At the end, when Bosola presents the body of the murdered Duchess to her brother, Webster has wrought a scene of tragic savagery that surpasses almost any other that the English stage can show. The sight, of his dead sister maddens Ferdinand, who, feeling the eclipse of reason gradually absorb his faculties, turns round with frenzied hatred on the accomplice of his fratricide. Bosola demands the price of guilt. Ferdinand spurns him with the concentrated eloquence of despair and the extravagance of approaching insanity. The murderer taunts his master coldly and laconically, like a man whose life is wrecked, who has waded through blood to his reward, and who at the last moment discovers the sacrifice of his conscience and masculine freedom to be fruitless. Remorse, frustrated hopes, and thirst for vengeance convert Bosola from this hour forward into an instrument of retribution. The Duke and his brother the Cardinal are both brought to bloody deaths by the hand which they had used to assassinate their sister. It is fitting that something should be said about Webster's conception of the Italian despot. Brachiano and Ferdinand, the employers of Flamineo and Bosola, are tyrants such as Savonarola described, and as we read of in the chronicles of petty Southern cities. Nothing is suffered to stand between their lust and its accomplishment. They override the law by violence, or pervert its action to their own advantage: The law to him Is like a foul black cobweb to a spider; He makes it his dwelling and a prison To entangle those shall feed him. They are eaten up with parasites, accomplices, and all the creatures of their crimes: He and his brother are like plum-trees that grow crooked over standing pools; they are rich and over-laden with fruit, but none but crows, pies, and caterpillars feed on them. In their lives they are without a friend; for society in guilt brings nought of comfort, and honours are but emptiness: Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright; But looked to near, have neither heat nor light. Their plots and counterplots drive repose far from them: There's but three furies found in spacious hell; But in a great man's breast three thousand dwell. Fearful shapes afflict their fancy; shadows of ancestral crime or ghosts of their own raising: For these many years None of our family dies, but there is seen The shape of an old woman; which is given By tradition to us to have been murdered By her nephews for her riches. Apparitions haunt them: How tedious is a guilty conscience! When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden, Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake That seems to strike at me.