The On the Verge reading series and the Handkwerker Gallery present a staged reading of John Webster's play, The Duchess of Malfi, directed by English department faculty member Claire Gleitman, on Thursday, November 15, at 6:30 p.m. in the Handwerker Gallery.
The cast will feature performances by theatre and English department faculty members Dan Breen and Jack Hrkach, as well as students from both areas.
John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, written in about 1612, is a blood-soaked story of intrigue, revenge and romance. It focuses upon a young, widowed duchess who marries a man far beneath her in station and then does her best to conceal the marriage (and three pregnancies) from her viciously controlling and sadistic brothers.
The Duchess's doomed efforts to carve out a private life for herself while remaining "Duchess of Malfi still" show her to be in clear contrast to Queen Elizabeth, who transformed herself into the Virgin Queen in order to quell her subjects' anxiety about a woman in a position of power, and about the destructive power they assumed her (necessarily weak and feeble) body would have upon her ability to rule.
Yet Webster's play was written over a decade after Queen Elizabeth's death, and it reflects the bleak cynicism of an age in which goodness seems a weak opponent to the forces of anarchy, amorality, and corruption that conspire to extinguish it.
