ABSTRACT
Antonio in the original Sadler's Wells revival, directed his wife Emma and, like Stark, portrayed Ferdinand. Although receiving mixed reviews on her first attempts at the Duchess, Mrs Waller went on to rival Isabella Glyn's success, playing the role for the next twenty-five years. Perhaps even more than the Starks, the Wallers sensationalized Home's text, as the Philadelphia review indicates: at the close, the Duchess was seen 'riding to heaven, in white muslin'. Frank W. Wadsworth, in his helpful study, American Performances of the 'Duchess of Malfi', in 'Theatre Survey', II (1970), pp. 151-66, examines the extant prompt-books and conjectures that these closing tableaux represented a strange marriage between Webster and Harriet Beecher Stowe: audiences had thrilled to George Aiken's stage adaptation of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' since 1852, with its climactic tableau wherein Little Eva was 'discovered' on the back of a milk-white dove, presumably en route to heaven. Sentimental moral victories were thus achieved in both plays, delighting the audiences but, as so often in the case of Webster, not always the reviewers. Excerpts from (a) the New Orleans 'Daily Picayune', 11
December 1857, p. 5; (b) the 'New York Times', 7 April 1858, p. 4; (c) the 'Spirit of the Times', 10 April 1858, p. 108; (d) the 'New York Daily Tribune', 6 April 1858, p. 5; (e) the 'New York Herald', 6 April 1858, p. 7; (f) the 'Philadelphia Press', 26 April 1859, p. 2.
