SOURCE: Forker, Charles R. “The Duchess of Malfi.” In Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster, pp. 304-28. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986.

[In this excerpt, Forker takes a psychological approach to character studies of Ferdinand, the Cardinal, and the Duchess. Forker maintains that the ambiguity of Webster's characters is a mark of his skill in developing individuated, strongly drawn figures.]

Again, as in The White Devil, Webster focuses attention on the complex interrelationship of three siblings—two brothers and a sister—probing the inherent ironies and contradictions that their kinship and independence can be made in combination to exhibit. In Bosola he gives us a more fully developed, more richly imagined version of Flamineo the malcontented intellectual. And he returns also to a strong heroine who, despite her different moral orientation, controls the emotional temperature of the play by virtue of her psychic energy, her indomitable spirit, and her daring to confront her own nature under terrifying pressure without cowardice and finally without self-deception. Webster employs several types or roles that he had already utilized in the earlier tragedy—the female servant who functions as dramatic foil to her mistress, the corrupt and worldly cardinal who “should have been Pope” (I.i.163), the criminally deranged nobleman, the libidinous court lady, the supine cuckold, the child-survivor of the carnage, even the grotesques of doctor and lawyer. And, although the Duchess of Malfi dominates her play more consistently than the second Duchess of Bracciano dominates The White Devil, Webster once more constructs his drama upon an intricate system of cross relations that exploits the paradoxes of union and division, of attraction and repulsion, of love and death, of sexuality and murder involving five major characters and several lesser ones.

Beneath his vivid individualizations of personality—and these must be reckoned among his greatest strengths—the dramatist implants the disturbing notion that radical differences may spring from a common source. Commenting on the well-ordered state in the opening scene, Antonio observes that either “Pure silver drops” or poisoned water may flow from the “common fountain” of a “prince's court” (I.i.11-15). Webster stresses the blood relationship of Ferdinand, the Cardinal, and the Duchess not only to heighten contrasts between health and disease or between the natural and the unnatural in a single family (as in King Lear) but to suggest also that the three most powerful representatives of hatred and love in the play share each other's lives by means of strong, though ambivalent, ties that only death can sever. The Duchess and Ferdinand are biological twins while he and the Cardinal are morally allied—twins “In quality” (I.i.172). Like Cain and Abel, the persecutors and the persecuted are primordially linked. Antonio calls them “three fair medals, / Cast in one figure” but “of … different temper” (I.i.188-189). Fascinated by elements of sameness in diversity and by the threat to stable identity that such ambiguities imply, Webster builds the psychology of these relationships into the dynamics of his tragic structure.

A certain indefiniteness or ambiguity of motivation is thus a necessary part of Webster's scheme and may partly explain why commentators have judged the Duchess so harshly in some cases and so sympathetically in others, or why the causes of Ferdinand's bizarre cruelty to his sister have proved so debatable. We may take up the inevitable question of incest first. Although Webster seems to present a Ferdinand who is largely unconscious of his own sexual nature, and, although even Bosola with his characteristic alertness to human seaminess omits to comment on the subject, the language and action of the play persistently suggest incestuous jealousy on the duke's part without quite confirming it. Mulryne is surely right to notice that Webster's refusal to be explicit about this sexual involvement (so unlike Ford's procedure in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore) actually “helps to make the Duchess's tragedy [more] unnerving.”¹ When Ferdinand deputes Bosola to spy upon his sister, he first insists (somewhat to the surprise of the spy) that he would not have the “young widow” remarry, then deliberately mystifies his interlocutor: “Do not you ask the reason: but be satisfied, / I say I would not” (I.i.255-258). What he conceals from Bosola he would also appear to be concealing from himself. From this point on Ferdinand betrays an obsession with the Duchess's body that neither the strictest, most Mediterranean conception of “attainted” family “honour” (I.i.296; II.v.21-23) nor the desire to inherit an “infinite mass of treasure” (IV.ii.285)—the stated motives for killing her—can possibly account for.²

