One of the challenges in reading John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi is deciding what the play’s message is. The play’s title page and the commendatory verses that follow on make it clear that it is a tragedy. So it is perhaps logical to view the text’s heroine as a tragic character. This assumption might then lead the reader to the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle’s Poetics, and the dramatic function of tragedy as outlined in that text.
By the Early Modern era, Poetics had been translated into Latin. Therefore, dramatists such as Shakespeare and Webster could have had some familiarity with the ideas on tragedy presented in Aristotle’s theory, and in particular the idea of the fatal flaw in the tragic hero or heroine. Is the Duchess flawed, as depicted in her actions and the consequences thereof? The play’s meaning might thus be unlocked through applying Aristotle’s ideas on literature to the text. However, on investigation, this approach proves problematic as Aristotle’s views on tragedy and its function are not easily applied to The Duchess of Malfi.
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