Word: malfi
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...such classics as Everyman, Twelfth Night, Dr. Faustus; such a novelty as W. S. Gilbert's Tom Cobb, or Fortune's Toy; such modern plays as Biography, High Tor, The Petrified Forest. Last week it tackled John Webster's difficult Elizabethan horror play, The Duchess of Malfi, proved itself braver than Broadway, which last produced the play in 1858. (Two seasons ago Orson Welles planned to do it, got cold feet...
Story of a young duchess who marries her steward, only to be persecuted and finally strangled to death at the command of her disapproving brothers, The Duchess of Malfi. swirls with the dark, cruel, guilty emotions of the Elizabethan theatre. Its splendid imaginativeness, its impassioned poetry, lift it above mere violence and gore. But it is horrifying rather than terrifying: there is so much bloodshed at the end it is impossible to keep stabs...
...Drama and the New," ridiculing the Elizabethan dramatists. This work holds that many of the seventeenth century plays tend toward a childish over emphasis of the horror element, and contrasts the unpretentious realism of the modern stage. In spirited refutation, O'Casey tied Webster's "Ducieas of Malfi," and pointed out that the swords and bloody charnel-houses of Webster are no more to be taken seriously than the telephones and camisoled ladies seen on the boards today. Archer has based his arguments merely on the mechanics of the dramatist. The case against him was complete when O'Casey read...