Twelfth Night and Duchess of Malfi Comparison

Samantha St. Claire

Prof. Flack

Eng 6

28 October 2012

From the Inside Out

Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night are two peas in a pod due to their common themes. They both wrestle with the concepts of love, and whether a marriage should be created on passion or convenience. They both challenge the idea that an individual’s status is determined by the class that he was helplessly born into, and that a man’s societal status and pocket book is what makes a man honorable, and not his inner virtue and character. These discussions finally lead to the gender roles that are set by society but deemed unstable and questionable by these two plays. They challenged their audience to ask radical questions about their surrounding culture.

These two plays relate to each other because they both focus on similar Early Modern English issues, first of which are gender roles. In Duchess of Malfi and Twelfth Night, our heroines are independent women who take their matters and desires into her own hands. Olivia from Twelfth Night chooses to avoid people by hiding behind her black mourning veil, and then changes her tune when she falls in love with Cesario. She gives up her gravity and proposes marriage to her “man” instead of the other way around, rebelling against the popular courtly love method. Viola chooses to lower herself to the lower status and actually changes her gender. She fools everyone into thinking she is Cesario, a male servant, and does such an impressive job that the Countess Olivia falls in love with her! When Sebastian shows up and accidentally rescues Viola from a forced marriage with Olivia, he informs Olivia, “But nature to her bias drew in that. / You would have been contracted to a maid. / Nor are you therein, by my life, deceived / You are betrothed both to maid and man” (5.1.288-289). Had it not been for nature’s hand, both Olivia and Viola would have found themselves married to a woman due to their independent actions! In Duchess of Malfi, the Duchess is very similar to the women in the previous play. Throughout the course of the whole play, she is the picture of a self-controlled woman who answers to no man. She defies her brothers’ wishes not to remarry, and secretly elopes with her steward, Antonio. She continues to have three children by him, right under her unsuspecting brother’s nose. Even when faced with death, she maintained her strong character, declaring victoriously, “For know, whether I am doomed to live or die, / I can do both like a prince” (3.2.68-69). She believed she had the same strength of a man, but it was an internal valor, not outward.

            Each play negotiates issues of societal norms by displaying the inconsistencies and conflicts that come with them. The fool, Feste, from Twelfth proves to be the wisest in the upper class household he serves, while the examples of nobility around him drink and carouse their money and life away. The steward Malvolio believes that simply wearing appropriate clothing and gaining the affection of the Countess will elevate his role in the household. Ferdinand from Duchess is portrayed as a cold, ruthless upper class man, who murders his own sister and her children for his societal views. Ferdinand explains that “the death / Of young wolves is never to be pitied” (4.2.237-238) because children born of slaves are “bastards” and do not have the right to life. Antonio realizes that when confronted with dire situations, “the great are like the base, nay, they are the same, / When they seek shameful ways to avoid shame” (2.3.51-52). Ferdinand agrees with this when he sighs his dying words, “Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, / Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust” (5.5.68-69). Only at the end does he seem to understand the equality of the human race. Even more, Bosola, who brings much wisdom to the play in the end, speaks in the prose of the lower class, while Ferdinand (who the audience hates) speaks in the upper class language of verse, but eventually goes mad and descends into speaking in prose. These plays repeatedly portray that wisdom comes from the lowly, while the high are the true fools.

Closely tied into this concept of status is marriage, and why and to whom one ought to marry. Contrary to the societal preference that people from like classes should partner up, Webster and Shakespeare wondered if the true marriage should be determined by romance. Olivia desires to marry Cesario, a servant, for love. Viola, masquerading as a servant boy, falls for the Count Orsino, and he in turn grows love for her, even while she was a boy. Sir Toby declares his marriage proposal to the servant Maria for her cunning and wit in deceiving the annoying Malvolio. The Duchess bemoans that societal pressures force the upper class to marry for convenience instead of preference, and desires to be a bird, “for they may choose their mates” (3.5.19). However, Ferdinand firmly believes it should be based on status. He looks down on Antonio for his lowly, steward position, and counts him unworthy of his sister’s hand in marriage because he was a “slave that only smelled of ink and counters, / And never in ‘t life looked like a gentleman,” (3.4.63-66). In contrast, Bosola praises the match because it was so contrary to the norm. He describes Antonio as “this trophy of a man” (3.3.271), and cries, “Do I not dream? Can this ambitious age / Have so much goodness in ‘t as to prefer / A man merely for worth, without these shadows / Of wealth and painted honors? Possible?” (3.3.255-258). He believed that it is far more important to determine what one thinks of a man by looking on the inside of that man rather than the outside.

Shakespeare questioned the ideas of his day, but ended his play with marriages that were within their correct classes. Webster ends his unequal marriage in disaster, but the tragedy comes not from the inequality but from the injustice and cruelty from the upper class. Stories such as these and the ideas they challenge are what revolutionizes culture and changes people, and ultimately makes the world a better place.