Most helpful customer reviews
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2.0 out of 5 stars
New Mermaids Edition has Inadequate Notes, Mar 24 2003
By A Customer
In using this edition to teach a college course, I found that the editorial notes were vastly inadequate, and I ended up having to make a supplementary glossary for students. For that reason, I don't recommend the New Mermaids edition.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A violent psychosexual play, Oct 12 2002
John Webster's play "The Duchess of Malfi" is a violent play that presents a dark, disturbing portrait of the human condition. According to the introductory note in the Dover edition, the play was first presented in 1613 or 1614.The title character is a widow with two brothers: Ferdinand and the Cardinal. In the play's opening act, the brothers try to persuade their sister not to seek a new husband. Her resistance to their wishes sets in motion a chain of secrecy, plotting, and violence. The relationship between Ferdinand and the Duchess is probably one of the most unsettling brother-sister relationships in literature. The play is full of both onstage killings and great lines. The title character is one of stage history's intriguing female characters; she is a woman whose desires lead her to defy familial pressure. Another fascinating and complex character is Bosola, who early in the play is enlisted to act as a spy. Overall, a compelling and well-written tragedy.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A superb play, May 25 2001
Of the "popular" editions of this play that by John Russell Brown (Revels Student Editions) and Elizabeth Brennan (New Mermaids) are both useful, though it must be said that no edition as yet does adequate justice to Webster's compexity - notably his presentation of Ferdinand. The play is both a tour de force and profoundly searching. It is perhaps the first major feminist play in England, with the Duchess presented as an outstandingly noble even if fallible character, the victim of her two evil "partriarchal" brothers. Of these, her twin brother Ferdinand is among the most intelligently conceived characters to appear on the Jacobean stage. Unknowingly (i.e. in his "unconscious") he is incestuously in love with his sister. Unable to cope with this "taboo" feeling, he tries to "repress" it unsuccessfully, and finally his ... "libido" comes to express itself in a violent wish to destroy her if he cannot ... own her, and he ends up believing himself to be a wolf, attempting to dig up her grave after he has had her killed. Obviously, then, this is a very Freudian work - anticipating Freud's insights brilliantly by some four centuries, and without lapsing into Freud's extravagantly improbable claims about such matters as the Oedipus complex. It is the working of the unconcious, as a reservoir of what we do not understand and cannot control, which is quite central in this play, and Ferdinand's ... confusion is potently contrasted with his sister's openminded, acknowledged and generous ... health. An outstanding play, recommended as among the best of its time (comparable in quality and interest to e.g. *Othello* or *The Changeling*). - Joost Daalder, Professor of English, Flinders University, South Australia
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