Duchess of Malfi

This play is about revenge. This play is gross. And, this play is about women. What’s going on?

Let’s play the Dowry Game!

Dowry Game!

n  Who thinks that women’s legal rights improved between the Medieval Period and the Renaissance?

Fact #1

n  In fact, the answer is NO. The legal rights of women declined during the

Reformation in England. One reason for this decline was the dissolution of the monasteries and convents.

Dowry Game!

n  Who thinks it was bad news to be a widow during the Renaissance?

Fact #2

n  It might not be so bad . . . “Married women became involved in their husbands’

business enterprises by assisting in the shop and keeping accounts, and even though women could not legally own property by themselves, widows of shopkeepers and craftsmen sometimes assumed ownership after their husband’s death. A well-provided widow probably enjoyed the greatest freedom of any early modern woman.” (McDonald 253)

Dowry Game!

n  True or False: Like Juliet, upper-class Renaissance women often found ways to marry for love.

Fact #3

n  False. “Daughters [. . .] could serve as a serious drain on a

family’s estate. The father would need to provide a dowry for each in order to get them married and out of his house, and women lacked the alternatives to marriage that young men had […] an heiress could improve a family’s fortune by attracting the son of a prominent landed family. This system of financial reciprocity meant that the upper classes tended to marry at a younger age than the middle and lower classes because the size of the estates was a primary consideration.” (McDonald 263)

Women’s Property

Who gets to control it?

Women’s Property: Now you see it, now you don’t. Do you? Duchess: Will you hear me? / I’ll never marry. Cardinal: So most widows say; / But commonly that

motion lasts no longer / Than the turning of an hourglass; the funeral sermon / And it end both together.

Ferdinand: Now hear me: / You live in rank pasture, here, i’ th’ court; / There is a kind of honey-dew that’s deadly; / ‘Twill poison your fame look to ‘t; be not cunning; / For they whose faces do belie their hearts / Are witches ere they arrive at twenty years, / Aye, and give the devil suck. (1.3.10-19)

Women’s Property: The Duchess smells a rat. Duchess: I think this speech between

you both was studied, / It came so roundly off. (1.3.36-7)

Women’s Property: Underneath it all…

Ferdinand: [. . .] Only I must confess I had a hope, / Had she continued widow, to have gained / An infinite mass of treasure by her death: / And that was the main cause, her marriage, / That drew a stream of gall quite through my heart. (4.2.263-7)

Women as Property

Traffic in women?

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles”

“Gayle Rubin has argued in an influential essay

that patriarchal heterosexuality can best be discussed in terms of one or another form of the traffic in women: it is the use of women as exchangeable, perhaps symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the bonds of men.”

Are you a diamond or a whore?

Duchess: Diamonds are of most value, / They

say, that have passed through most jewelers’ hands.

Ferdinand: Whores by that rule are precious.

(1.3.7-9)

Give me jewelry or give me death.

Bosola: Yet, methinks, / The manner of your death should much afflict you: / This cord should terrify you.

Duchess: What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut / With diamonds? Or to be smothered / With cassia? Or to be shot to death with pearls? (4.2.194-9)

Can you blame a rock?

Bosola: I have it, I will work upon this creature.— / Let us grow amorously familiar. / If the great Cardinal should see me thus, / Would he count me a villain?

Julia: No, he might count me a wanton, / Not lay a scruple of offence on you; / For if I see and steal a diamond / The fault is not I’ th’ stone, but in me the thief / That purloins it.

(5.2.173-181)

Diamonds to diamonds, dust to dust.

Ferdinand: My sister, O my sister! There’s the cause on’t. / Whether we fall by ambition, blood or lust, / Like diamonds we are cut by our own dust. (5.5.69-71)

Women make Property

Reproductive Rights?

Mama’s baby, Papa’s maybe.

n  Primogeniture (first born) refers to the right of the eldest son to inherit the family property […]

n  primogeniture was calculated to protect the property of large families, to keep estates from being dismantled or divided into a number of small and therefore weaker units […]

n  inheritance was becoming a widespread social concern. Indeed, on a national scale, the question of succession was of paramount concern at the turn of the seventeenth century, since Queen Elizabeth had no firstborn to inherit her throne. (McDonald 261-2)

Policing the body.

Bosola: I have other work on foot. I observe our duchess / Is sick a-days: she pukes, her stomach seethes, / The fins of her eyelids look most teeming blue, / She wanes I’ th’ cheek, and waxes fat i’ th’ flank, / And contrary to our Italian fashion, / Wears a loose bodied gown: there’s somewhat in’t. / I have a trick that may perchance discover it, / A pretty one; I have brought you some apricocks, / The first our spring yields. (2.1.58-66)

That dress is not revealing, but apricocks are.

Duchess: Sir, you are loath / To rob us of our dainties: ’tis a delicate fruit; / They say it is restorative.

Bosola: ‘Tis a pretty art, this grafting. Duchess: ‘Tis so, a bettering of nature. Bosola: To make a pippin grow upon a crab, / A

damson on a blackthorn. [aside] How greedily she eats them! / A whirlwind strike off these bawd farthingales! / For, but for that and the loose bodied gown, / I should have discovered apparently / The young springal cutting a caper in her belly. (2.1.132-42)

Is it just gas?

Duchess: I thank you, Bosola. They were right good ones, / If they do not make me sick.

Antonio: How now, madame? Duchess: This green fruit and my stomach are not

friends; / How they swell me! Bosola: [aside] Nay, you are too much swelled

already. Duchess: Oh, I am in an extreme cold sweat! Bosola: I am very sorry. Duchess: Lights to my chamber! O good Antonio, / I

fear I am undone! (2.1.143-48)

APT (Apricock Pregnancy Test)

Bosola: So, so, there’s no question but her

tetchiness and most vulturous eating of the apricocks are apparent signs of breeding.

(2.2.1-2)

In his mother’s right.

Delio: Let us make noble use / Of this great

ruin, and join all our force / To establish this young hopeful gentleman / In ’s mother’s right.

(5.5.108-11)

Duchess of Malfi

Simone & Jessica