italy, Spain, etc.)
The play is set in Italy. Ferdinand, the duke of Calabria, is a typical revenge tragedy villain. The plot is extremely convoluted and includes the ruse to send Antonio away and keep the children safe. Many of the characters are murdered near the end of the play.
Although The Duchess of Malfi does not have the classic plot arc of a single avenger seeking and obtaining justice for a past injustice, it has many of the other characteristics of revenge drama and, as a result, most critics consider it a revenge tragedy.
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