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Toombs was a short, thick, heavy-set man of the Websterian type, and one of the South's most picturesque orators.

It recalls the tragedies before 1642, with their heroic love after the style of Beaumont and Fletcher, their horrors and incest following the Websterian school, and their emulation of famous passages in Shakespeare.

It essentially becomes background music to a series of Websterian verbal highlights.

The title skews a speech from the Duchess of Malfi, and like her magnificent Websterian counterpart, Adès's heroine, at her low point, asserts: "I am Duchess still."

The Websterian ideal of language as a careful garden of hardy perennials and occasional exotics, cultivated by a corps of devoted lexicographers, is consistently challenged by a weedy invasion of the vulgate.