Webster introduces “the great Calabrian duke” (I.i.87) in a context of bawdy double-entendres, appropriately associating his aggressiveness as a soldier with a marked tendency to quibble pruriently on the drawing and putting up of weapons (I.i.113-114) and a need also to suppress such punning in others, as when he silences his courtiers for laughing at the sexual implications of “reel[ing] from the tilt” (I.i.120). Later in the same scene Ferdinand addresses the Duchess (for the first time in the play) with the ambiguous line, “Sister, I have a suit to you—” (I.i.213). Ostensibly, of course, he is recommending Bosola for the “provisorship of [her] horse” (I.i.217), but the hint of a more personal and subterranean meaning suggests itself, and Webster quickly strengthens these early impressions by having Ferdinand dwell embarrassingly on sex in his tirade against remarriage. As a widow she should “know already what man is,” but she is nevertheless susceptible of having her “high blood” (I.i.294-297) swayed by youth and other male attractions. Those who “wed twice” are “most luxurious,” their “livers … more spotted / Than Laban's sheep,” and potentially “Whores” (I.i.297-301) if, like diamonds, they should pass through more than one pair of hands. The court is “a rank pasture” (note the animalistic implications) in which women who hide their “darkest actions” or even “privat'st thoughts” are like “witches” who “give the devil suck” (I.i.306-315). Ferdinand accuses his sister of craving “lustful pleasures,” observing grossly, as he menaces her with his “father's poniard,” that “women like that part which, like the lamprey, / Hath ne'er a bone in't,” then claiming, when she protests, that he had referred only to “the tongue” (I.i.326-338). His parting epithet is “lusty widow” (I.i.340).

The duke's reaction to the news that his sister has borne a child is compounded of frenzy, horror, and sexual excitement. His imagination fluctuates wildly between exaggerated fantasies of her forbidden sex life and, more extravagantly still, of the fanatic punishments he would like to impose. In his febrile mind she becomes “a notorious strumpet,” “a sister damn'd,” who makes use of “cunning bawds” and other secret “conveyances of lust” (II.v.3-10); he envisions her partner “in the shameful act of sin” (it does not occur to him that at this juncture she might be married) as “some strong thigh'd bargeman,” some athletic woodman who “can quoit the sledge, / Or toss the bar, or else some lovely squire / That carries coals up to her privy lodgings” (II.v.41-45). Sexual stimulation is self-evident. And Ferdinand would eradicate these intolerable images with the “sponge” of “her bleeding heart” (II.v.15), by “toss[ing] her palace 'bout her ears,” rooting up her forests, blasting her meads, and laying waste “her general territory” (II.v.18-20). He would “purge” his sister's “infected blood” with “fire” and “cupping-glass” and, after having her “hew'd … to pieces,” bequeath a handkerchief wet with his own tears to her “bastard” from which the child might fashion “lint for his mother's wounds” (II.v.24-31). He would “quench [his] wild-fire” with her “whore's blood” (II.v.47-48).

These ravings reach their climax in his vision of the amorous pair being consumed in the very act of lovemaking:

                                                                                          I would have their bodies
Burnt in a coal-pit, with the ventage stopp'd,
That their curs'd smoke might not ascend to heaven:
Or dip the sheets they lie in, in pitch or sulphur,
Wrap them in't, and then light them like a match;
Or else to boil their bastard to a cullis,
And giv't his lecherous father, to renew
The sin of his back.

(II.v.66-73)

Although the duke is manifestly enraged by the idea of his sister's intercourse with an unknown lover, he can conceive of a revenge that would “renew” rather than extinguish that lover's passion. Act II ends with Ferdinand's admission that his sister's liaison has not only “put [him] / Into a cold sweat” but also engendered a kind of frustrated paralysis:

Till I know who leaps my sister, I'll not stir:
That known, I'll find scorpions to string my whips,
And fix her in a general eclipse.

(II.v.77-79)

Meanwhile he “bear[s] himself right dangerously” but is mysteriously “quiet” and “seems to sleep / The tempest out, as dormice do in winter” (III.i.20-22). Clearly, Webster takes pains to underline the sexual component in what Antonio had described earlier as the duke's “most perverse, and turbulent nature” (I.i.169).

Critics have sometimes cited Ferdinand's delay in taking action against the Duchess until after two more children have been born to her as proof positive that Webster was incompetent in dramatic craftsmanship; but, as John Russell Brown points out in his edition (pp. 67-68), the lapse of years may be plausibly understood as further evidence of the deep-rooted nature of the duke's neurotic conflict, and particularly of his wrestling with both guilt and desire. The unfolding pattern of the final three acts would seem to corroborate Brown's insight, for Ferdinand's behavior toward his sister combines sadistic advance with timorous withdrawal. His first speech to the Duchess in Act III consists of two casual and superficially unrelated remarks—that he will go “instantly to bed” and that he is about to “bespeak / A husband” (III.i.38-40) for her. Although this juxtaposition may be fortuitous, it is nevertheless characteristic of Ferdinand's habit of dealing with his own emotions through displacement. Consciously he wishes to make his sister uncomfortable by reminding her that in taking a clandestine lover she has disobeyed him, but at a deeper stratum of his psyche he may be battling his own alarming attraction to her. When the Duchess attempts to defend herself from the “scandalous report … Touching [her] honour,” he insists on remaining “deaf to't” and pretends to reassure her that, being “safe / In [her] own innocency,” she has nothing to fear; but even as he backs off from confronting her openly with her potentially explosive secret, he mentions his “fix'd love,” and “pour[s]” his misleading confidences into her “bosom” (III.i.47-55). Comforted by the mistaken belief that her immediate danger has passed, the Duchess leaves the stage to her brother, who observes, in the briefest of soliloquies, that “Her guilt treds on / Hot-burning coulters—” (III.i.56-57). Ironically, the words reveal more about his own precariousness, morally and psychologically, than about hers.

