Lucy’s Presentation on The Duchess of Malfi:

Lucy began with Ferdinand’s wrestling match in Act V, scene 2 and compared it to Disney’s Peter Pan and his rebellious shadow, as he attempts to reattach it to avoid identity splitting, as well as Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, who stabs his painting. The play prefigures modern portrayals of disassociative identity. Ferdinand disassociates the self from his physical body in viewing himself as a man transformed into a wolf. A frightened double self is evident in the invisible creature that the audience witnesses the absence of, pointing to the theme of portrayal of the body in strange scientific and mathematical terms and a peculiarly doubled entity watching and disassociated from itself. The body, real or imagined, thus becomes a piece of art fashioned in human form. This occurs similarly with the Cardinal in the last act as well as with the Duchess, who is subject to multiple artistic renderings. Additionally, Ferdinand imagines his sister as another piece of himself, or a projection of himself, and cannot disassociate himself from her persona. This reflects catholic understandings of the self as bound up with materialist tradition idealized in the relic. Yet the Duchess defies ceremony and the relic, and perhaps she represents feminine identity as idolatrous in nature.

Questions: Considering that we as the audience are made doubles, voyeuristically watching, what’s the (meta)significance of the wax figures? Does the play incite us to affect or perhaps political action? Why is the artistic space contrasted with image of dog kennel? Why do the women need to be strangled by two executioners? What would this look like in performance?

Connection to Hotel: the close ups on characters faces highlight the importance of facial features and transformation in the play.

Michael—Why do we see Cariola die at all? What’s being bought there dramatically?

Emily—There’s something erotic and double about Cariola, queer and not rejection of heterosexual, made obvious by bringing her back on in the execution. She’s witness to all, and it’d be strange if there wasn’t a moment of seeing, of eye contact with her and the Duchess. Additionally, the play involves language that points to doubling—Ferdinand asserts he and the Duchess are twins, increasing the link between doubleness and eroticism.

Tracey—There’s tension throughout the play in terms of actual embodiment of characters. In the difference between theater and the dog kennel, Webster privileges the dynamic nature of theater over static forms of art like relics. The body is consumed and consuming. The play navigates difference between constituting someone as a signifier and the actual physical form of person.

Ellen—Stability of Ferdinand’s diagnosis, recognize the doctor as quack, no reason to trust. Ferdinand conforms to the diagnosis out of convenience, to put a name to his symptoms that perhaps cannot be explained. This is problematic because it cannot be explained--eruption of absurdity, turns into wolf a manifestation of absurdity, points to the meaninglessness of Act V.

John—The absurd/obscene in hotel points to the play’s absurdity: the body doubles, theatrical action doubles, two seduction scenes, multiple going behind curtains, is perhaps all designed to get us to affectively respond. The play feels authentic and committed, but, at same time, all this nonsense is hard to place.

Ellen—An unspooling that doesn’t work with logic points to structural, willful messiness in the play. Representationality in art versus in one’s authentic biological nature – play between representation as more potent than the biological body, more wounding than what can happen in real life. The play doesn’t want to side with either the dialectics we can set up.

Ellen— the damned and the blessed

Tracey—What’s the play saying about animality?

Natalie— Page 172, abortive hedgehog face? What’s this image doing in this play?

Ellen—patent absurdity to figure, grotesque, misogynistic. The play pushes at our desire to feel stable through an affective path of identification—deliberately complicates.

Emily—The Duchess imposes order. After her death, the order of narrative breaks down. Move from brief instances of language to Ferdinand actually thinking he’s a wolf.

Steven—How do we take the absurdity? Echo scene, should we choose whether it’s funny or serious? No. What’s more painful than absurdity is the sense that nothing means anything. A mixture of silliness, comedy, and pain seems tied into repetition.

Marx-History appears first as tragedy then as farce; having repeated it, you can’t get same meaning

Ellen—Do we read the echo scene as either profoundly tragic or as comic?

Ellen—The supernatural is an un-denoted phenomenon that runs throughout the play, as theatrical phenomenon requiring decision as to what is and is not there. The play ventriloquizes King Lear, like lines around notion of “look there, look there” to wider audience. In Lear and this play, you have to reclaim a sense of undecidedness that occurs in that moment, creating a sense.

Ellen—The play was criticized for Act V, and some productions cut it out because the tragic figure dies before end (not within theater conventions). The play messes with traumatic structure by not letting the audience anticipate or prejudge where it’s going. The last act is brilliant dramaturgy that keeps the audience doing the imaginative work that keeps theater alive. The play works in reverse of the tragic drama to alienate the audience in terms of dramatic expectation.