Word: duchess
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Dancer in Darkness, by David Stac-ton. Seventeenth century Playwright John Webster's ill-fated heroine, the duchess of Malfi, is chillfully done in, this time in silky, horrifying prose...
...Dancer in Darkness, by David Stacton. In this neo-Gothic retelling, an old and bloody tale-best known in John Webster's 16th century play, The Duchess of Malfi-becomes a great horror story...
Three of the four episodes comprise a movie that a Parisian goes to see one afternoon after a spat with his wife. The first is a grisly little playlet borrowed from Stendhal's Italian Chronicles, about an aging Venetian duchess who gets even with her handsome, young, philandering lover by having him chased by a band of cutthroats. He finds momentary sanctuary in a church where a funeral is in progress. But when he discovers the funeral is for him (a grim whimsy of the duchess'), he runs out and is run through by the bully boys...
Italian Matteo Bandello, who himself had not invented the tale but had merely written it down. No one knows now, and it is a dreadful thought, but there may actually have been an unfortunate duchess of Amalfi...
...nightmare is too athletic to be staged successfully in an age dulled by realism, but in Stacton's retelling it moves as smoothly as the oiled gears of a stretching rack. The reader's disbelief is abruptly suspended-as from a gibbet-as the rich young widowed duchess runs off with her lover Antonio, and her brothers, the bloody Ferdinand and the scheming Cardinal, stalk her to earth for profit and incestuous love...