Having arranged to procure “a false key / Into [the Duchess's] bed-chamber,” Ferdinand now challenges Bosola to “guess” (III.i.80-82) at his purpose, then retreats again into privacy without satisfying him. Meanwhile he has been struggling to reject Bosola's notion of sorcery as a possible cause of amorous attachment: can it be true that “potions” or “charms” can “make us love, whether we will or no?” (III.i.67-68). (Significantly, throughout the drama, Ferdinand associates sexuality with witchcraft.) The scene of the duke's sudden intrusion into his sister's bedroom draws even tauter the strain already established between his sexual revulsion (a manifestation of guilt) and his intense erotic fascination. Once more he produces his poniard—an instrument both lethal and phallic—and, handing the Duchess the naked blade, counters her brave assertion that whether “doom'd to live or die” she can “do both like a prince” with a sexually charged pun: “Die then, quickly!” (III.ii.70-71). His abrupt command that she kill herself (suggested probably by a similar episode in Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Part I [III.ii] in which Agydas is also presented with a dagger for daring to love Zenocrate) shows us a Ferdinand in whom aggression and self-destruction are two faces of the same disturbance.

Although the duke has expected to discover the identity of the Duchess's lover and has possibly hoped to interrupt their very embraces, he suddenly refuses to see Antonio, “now persuaded” that the revelation “would beget such violent effects / As would damn” (III.ii.93-95) brother and sister alike. He therefore charges her unseen partner to “Enjoy [his] lust still, and a wretched life, / On that condition” (III.ii.98-99) but to remain hidden and unidentified. He also announces that he will “never see [the Duchess] more” (III.ii.141), indeed, conducting all further communication with her either through the agency of Bosola or in darkness, as when he gives her the dead hand to kiss. The atmospherically—perhaps literally—darkened stage upon which so much of the central action takes place is obviously symbolic of the blackness that all but eclipses moral order in this tragedy, but the effects of “owl-light” (IV.ii.334) also speak volumes about the semiconscious lust, terror, and sadism that tangle so obscurely in Ferdinand's own psyche. The duke can scarcely bear to look upon his sister even after her strangling (“Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young” [IV.ii.264]), yet at the same time he cannot resist looking (“Let me see her face again—” [IV.ii.272]). And it is precisely at this point that he mentions their twinship and admits that in distraction he has ordered Bosola to “kill my dearest friend” (IV.ii.280). In Renaissance usage the term “friend” sometimes meant lover or paramour, as in Lucio's words about Claudio in Measure for Measure, “He hath got his friend with child” (I.iv.29). Thus does Webster present Ferdinand's self-alienation as an aspect of his claustrophobic involvement—indeed almost of his identification—with the image of his sister. The confused feelings of love-hatred that he expresses toward her are dramatized as a transference, in part, of inadmissible feelings about the self. And, just as the duke imposes a kind of artificial blindness upon his relations between himself and his victims, so he now orders Bosola, the agent of his villainy, “Never [to] look upon [him] more” (IV.ii.317). For Ferdinand, the full light of self-recognition is unendurable, but enough illumination has occurred not only to “dazzle” his eyes with tears but to make mental collapse nearly immediate. He becomes the creature of his own “deed of darkness” (IV.ii.335), a phrase that he himself applies to the murder but that Jacobeans more commonly used for copulation.³

Webster's Calabrian duke is an impressively sophisticated study in the psychology of a sadist, repressed by guilt and horrified to the point of self-delusion by the nature of his own erotic urges. The aristocratic pride and hope of wealth that he invokes to explain his behavior are not so much spurious as inadequate and superficial. It is his sister's secret “marriage” (especially to a social inferior who symbolically disrupts his essential closeness to a more acceptable image of the self) that draws “a stream of gall, quite through [his] heart” (IV.ii.286-287) and that impels him to retaliate in kind by intruding so destructively upon the competing relationship. And the obsession with image carries over logically into the revenge with its grotesque substitution of a dead and alien hand for Ferdinand's own living one and of wax effigies for actual corpses. The Duchess is “plagu'd in art” (IV.i.111) because the objective naturalness of her relationship to an outsider wrecks the indispensable private illusion upon which her brother subsists.

