However, he also repeatedly shows disgust for the act of disguising. Further, in the fourth act, he literally disguises himself as an old man. He is a spy, and is thus constantly disguising his motives and his true feelings. The distinction between what he says and how he acts is so vast that even the audience, who is given access to his private thoughts through soliloquies and asides, has trouble understanding his motivations. The most obvious symbol of this is Bosola. Disguiseĭisguise-masking reality, hiding one’s true intentions, presenting a false front-is a major theme in The Duchess of Malfi. Ferdinand goes mad, the Cardinal loses all hope, and both die, leaving no legacy behind them. The hell that they create in the end destroys them, too-as Ferdinand says, “Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust” (5.5.72). This hell on Earth serves to emphasize just how virtuous the Duchess is, and how much better for the world her kind of domestic love and child-rearing is than the greed and selfishness of her brothers.
Antonio says “the devil speaks in” (1.1.177) the Cardinal’s lips, and Bosola describes Ferdinand's manipulation as: “Thus the devil/Candies all sins o’er” (1.1.266-7). Additionally, he is associated with salamanders-at the time of the play, thought to live in fire-multiple times.īoth brothers are also even more directly connected to hell through constant associations with the devil. He says only the Duchess’s “whore’s blood” can put out his “wild-fire” (2.5.46-7), he imagines killing her children by having them “burning in a coal-pit” (2.5.69), lighting “them like a match” after dipping them in “sulphur” (2.5.71-2). Ferdinand is constantly associated with fire, by others and in his own language.
The Cardinal and Ferdinand are particularly responsible for bringing this fire to her world. And when Bosola tells her she must keep living, she makes it clear that hell is truly on Earth-“That’s the greatest torture souls feel in hell,/In hell: that they must live, and cannot die” (4.1.70-1),
The Duchess, a symbol of motherhood and light, is unfazed by these horrors because she believes her family already dead, but she does explain that “the earth” seems made “of flaming sulphur” (4.2.26). The idea that the brothers have unleashed hell on Earth is most apparent in the fourth act, which includes utter horrors like fake corpses, a severed hand, a plethora of madmen, and most centrally, the vicious murders of the Duchess and her children. On the other hand, the brothers, who exhibit unrelenting evil, are associated with motifs of darkness, fire, the devil, and sin. There are good figures, and these characters are associated with light. The Duchess of Malfi is a play replete with darkness, both literal and figurative.
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