The Duchess of Malfi received generally scathing reviews. William Archer, England's chief proponent of Ibsen's new drama, took advantage of the occasion to lambast what he saw as the overestimation of Elizabethan theatre in general. In 1919, the Phoenix Society revived the play in London for the first time in two decades. The production featured Cathleen Nesbitt as the Duchess; Robert Farquharson played Ferdinand. The production was widely disparaged. For many of the newspaper critics, the failure indicated that Webster had become a "curio"; T. S. Eliot, conversely, argued that the production had failed to uncover the elements that made Webster a great dramatist—specifically
Howard Baker (poet) Howard Baker (poet) Howard Baker (born Howard Wilson Baker, Jr.) (April 5, 1905 – July 1990) was an American poet, dramatist, and literary critic. Baker was born in Philadelphia. He did graduate work in English at Stanford University, where he befriended Yvor Winters and was co-editor of the literary magazine "Gyroscope". After getting his master's degree, he moved to Paris to pursue his studies at the Sorbonne. There he married the novelist Dorothy Baker and met and was influenced by Ernest Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford, who helped him to publish his first work, the autobiographical novel "Orange Valley" (1931).