Three speeches in particular reflect the intimate nature of Ferdinand's pain and its rediversion into elaborately choreographed torment. When the trapped Duchess asks her brother why he is so irrationally opposed to her second union, he is incapable of answering directly; he responds instead with a threat and a cry of anguish:

                                                                                                    Thou art undone:
And thou hast ta'en that massy sheet of lead
That hid thy husband's bones, and folded it
About my heart.

(III.ii.111-114)

The allusion to the burial of her first husband in such a context is revealing, for it shows how instinctively he identifies himself with her deceased sexual partner. The same harsh and impenetrable metal that forever isolates the Duchess's dead lover cuts off the living brother with equal finality, and, in doing so, murders his heart. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Ferdinand responds by inflicting upon his sister so many emblems of death, including, of course, the coffin that is to be her “last presence-chamber” (IV.ii.171) and the noose, which is referred to (at least in Cariola's case) as a “wedding ring” (IV.ii.249). The ritual strangling and burying of his twin becomes a deviate means of self-repression, a way of twisting his need for forbidden intimacy into a kind of danse macabre.

But Webster has already brought out Ferdinand's difficulties with self-image earlier in the play. When first informed by letter of the Duchess's “strumpet[ry]” (II.v.4), the enraged duke, struggling for mastery over his emotions, betrays to his brother how closely he feels that his own identity is bound up with those of both the Cardinal and his sister:

                                                                      I will only study to seem
The thing I am not. I could kill her now,
In you, or in myself, for I do think
It is some sin in us, heaven doth revenge
By her.

(II.v.62-66)

In his mechanistic term “thing” and in his fervent attempt to moralize what he cannot understand, we recognize Ferdinand's unsuccessful efforts to confront his deeper feelings. A later outburst—in response to Bosola's pleas for compassion upon the Duchess's “delicate skin”—again manifests the simultaneous feelings of identification and alienation that define the duke's relationship to his sister:

                                                                                Damn her! that body of hers,
While that my blood ran pure in't, was more worth
Than that which thou wouldst comfort, call'd a soul—

(IV.i.121-123)

The complete disintegration of personality that finally overtakes Ferdinand is the logical result not merely of a murderer's guilt but of a psychic impasse—of his desire to love his twin and to hate himself through her for that same love. The symptoms of this malady, as Webster presents them, are remarkably close to those in certain modern descriptions of schizophrenia. John Vernon remarks that for the typical schizophrenic “areas of the personality are fragmented and mutually exclusive”; experience is characterized by “the simultaneous presence but absolute separation of a fantastic space and a real space.”⁴ Sufferers are often afflicted by a consciousness that selfhood somehow lies outside or is distinct from their own bodies, a problem for which they try to compensate by retreating into subjective fantasy, which then takes on a horrifying objectivity of its own. Schizophrenics are thus much given to hallucination and role playing as well as to obsessions with dismemberment (symbolic self-amputation or self-disposal) or with the merging of self into other identities. Ferdinand not only presents a ring and severed hand to his sister (his grotesque re-enactment of her betrothal and perverse literalization of giving her his hand in marriage) but also imagines himself to be a wolf, digs up corpses, and is observed at midnight “with the leg of a man / Upon his shoulder” (V.ii.14-15). The lycanthropy seems fittingly to dramatize the principle of Seneca (elaborated in his well-known moral epistle On Wrath) that man is never so near the beasts as when he is angry. But, as Elizabeth Brennan has suggested, Webster also seems to associate it with lovesickness. Treatises by Pierre Boaistuau and Jacques Ferrand both connect the jealousy of lovers with wolf madness,⁵ and Ferdinand, in a curious anticipation of his own disease, compares his sister's confession of remarriage to “The howling of a wolf” (III.ii.88). He also speaks of her children by Antonio as “young wolves” (IV.ii.259). Subconscious identification with the Duchess and her offspring would appear to color his rejection of them. Webster portrays the crazed duke not only as doomed to relive the horror of his crimes (“Strangling is a very quiet death” [V.iv.34]) and to live in terror of discovery but as experiencing also the schizophrenic's appalling sense of being both inside and outside his own physique. Ferdinand believes he is at once a wolf and not a wolf—strangely “hairy … on the inside”—and he therefore demands to have his sensation verified by being “Rip[ped] up” with “swords” (V.ii.17-19). A moment later we see him falling upon his shadow in a futile attempt to obliterate the dreadful “otherness” that oppresses him, and he would “throttle” it (V.ii.38) just as he has already had his sister throttled.

