Character Clues
Character Analysis
Clothes: Class and Occupation
When you're a duchess, you've gotta look the part, right? But the truth is, no matter what your social station, in this play, your clothes had better fit your position. Ferdinand's costume, for instance, would make it clear that he's a noble, as opposed to Cariola's costume, which just screams lady's maid.
But we can't stop there. Clothes do a little more heavy lifting than that.
When we first meet Antonio, Delio remarks that Antonio is "a very formal Frenchman in [his] habit" (1.1.3). Antonio's just back from France, and is still wearing their clothes. Right from the get-go, then, Antonio is visually set apart from everybody else at the Malfi court, and, moreover, he's being associated with the French court, which is made out to be an example of the way an ideal, honestly-run court should operate. His outfit tells us Antonio's the good guy.
The Duchess has a few clothing-moments, but probably the one that sticks out the most is when Bosola starts suspecting she's pregnant because "contrary to our Italian fashion / [she] Wears a loose-bodied gown" (2.1.68-69). The Duchess's roomier dress is doing double-duty here: it both makes her look un-Italian (which, as is the case with Antonio above, has political significance), and it indicates that her body, which is a big talking-point in the play, is changing.
Costume Changes
The changing in and out of clothes is also meaningful. Take, for instance, the Cardinal. For most of the play he's walking around in his religious get-up, but then you have that moment in Act 3 Scene 4 when you watch him change into his soldier duds. He shifts from being just a cunning "melancholy churchman" (1.1.153) into a more Serious Business, martial figure.
Sex and Love
The main plot is driven by Ferdinand and the Cardinal's attempts to control their sister's sexuality, so how you feel about the play as a whole is partly determined by how you feel about the characters' own sexual relationships and attitudes toward sex.
First, of course, you have the Duchess: she's young, sexually experienced, and very in touch with her own desire for sexytimes. She's pretty open about the fact that she's not marrying Antonio just because she's looking for a guy to play house with: she wants a sexual partner, yo.
One of the interesting things about this play is how the Duchess is, on one hand, characterized by her brothers as having committed this huge sexual crime by marrying Antonio and having kids with him, while on the other hand Webster himself paints her as having basically the healthiest attitude toward sex in the play. Whatever happens as a result of their relationship, there's abundant evidence that the Duchess and Antonio have a very happy, fulfilling marriage, and Webster emphasizes that sex is a part of that. Que scandal!
But get this: the Cardinal and Ferdinand, in contrast, are both written as types of sexual deviants. The Cardinal is having an affair with Castruchio's wife, Julia, and when he gets tired of her and she starts asking a few too many questions, he simply whacks her. Ferdinand's a different story. We don't see him having any sexual relationships of his own; instead we see him being totally obsessed with his sister's sex life, leading an army of critics to conclude that he's digging her in a decidedly non-brotherly way. That ish just ain't normal.
Occupation
In Duchess, your social rank and your job are intertwined. You can tell that Antonio's a non-aristocrat because he's working as the Duchess's steward, while the Duchess's very name indicates both her social position and her occupation: she's the (former) wife of the Duke of Malfi (so, a noblewoman) and the ruler of Malfi.
That's the basic working principle, at least. Of course Webster actually spends most of the play undermining the connection between occupation and social position. Think about it: by marrying the Duchess, Antonio is marrying into nobility, but he keeps his job as her steward—in short, he's living as a secret aristocrat while working as a commoner.
Then there's Bosola, who doesn't really fit anywhere. When we first meet him he's a bitter ex-con who's wandering around the Malfi court dishing out scathing criticism against the social hierarchy. He's a Malcontent; there's no place for him in the social sphere he's complaining about. Bosola agrees to work for Ferdinand in large part because he thinks that occupation will correlate with social position in the traditional way, because he believes Ferdinand when he says "ere long thou mayst arrive / At a higher place by't" (1.1.255-56), were "it" means "massive amounts of dirty work."
In the end, though, Bosola gets the fuzzy end of the social advancement lollipop, both because Ferdinand ultimately doesn't want to play by the rules and refuses to pay him off, and because of the particular job Bosola agreed to do: where exactly in the social food chain does "intelligencer" fit? Even though Bosola has an occupation per se, it turns out there's no more room in the court for intelligencers than there is for Malcontents.