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
Peter McDonald (critic) Peter McDonald (critic) Professor Peter McDonald (born 1962 in Belfast) is a poet, university lecturer and writer of literary criticism. He holds the post of Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church, a college of the University of Oxford (and where the term "Student" is used for what elsewhere would be termed a "Fellow"). McDonald was educated at Methodist College, Belfast, and University College, Oxford. He has been writing poetry since his teens, and was the winner of national young poet competitions in 1978 and 1979. His first published poems were collected in