Otto Rank in his study of the double as a literary and psychological archetype analyzes the obsession with one's twin or shadow as a well-known form of narcissistic self-projection. This motif, rooted in the myths and customs of many cultures, whether primitive or highly developed, became especially popular with the rise of continental romanticism (doubtless because of its applicability to questions of identity and self-consciousness), and Rank therefore draws his examples mainly from nineteenth- and twentieth-century works. His insights of course are equally relevant to earlier literature, even if Renaissance dramatists, for instance, did not formulate such configurations discursively or express them in a post-Freudian vocabulary. In fact, Ferdinand's love-hatred for his twin sister, as Webster dramatizes it, exhibits a pattern surprisingly close to the constellation of actions and feelings that Rank regards as central to the model:

Always … [the] double works at cross-purposes with its prototype; and, as a rule, the catastrophe occurs in the relationship with a woman, predominantly ending in suicide by way of the death intended for the irksome persecutor. In a number of instances this situation is combined with a thoroughgoing persecutory delusion or is even replaced by it [Ferdinand's fear of his own shadow], thus assuming the picture of a total paranoiac system of delusions.⁶

Ferdinand torments and finally kills in his twin sister a version of himself, a figure who symbolizes—simultaneously but irreconcilably—his infatuation with and revulsion from his own ego. Many of the narratives that Rank adduces involve savage jealousy on the part of the protagonist when his alter ego becomes involved with a rival lover. In addition, a late variant of the Narcissus myth establishes a significant identity of the beautiful youth with his twin sister, after whose death the boy assuages his grief by redirecting his love from her to his own image. In some of the stories, also, the hero's shadow represents his accusing conscience or impending death. It can hardly be coincidental that Geoffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblemes (Leyden, 1586), a book that Webster seems to have known, presents the image of a murderer terrified by guilt in the form of his own shadow.⁷ The tragic constant in Rank's exploration of the Doppelgänger motif is the central character's incapacity to love, a condition that leads to unbearable frustration, fear, self-loathing, and despair and that almost invariably ends in death by violence and some form of displacement and self-depersonalization.

The half-acknowledged suggestions of incestuous passion with which Webster invests the character of Ferdinand are of course inseparable from other elements in his make-up—the painful loneliness, the savage aggression, the extreme volatility, the unhealthy fixation on the contamination of his bloodline, the tyrannical pride, the nightmarish imagination, the simultaneous self-absorption and fear of his own buried nature, the suicidal destructiveness, the almost childlike capacity for tears, the crippling remorse—and critics would perhaps be less inclined to doubt the sexual motive in his behavior if they did not consider it in isolation.⁸ Every facet of Ferdinand's conduct and, characteristically of course, his discontinuous speech,⁹ his “deformed silence[s]” (III.iii.58) punctuated by explosive laughter, reflects psychic incoherence and moral chaos. Together they exemplify by negation the quality, discussed in the previous chapter, that Delio praises in the stronger figures of the tragedy—namely, “Integrity of life” (V.v.120).

The passionate embodiment of wickedness in Ferdinand is partly, of course, the result of Webster's need to balance the equally passionate expression of goodness in his heroine. As their physical twinship implies, the two characters are complementary as well as opposed, each being defined primarily by means of intense emotional involvement with another human being. But it is the third member of the family, the Lord Cardinal, who furnishes the tragedy with a different and altogether more mysterious dimension of evil.

Like his sister, the “melancholy churchman” (I.i.157-158) is referred to throughout only by title. In the case of the Duchess, this emphasis on rank seems intended to establish her dramatically as a reigning princess and therefore to enhance her tragic stature; it in no way diminishes or limits her private sensibility, her magnetic individuality. But the anonymity of the Cardinal confers a shadowy remoteness upon him; and Webster seems deliberately to minimize particular traits in order to achieve something like the grandeur of generality. Like Duke Francisco in The White Devil, the prelate of The Duchess of Malfi tends to function behind the scenes and through the agency of subordinates, emerging as the most powerful but least knowable of the major figures—a cold character who in one way approaches the objectivity, even the absoluteness, of allegory yet who also in his opacity generates the fear peculiar to incomprehension. Webster's imagery suggests a man who is not only evil in himself but the source of evil in others. He is negatively creative: “the spring of his face is nothing but the engendering of toads …” (I.i.158-159); “That cardinal hath made more bad faces with his oppression than ever Michael Angelo made good ones …” (III.iii.51-52). The fire-immune “salamander” may live in the duke's violent “eye” (III.iii.49), but, as Bosola observes, the Cardinal “doth breed basilisks” in his, and therefore personifies death: “He's nothing else but murder” (V.ii.146-147). If Ferdinand portrays the chaotic and bestial in a specific individual, the Cardinal represents destruction made scientific, abstract, intellectual, and nihilistic. His allusion to Galileo's “fantastic glass” (II.iv.16) seems perfectly in character. He incarnates an evil rationalized to its first principles, elevated almost to the level of a metaphysical concept. Webster associates both brothers with the diabolical, but, whereas Ferdinand appears to be enthralled sexually by some personal demon, the Cardinal is the very spokesman for hell. Antonio remarks that “oracles / Hang at his lips” through which “the devil speaks” (I.i.184-186). According to Bosola, “Some fellows … are possessed with the devil, but this great fellow were able to possess the greatest devil, and make him worse” (I.i.45-47). At least Webster begins his characterization with some such distinction in mind. But then, typically, he blurs it in the final action, for the Cardinal forfeits his satanic dignity in the murderous scuffle that ends his life, wrecking the carefully wrought facade of icy control and dwindling in a trice to the cravenness of a “leveret” (V.v.45). Bosola speaks Webster's epitaph:

