"The language is striking, and there’s plenty of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll (or was that sex, poison, and murder?), but I didn’t love The Duchess of Malfi. I thought the play compared rather unfavorably to Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, which I read last week. The men and women in The Maid’s Tragedy—as ridiculous as their circumstances were—felt like real people trapped in a terrible nightmare. The Duchess of Malfi is certainly a nightmare, and its characters don’t feel unreal, necessarily—but I had trouble tracking their motivations until the last two acts, and all but the assassin were basically one-note (though I’m sure good actors could bring them to life). The political stakes were hard to follow, but there was no real sense of intimacy, either—so it didn’t really work as a drama about Dukes and Duchesses, or about brothers and sisters.

Like Ben Jonson’s comedies, this is a play about nasty people being nasty and good people being good, but mostly nasty people being nasty. It’s easy to see how the horror in the play might be effective on stage, but on the page, the play mostly lacks the sheer delight Jonson takes in his nasties, Marlowe in his murders, or Shakespeare in every word and thing.

[Edit: this play may have caught me on a bad week for Elizabethan theater. I had other things on my mind and I drew out reading it in a way that doesn’t generally help these plays, which tend to fare better if you play them out in your mind over a few hours of complete focus (perhaps with an intermission or two as necessary), as if you were indeed at the theater. Perhaps I would have seen and comprehended more, and gotten more out of it, if I’d read it last week or next, or all in one go...]"

Dave wants to read Mr. Trouble

Dave wants to read The Long-Ago Dead