“The Duchess of Malfi” is a pure tragedy. /“The Duchess of
Malfi’ is melodrama raised to the level of tragedy.
The Duchess of Malfi has been
highly praised by one critic after another and Edmund Gosse goes to the extent of
saying that it is, the “finest tragedy in the English language outside the
works of Shakespeare”. We may not agree with such exaggerated claims, for the
play has certain well- marked faults and weaknesses and it has not the
passionate intensity of Macbeth, Othello or King Lear, but there can be no denying
the fact that it is a great tragedy, “one in which melodrama has been raised to
the level of great tragedy”.
In the Jacobean age tragedy had
degenerated into melodrama. A melodrama lacks in subtlety and depth of
characterization, and the dramatist depends for his effects on the exploitation
of crude physical horrors. There is much in The Duchess of Malfi that is merely
melodramatic and sensational, lurid and gruesome. All kinds of fearful things-
waxen- images counterfeiting death, the wild masque of madmen, the tomb-maker,
the bell-men, the strangling of the Duchess, of the children and of Cariola -
things that make the flesh creep and the blood run cold, are presented before
the audience to make horror tenfold more horrible. There are conventional
murders in the dark to effect their evil purpose, and by the end the stage is
littered with dead bodies. There are deaths by poisoning, by strangulation and
by the dagger of the assassin. All these are crude devices freely exploited by the
contemporary writers of blood and thunder tragedies.
