Webster's "Worthyest Monument": The Problem of Posterity in The Duchess of Malfi

“Superfluous Men” : the graveyard politics of The Duchess of Malfi

“…17 Insofar, then, as the scene remembered Middleton's staging, it was surely just to emphasise Webster's refusal to indulge in such fantasy : what matters here, as Brian Chalk has recently suggested, is the scene's very lack of monumental display. 34 In its place there is only the desolate ruin conjured into the audience's minds by Antonio's rumination on the "reverend history" (V.iii.11) represented by the remains of an "ancient abbey" (V.iii. It is worth asking, however, why, in a work generally careful to avoid topographic detail, this decaying cloister should be so vividly imagined.…”

“…A character almost entirely of Webster's invention, he becomes the vehicle for social resentments that often seem to voice those of his creator -an Inns of Court man who, apparently finding no proper career in the law, became the jobbing writer famously sneered at by a more privileged contemporary as "Crabbed Websterio, / The Play-wright, Cart-wright" 58. Bosola's too is an anger that results from frustrated social ambition : a university graduate whose determination to seek the favour of the great has made a murderer of him, and won him nothing better than a seven-year sentence to the galleys (I.i [30][31][32][33][34][35]…”