Jealousy of the Duke

3. The trivial incidents that made the Duke want to kill his wife were mostly from her treating other men like she treated him.  In the poem the Duke says “all and each would draw from her alike the approving speech, or blush, at least.  She thanked men-good! But thanked somehow-I know not how-as if she ranked my gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name with anybody’s gift.”  This is an insignificant reaction towards why the Duke should have killed his wife because maybe she was just a really nice woman to the other men.  Instead of just giving commands to kill her he should have dealt with the problems.  Another trivial incident was when the Duchess would always smile at everyone she passed including the Duke. This means that she was treating his royal self as any normal peasant and wasn’t getting any extra attention.  This is a really vacuous reason for why the Duke had his wife killed.  He was jealous because the duchess didn’t see him as a gift or even as a husband, but this doesn’t give the Duke the right to just execute her. She was a nice women that had never committed a transgressed before. There are more events leading to the Duchess's death and all of them to me are trivial.  All in all, the Duke used his story in a poem format to make his jealousy look less of the problem and to make it harder to understand what happened in order to make him look more innocent of the duchess's death.