Now it seems thy greatness was only outward;
For thou fall'st faster of thyself, than calamity
Can drive thee.

(V.v.42-44)

As befits such a purposely distanced character, the play is all but silent about the Cardinal's motive. Of course the priest shares in his brother's revulsion for mingling “The royal blood of Arragon and Castile” (II.v.22) with that of a commoner, but he expresses no additional reason for implacable cruelty to the Duchess—cruelty that he not only approves but seems to initiate. He does not trouble, for instance, to plead the duke's excuse of desire for greater riches. We see him chiding his partner in revenge for “fly[ing] beyond [his] reason,” for allowing idle “rage” and “intemperate anger” to “deform” his outward behavior; and he shrewdly perceives the incipient dementia of which the rabid emotionalism of his brother is a symptom: “Are you stark mad?” The Cardinal “can be angry / Without this rupture” (II.v.46-58)—that is, without raising his voice—and, with characteristic detachment, can distinguish between his own and the duke's attitude toward vengeance: “though I counsell'd it, / The full of all th' engagement seem'd to grow / From Ferdinand” (V.ii.107-109). This tranquil, slightly enervated villainy, especially in the earlier acts of the tragedy, comes close to denying the Cardinal human status, and we think of Coleridge's idea of “motiveless malignity” as though the churchman were a sophisticated mutant of the conventional Vice—a figure whose function is simply to stand for depravity but from whom the traditional wit, energy, and active control have been drained away. Although this formulation has its attractions, it is oversimple, for the diabolical mystique that the character projects proves to be more illusory than real. The interior feelings, which at length emerge, are all too human and anything but vicelike—tormented conscience and panic in the face of death and damnation. Underneath, the Cardinal is more like Ferdinand than we are led at first to suppose, for both are profoundly terrified of themselves. As the duke cannot rid himself of his alter ego, which pursues him relentlessly in the form of a shadow, so is the Cardinal haunted by his own hostile image, reflected as a threatening shadow in his “fish-ponds”: “Methinks I see a thing, arm'd with a rake / That seems to strike at me:—” (V.v.5-7). The tortured conscience projects itself as a vision of eternal punishment.

Throughout most of the action Webster keeps the Cardinal in the background where, as a malign and inscrutable presence, he can evoke without explaining, the poisoned ethos in which all of the other characters must live. We hear more said about him than he tells us himself, and the churchman is notably absent from the entire fourth act, in which the sufferings of the Duchess mount to their tragic climax and resolution. But his influence is felt even when not seen. Politically, he appears stronger than his brother. Having already tested Bosola in villainous service before the action commences, he overrules Ferdinand's shortsighted inclination to appoint Antonio as intelligencer (“His nature is too honest for such business—”) and easily installs the substitute, although he “would not be seen in't” (I.i.225-230). He is closer in touch with the military and diplomatic affairs of Italy, about which we hear only vaguely, and appears indeed the éminence grise of international intrigue. It is he who asks about naval strategy (“Are the galleys come about?” [I.i.149]) and the emperor's need for his commission (“Must we turn soldier then?” [III.iii.1]). It is also he who “solicit[s] the state of Ancona / To have [the lovers] banish'd” (III.iii.66-67), who persuades the pope to seize the dukedom of Amalfi, and who, by his letter, procures Antonio's confiscated property for Julia. The Cardinal is instantly apprised by Ferdinand of the Duchess's delivery of a son and, though just as guilty of her murder as his brother, wears the camouflage of passivity, pretending even to Bosola to know nothing of her death. Later, but only after Ferdinand has collapsed into guilty madness, we see him take more active charge of events, covering for his brother by inventing the apparition of “an old woman … murder'd … for her riches” (V.ii.92-94), ridding himself of his too inquisitive mistress with the poisoned book, and trying, though now unsuccessfully, to manipulate Bosola. It is ironic that Antonio naively places his hope for reconciliation in an appeal to the Cardinal and that the churchman prepares the stage for his own death by instructing the courtiers to ignore both the duke's and his own “mad tricks” (V.iv.15) or cries for help. But both ironies depend in large measure on a perception of the prelate as the chief source of Machiavellian power in the play.

