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A Note on The Madmen's Scene in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

S. Ichiyé Hayawaka
S. Ichiyé Hayawaka*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin
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Extract

Professor Louis B. Wright, in a very interesting paper on “Madmen as Vaudeville Performers on the Elizabethan Stage,” cites as one of his examples the madmen's scene of The Duchess of Malfi with the following comment:

The modern reader is prone to regard the introduction of the madmen in Act 4, Sc. 2, purely as a means of intensifying the horrors of the scene, but to an Elizabethan, the antics of the madmen furnished comic entertainment. It is certain that the madmen were not regarded as a horror by the contemporary audience; the author himself, at some pains to account for the madmen, makes Ferdinand explain that they are there to keep the Duchess awake.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , September 1932 , pp. 907 - 909
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1932

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References

1 JEGP, xxx (January, 1931), pp. 48–54.

2 The Works of John Webster, ed. F. L. Lucas (London, 1927), i, 34.

3 John Corbin, The Elizabethan Hamlet (London, 1895), p. 63.