The play begins as a love story, when the Duchess marries beneath her class, and ends as a nightmarish tragedy as her two brothers undertake their revenge, destroying themselves in the process.

Her brothers, Ferdinand and the Cardinal, forbid her from remarrying, seeking to defend their inheritance and desperate to avoid a degrading association with a social inferior.

Antonio escapes with their eldest son, but the Duchess, her maid, and her two younger children are returned to Malfi and die at the hands of Bosola's executioners, who are under Ferdinand's orders.

[citation needed] Webster's principal source was in William Painter's The Palace of Pleasure (1567), which was a translation of François de Belleforest's French adaptation of Matteo Bandello's Novelle (1554).

He recounted the story of Antonio's secret marriage to Giovanna after the death of her first husband, stating that it brought down the wrath of her two brothers, one of whom, Luigi d'Aragona, was a powerful cardinal under Pope Julius II.

A vein of corruption runs throughout the play, notably in the character of the deadly Cardinal, a man ready to employ lesser beings (such as Bosola) to commit murders for him, then cast them aside as rotten fruit.

Antonio describes him thus: The spring in his face is nothing but the engend'ring of toads; where he is jealous of any man, he lays worse plot for them than ever was impos'd on Hercules, for he strews in his way flatterers, panders, intelligencers, atheists, and a thousand such political monsters.

Throughout, she refuses to submit to her brothers' attempts at control and even asserts her identity and self-control at the moment of her death, announcing "I am Duchess of Malfi still" (4.2).

The internal struggle faced by the Duchess when fighting her brothers and hiding her marriage was all part of Webster's intention to reflect and refer to the Roman paradigms and Senecan tragedies.

The Duchess is often criticised (Clifford Leech condemned her for her 'irresponsible overturning of a social code') for stepping out of the societal expectations of a widow in sixteenth century England.

[10] As a female in a position of power, she is expected to hold the throne and obey the patriarchal figures in the court, specifically her two brothers, the Cardinal and Ferdinand.

The continued objectification of the Duchess from her brothers conveys males' perceived ability to control a woman's body in the society of the 16th century.

That the scene is set against the backdrop of the Shrine of Our Lady of Loretto, a religious place, adds to its sharp distinction between good and evil, justice and injustice.

[citation needed] Act V, Scene iii, features an important theatrical device, echo, which seems to emanate from the grave of the Duchess, in her voice.

Samuel Pepys reports seeing the play several times; it was performed by the Duke of York's company under Thomas Betterton.

In 1850, after a generation of critical interest and theatrical neglect, the play was staged by Samuel Phelps at Sadler's Wells, with Isabella Glyn in the title role.

Poel's playscript followed Webster's text closely apart from scene rearrangements; however, reaction had set in, and the production received generally scathing reviews.

William Archer, England's chief proponent of Ibsen's new drama, took advantage of the occasion to lambast what he saw as the overestimation of Elizabethan theatre in general.

A 1935 production at the Embassy Theatre received similarly negative reviews; Ivor Brown noted that the audience left "rather with superior smiles than with emotional surrender."

In the aftermath of World War II, George Rylands directed a production at the Haymarket Theatre that at last caught the public mood.

John Gielgud, as Ferdinand, accentuated the element of incestuous passion in that character's treatment of the Duchess (played by Peggy Ashcroft).

A 1946 production on Broadway did not fare as well; Rylands attempted to duplicate his London staging with John Carradine as Ferdinand and Elisabeth Bergner as the Duchess.

Directed by Jack Landau, who had earlier staged a brief but well-reviewed White Devil, the production emphasised (and succeeded as) Grand Guignol.

As Walter Kerr put it, "Blood runs right over the footlights, spreads slowly up the aisle and spills well out into Second Avenue."

The result, as Jarka Burian noted, was "a unified, consistent mise-en-scene...without enough inner turbulence to create a completely satisfying theatre experience."

In 1995, Juliet Stevenson and Simon Russell-Beale played the Duchess and Ferdinand respectively in a production at Greenwich Theatre, directed by Philip Franks.

In July 2010, English National Opera and Punchdrunk collaborated to stage the production, which had been commissioned by the ENO from composer Torsten Rasch.

The production was staged in a promenade style and performed at a mysterious vacant site at Great Eastern Quay in London's Royal Albert Basin.

In January 2014, Shakespeare's Globe staged a production[21] directed by Dominic Dromgoole and starring Gemma Arterton as the Duchess, James Garnon as the Cardinal, David Dawson as Ferdinand, Alex Waldmann as Antonio, and Sean Gilder as Bosola.

[22] This production coincided with a representation of the aforementioned Theobald text of 1736 as part of the Globe's Read Not Dead series – directed by David Oakes.