Except in the final movement, then, when the mask falls from his face, the Cardinal contributes to the play's atmosphere of peril and uncertainty. Webster brings him into the foreground infrequently, and only then to fulfill one of two purposes, neither of which reveals the inner man. The first is to join Ferdinand in an antiphonal browbeating of the Duchess, to foist upon her the “terrible good counsel” (I.i.312) not to remarry that she herself recognizes as stagy and artificial: “I think this speech between you both was studied, / It came so roundly off” (I.i.329-330). Here the Aragonian brothers speak, so to say, with a single voice, and the doubling is intended to create, as a chorus might, the effect of the same evil multiplied. As in Pinter's The Birthday Party, in which Goldberg and McCann similarly assault Stanley, Webster gives us a phalanx of oppression that cannot help but garner sympathy for the victim and underscore the isolation of her plight. But nothing of the Cardinal's individuality emerges here.

The second variation from pattern is, of course, the by-plot with Julia. The scenes that present the churchman with his mistress do provide a kind of close-up on the character, and these—especially the poisoning by means of a Bible—have sometimes been regarded as a melodramatic excrescence, a sensationalist departure from naturalism, that is part of the regrettable “caotica carneficina” of which Baldini speaks.¹⁰ It is true that voluptuary and murderous prelates belong more to the conventional theatrics and anti-Catholicism of blood tragedy than to psychological verisimilitude, but Webster's rather gothic sideplay is not without structural and moral relevance. The entirely mechanical sexuality of the Cardinal's relationship to Julia shows us the thematic conjunction of love and death in yet another aspect—the seriocomic. Possessing neither the human warmth of the Duchess's commitment to Antonio nor the polymorphous perversity of Ferdinand's suppressed passion, the Cardinal's almost farcical entanglement with Julia is dramatized as merely a cynical and finally tedious experiment in physical gratification, an essentially casual and hypocritical affair devoid of passion and even of pleasure. She pretends affection only to secure privilege and to extract information. He loves her “wisely” (that is, “jealously”) at first (II.iv.24-25), keeping her docile through dependency, then wearying of the encumbrance, regards her as his “ling'ring consumption” of whom he would “by any means … be quit” (V.ii.228-230). Total egotism and the absence of genuine attachment make the moral point and make it appropriately in the spirit of grim parody akin to the self-seeking automatons of The Revenger's Tragedy. Sexuality, whether fruitful and normative as with the Duchess or stifled and violent as with Ferdinand or cynically routine as with the Cardinal, is seen always to eventuate in murder, and the common dust to which the tragedy reduces such disparities suggests yet again that, in Webster's universe, physical death is the inexorable concomitant of erotic relationships irrespective of their psychological or ethical health.

Webster may have invented the Cardinal's lubricity as a polar contrast to the Duchess's “divine … continence,” which, in the words of her most devoted admirer, “cuts off all lascivious, and vain hope” (I.i.199-200). Nevertheless, he treats these episodes with calculated superficiality as though to show us how desiccated and emotionally hollow the churchman fundamentally is. His keeping of a mistress accords with his other public accomplishments—playing tennis on wager, dancing, courting ladies, and fighting single combats—all of them “flashes” that “superficially hang on him, for form” and bear no significant relation to his “melancholy” and “inward character” (I.i.154-157). Webster's emblem of this space between the inner and outer selves is the ceremony at Loretto at which the Cardinal divests himself of his ecclesiastical regalia, puts on military armor, and banishes the Duchess and her family from Ancona.

