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) After returning to the United States in 1931, he took a position teaching English at Berkeley. From 1937 to 1943 he taught English at Harvard. Besides collaborations with his wife, his writings include the poetry collections "Letter from the Country" (1941) and "Ode to the Sea" (1954), as well as a collection of essays on ancient Greek culture, "Persephone's Cave: Cultural Accumulations of the Early Greeks" (1979). 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