Paperback. White and green cover with black title.

We provide an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available

• This used book has a £3 discount when collected from our shop 

For conditions, please view the photographs. The Duchess was Giovanna d’Aragona, Duchess of Amalfi, whose father, Enrico d’Aragona, Marquis of Gerace, was an illegitimate son of Ferdinand I of Naples. As in the play, she secretly married Antonio Beccadelli di Bologna after the death of her first husband Alfonso I Piccolomini, Duke of Amalfi. The play begins as a love story, with a Duchess who marries beneath her class, and ends as a nightmarish tragedy as her two brothers exact their revenge, destroying themselves in the process. Jacobean drama continued the trend of stage violence and horror set by Elizabethan tragedy, under the influence of Seneca. The complexity of some of its characters, particularly Bosola and the Duchess, plus Webster’s poetic language, ensure the play is often considered among the greatest tragedies of English renaissance drama.

Review: The Duchess of Malfi is John Webster’s masterpiece, and justly renowned as the Jacobean drama par excellence. A young widow, rich and beautiful, secretly marries her steward, against the wishes of her brothers, a cardinal and a judge, who have insinuated Bosola, a convicted murderer, into her household as “intelligencer.” One brother, Ferdinand, is insanely jealous of his sister.

John Webster (c. 1578 – c. 1632) was an English Jacobean dramatist best known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, which are often seen as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage. His life and career overlapped with Shakespeare’s.