Rigoletto is addicted to humiliation; his deformity makes it his very essence, and is the reason why he took on the job of humiliating others, in a vain attempt to avenge his own. The charge of guilt this stores up in him develops self-hatred into self-destruction.

What he most fears is the loss of his daughter. It is therefore this that he brings about, losing her twice, to the seduction of the Duke, and to the most violent of deaths. This he brings about by being voluntarily and tacitly complicit with the forces of her downfall and his own. He deludes himself into thinking he is accepted by the courtiers by participating in the humiliation of Count Ceprano, husband of the Duke’s current inamorata, even suggesting her kidnap and her husband’s death, which goes a little too far even for the Duke, who protects Ceprano, to Rigoletto’s dismay.

Rigoletto has already led the others in the humiliation of another Count, Monterone, and calls down upon himself the savage curse of this father whose own daughter has been seduced by the Duke. Rigoletto is terrified by this curse because he knows that ‘what one fears most always happens’ (Cesare Pavese).

Rigoletto’s next suicidal act – or Freudian slip – is to leave the door open to his own courtyard, permitting the Duke to gain access to Gilda. He actually shuts him in as well.

Rigoletto then lets himself be tricked by the courtiers into apparently taking part in the abduction, which he had suggested, of Countess Ceprano. Cleverly, knowing their man, the courtiers give him a key with a crest on it and tell him it is the key to the Ceprano house. What an insider Rigoletto must have felt as he ran his fingers over the crest on that key! Then, with stubborn obedience to his mania for self-destruction, he asks the courtier Marullo to give him a disguise in the form of a mask, which he receives in the form of a blindfold, enabling him, unaware, to hold the ladder into his own courtyard, up which the courtiers climb to kidnap his daughter.

In comforting Gilda after her seduction by the Duke, Rigoletto at first tries to make light of the situation, but then let’s the cat out of the bag, and incidentally reveals his abysmal ignorance of the relationship between fathers and children. He says he alone wants to be degraded so that she might rise as high as he had fallen low.

From then on Rigoletto’s story is like that of the Gadarene swine, with the downward slope getting progressively steeper. His magnificent revenge aria, sung now in solidarity with the condemned Monterone, whom he had formerly mocked, is desperate but patently unrealizable.

Rigoletto shows fatal misjudgment of his daughter’s passionate love of the Duke. He believes she would leave the inn after he shows the Duke to her ogling and pawing another woman. That is Rigoletto’s most excusable but most fatal mistake. A man generally thinks his beloved is sullied if he sees her in the embrace of another man; but a woman in love is inclined to believe she can purify her lover, even if she sees him in the arms of another woman. Rigoletto, a widower who himself enjoyed the love of a selfless woman, despite his deformity, and whom he therefore worshipped, knows nothing of this. His and Gilda’s resulting horrible end must constitute ‘cruel and unusual punishment’, all the worse for being entirely self-inflicted.

Rigoletto has been summed up as ‘the biter bit’. This is true but unfair, because Rigoletto’s does not choose to be a biter: it is his livelihood. He is a pitiful character in his own right, who cruelly suffers from embracing the behaviour that goes with the job which seemed best to ensure his place in society. He does not so much receive just punishment from others as destroy himself.

To cause the death of your beloved only child might be called suicide by proxy. It was Rigoletto’s misjudgment of the two people he knew best – the Duke and Gilda – that led to her double fate: first, kidnap and the loss of her virginity, then death.

Rigoletto’s own humiliation made it impossible for him to understand normal human emotions. His own limited experience of court life, and the even more limited range of his own role in it, deluded him into thinking that he exercised some kind of control over such apparently powerful people. That he so comprehensively misunderstood his daughter was only possible because she had become a human being who loved, whereas he had never become a human being at all. His physical deformity had become moral deformity. He felt Monterone’s curse so strongly because he had already cursed himself. At the very end, this man who earlier mourned the fact ‘that he lacked the birthright of every man – tears’, sobs himself to death, and is thus – too late – born at last as a human being.