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The Cardinal of Aragon is the Duchess of Malfi’s elder brother, and one of the central villains of the play – along with the Duchess' twin brother Duke Ferdinand. Like many powerful clergymen in Webster’s plays, he’s utterly corrupt.
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Tantalus was a notorious figure of Classical mythology. After he served up his son Pelops at a meal with the gods, he was condemned to spend an eternity in the underworld, forever trying to eat an apple which hung just out of reach. It’s from him that we get the word “tantalising”.
Bosola’s point is that Tantalus feels hungrier because he has more hope of food: when we can see something that’s just out of our reach, we want it more. Bosola himself wants payment from the Cardinal for his services. He’s been promised it, but the Cardinal ain’t playin' straight.
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Delio is Antonio’s trusted friend. Their friendship is one of the few relationships in The Duchess of Malfi which are not in some way corrupted, usually by a lack of trust.
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What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
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What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
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The Faerie Queene is considered one of the most innovative poems in English, and that’s partly because of the way it’s structured. Spenser imagined his epic in twelve books (although he only finished six), each book representing a particular virtue. Each of those books is in turn divided up into 12 cantos, or ‘songs’. And each canto is made up of a number of stanzas – usually between 40 and 70 – in the ‘Spenserian form’, a stanza form which Spenser invented himself and which has nine lines, in iambic pentameter (dee-dum-dee-dum-dee-dum-dee-dum-dee-dum), and with the rhyme scheme:
ABABBCBCC
Multiply all these numbers together, and you’ll find out that it’s a very, very long poem.
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The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s masterpiece, was planned in 12 books. He only managed to finish six of them – which is well enough for most people, since each book’s about 6000 lines long – but the original plan was to cover what Spenser calls “the twelue priuate morall vertues, as Aristotle hath deuised”. No one has actually been able to find where exactly Aristotle comes up with these twelve virtues, but apparently he does, so.
The first book, then, is supposed to represent Holiness. St. George is Spenser’s “Knight of the Red Crosse”, and the virtue he represents will be tested and analysed through allegory over the course of the book.
Numerology plays an important role in the Faerie Queene. Since this is the first book, it focuses largely on the meaning of ‘the one’, as Spenser learned it from Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. The ‘holinesse’ of this book has much to do with the ‘undifferentiated oneness of the Almighty’ (as is hinted at by the name Una, Latin for ‘one’), as opposed to the inherent strife (or Strife, in the Empedoclean sense) and falseness of a twofold thing (cf. Duessa, disguised as Fidessa, or the copy of Una, conjured by Archimago: a sort of double irony).
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“Judged”. Not, like,
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“Gromwell”, a common purply-blue flower.
Note that all the flowers in this line begin with the letter ‘g’. This is no accident: the poet’s employing the technique of alliteration, common in medieval verse and the driving force behind Anglo-Saxon poetry. A good example of alliterative verse is The Grave.
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Ginger. Ginger flowers are pretty in pink.
It’s an exotic plant from South Asia, which fits the poem’s depiction of a kind of paradise.
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