The Duchess of Malfi Resources

This is a site with links to all of Webster's work (even the bad stuff), a nice big page for criticism, and a biography detailing what very little we know about Webster.

Check out this easily navigable online version of the play, complete with line numbers and footnotes. You never know how hard it can be to find an online edition with line numbers until you start looking, so appreciate what your Shmoop-Yoda has done for you.

This BBC-produced, traditionally staged version of the play should do the trick for your viewing needs.

This (rather lukewarm) review of the 2012 Old Vic stage production contains some great tidbits.

The same production was given a more favorable review by the NYT, where it is fittingly introduced as "the most compelling of the carnage-heavy productions I saw."

Here's a set of notes that Jim Warren, the director of the 2012 American Shakespeare Center staging of the play, sent to his cast members. One of our personal favorite is "We're doing Duchess because it is a masterpiece." Tell it like it is, Jim.

This links you to the first part of the 1972 BBC version of the play—featuring a suitably hunky Antonio, as well as fabulous and fabulously impractical costumes—graciously uploaded (and may it remain so) to YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

This is actually a trailer clip for the full DVD, but it shows you the crazy three-way murder of the Cardinal, Ferdinand, and Bosola in Act 5.

A lady named Eilen Connolly took it upon herself to adapt a very…different and experimental theater version of The Duchess of Malfi, complete with modern dance segments and additional text. It's definitely wacky, but it all goes to show that people are still playing around with this text in interesting (if sometimes kind of weird) ways.

For those long road trips when you get a hankerin' for some Webster, there's always Librivox. Check out this full-length recording featuring a different voice actor for each character, so you always know who's who.

Here's an excellent lecture done on podcast by Emma Smith, a professor at Hertford College, Oxford. In addition to great feminist approach to the play, it also addresses the literary history of the original Duchess of Malfi story.

Original title page of the published edition, complete with old time-y Renaissance spelling.

… as the Duchess.

Who wore it better? The part, we mean.

This is the title page for William Painter's The Second Tome of the Palace of Pleasure, which contained a (heavily moralized) version of the Duchess of Malfi story, and served as the principle source material for Webster's play.