More widely studied and more frequently performed than ever before, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi is presented here in an accessible and thoroughly up-to-date edition. Based on the often reprinted Revels Plays Edition the notes have been augmented to cast further light as Webster's amazing dialogue and on the stage action which it implies. A new introduction gives a revealing view of the plays themes, action, and visual imagery and sets the tragedy in the context of pro-Civil War England; it all explores why the play has lived on stage with renewal force in the last decades of the twentieth century.