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IN the criticism on The Duchess of Malfi, there is one major point of debate: how is one to react to and judge the Duchess' behavior as a widow? In exploring this question, scholars disagree: some argue that she causes, even deserves, her degradation and death; others maintain that she transgresses none of the rules of decorum for a widow of the time. Although I will argue for the latter, my sole purpose in this paper is not to examine the Duchess as if she were on trial and I a member of a jury. As I will argue, the Duchess is so easily within the bounds of her society in remarrying that her widowhood is not the cause but the context for her martyrdom. As well as limning her as a character, contemporary attitudes toward widows also provide the configuration within which Ferdinand's vision of her as the Duke's widow, not Antonio's, finally stands. The importance of Webster's depiction of the Duchess' widowhood lies not only in his exonerating her but also in his using the dynamics of her marital status to construct and then deconstruct a female hero within the genre of tragedy.
It has been hard to view the Duchess as a hero,l for the male hero in early modern tragedy achieves a kind of identity-"This is I, Hamlet the Dane" (5.1.250-51), says the quintessential hero. "I am a very foolish, fond old man" (4.7.60); says Lear, accurately describing himself perhaps for the first time. In tragedy the hero may refer to his place in the society, as Hamlet does, or to his own experience, as Lear does. Identity of both kinds can also be lost: Macbeth's kingly robes hang loosely about him; he is left at the end only with his brute, physical strength, what he had before he accrued society's rewards. Marlowe's Dr. Faustus is literally torn apart, losing not only the constructed self but the body upon which it is predicated. In this play the Duchess comports herself in a way that is congruent with her society's mores, but not with her brother's wishes, and in the end he wins. His victory is not only in his control over her physical self, however. In contrast to her defining herself...