SOURCE: Forker, Charles R. “The Duchess of Malfi.” In Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster, pp. 304-28. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986.

In this excerpt, Forker takes a psychological approach to character studies of Ferdinand, the Cardinal, and the Duchess. Forker maintains that the ambiguity of Webster's characters is a mark of his skill in developing individuated, strongly drawn figures.

Again, as in The White Devil, Webster focuses attention on the complex interrelationship of three siblings—two brothers and a sister—probing the inherent ironies and contradictions that their kinship and independence can be made in combination to exhibit. In Bosola he gives us a more fully developed, more richly imagined version of Flamineo the malcontented intellectual. And he returns also to a strong heroine who, despite her different moral orientation, controls the emotional temperature of the play by virtue of her psychic energy, her...