This formal spectacle, presented in dumbshow but accompanied by the “solemn music” of “divers Churchmen” (III.iv.7) and the commentary of pilgrims, enacts the Cardinal's self-depersonalization as well as the Duchess's expulsion from a city state. The silence of the protagonists lends them, as in a tableau vivant, a special objectivity. The scene not only interposes maximal aesthetic distance between us and its focal character but also serves as a parallel of sorts to Ferdinand's ritual punishing of the Duchess. Both brothers make their violence ceremonial, imposing a masquelike artifice upon actions that stem from and encapsulate moral disorder. The Cardinal, for instance, symbolically annuls his sister's marriage by removing her ring; later, Ferdinand presents the Duchess with a wedding ring of his own but attaches a dead hand to the gift. The Cardinal's rite is intended, among other things, to deprive the Duchess of her true legitimacy as wife, mother, and ruler. As such, it must stress the disjunction between the poignant feelings of individuals and the harsh impersonality of officialdom as embodied in municipal pageantry. Public metamorphosis from priest to soldier institutionalizes the subversion of human and religious values in the play. As the sword replaces the pectoral cross and the accouterments of bellicosity those of pastoral concern, so mercy yields to retribution and love to death. One recalls Prince John's rebuke to the rebellious Archbishop of York in Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV, who, in donning armor at Gaultree Forest, has become “an iron man … Turning the word to sword and life to death” (IV.ii.8-10).¹¹ Webster's Cardinal thus gives shape to the darkest of cynicisms. He can condemn his sister for feigning a pilgrimage, for using religion as strategy (a “riding-hood / To keep her from the sun and tempest” [III.iii.60-61]), yet encourage Bosola to violate the seal of the confessional by bribing a priest for purposes of gathering intelligence (V.ii.135-137). In the public ceremony, at least emblematically, he abandons even the pretense of his sacerdotal office.

Although Webster obviously took pains to individualize the “Arragonian brethren” (V.v.82), he also insisted upon their complementarity. Bosola characterizes them as a pair—two “plum-trees, that grow crooked over standing pools,” that, although richly “o'erladen with fruit,” feed only “crows, pies, and caterpillars” (I.i.49-51); their twin “hearts are hollow graves, / Rotten, and rotting others,” and their “vengeance, / Like two chain'd bullets, … goes arm in arm” (IV.ii.319-321). This imagery, of course, emphasizes their moral stagnancy, their mutual corruption and association with decay and death. Both brothers, being wifeless and childless, represent sterility in different guises and so contrast starkly with the natural fecundity and homemaking instincts of their sister. She produces children; they foster only “flatterers, panders, intelligencers, atheists, and a thousand such political monsters” (I.i.161-163). The shared destructiveness of the brothers is suitably embodied in their common commitments to soldiery. Both threaten enemies at moments of high anger with having them “hew'd … to pieces.” Ferdinand, as noted earlier, applies the phrase to his sister (II.v.31); the Cardinal, late in the play, applies it to Bosola: “I'll have thee hew'd in pieces” (V.ii.292). The play would seem to bear out Castruchio's precept (though in an altered sense) that a “realm is never long in quiet, where the ruler is a soldier” (I.i.103-104). Ironically, Webster also makes the Duchess a soldier at one point—but, of course, metaphorically in order to stress not her malignant force but her quasi-masculine daring:

                                                                                as men in some great battles,
By apprehending danger, have achiev'd
Almost impossible actions—I have heard soldiers say so—
So I, through frights, and threat'nings, will assay
This dangerous venture. …

(I.i.344-348)

Both Ferdinand and the Cardinal practice their corruptions in an ambience of secrecy and intrigue, a fact to which Webster calls attention by putting them both in possession of “master-keys” for gaining entry to private apartments: the duke obtains such a key from Bosola to enter the Duchess's chamber (III.i.80), and the Cardinal gives a similar one to Bosola so that he may secretly dispose of Julia's corpse (V.ii.327). The sexual suggestiveness of keys being inserted covertly into palace locks is disturbingly relevant to both contexts. Both brothers, of course, are practiced self-disguisers. As the Cardinal veils his interior gloom under an array of social or sporting activities, so Ferdinand “speaks with others' tongues” and “hears … With others' ears” (I.i.173-174).

The most important point in common is of course the remorse of conscience that both brothers suffer for their collaborative murder, although, like the protagonists of Macbeth, they suffer it in psychic isolation from each other. Also as in Shakespeare's tragedy, their doom is despair. Ferdinand goes to pieces before our eyes, actually becoming like the madmen whom he had set upon his sister and experiencing himself the agony of hopelessness to which he had sought to drive her. The Cardinal, although he too changes inwardly, maintains an uncanny reserve, “Bears up in blood” and “seems fearless” (V.ii.336), almost to the end. After the strangling, however, Bosola notices that the cleric has “grown wondrous melancholy” (V.ii.202), and Julia, observing that he is “much alter'd,” tries (with results fatal to herself) to “remove / This lead from off [his] bosom” (V.ii.231-233). Both figures acknowledge the reality of their own damnation, which amounts to a kind of negative identity achieved in defeat. Ferdinand babbles wildly about carrying “a bribe” “to hell” (V.ii.41-42); his brother credits “the devil” with taking away all “confidence in prayer” (V.iv.27-28), is “puzzled” about the “one material fire” (V.v.1-2) that is said to burn the damned in distinct ways, and finally wishes only to “Be laid by, and never thought of” (V.v.90). Ferdinand moralizes his own death in a couplet that clearly includes his ecclesiastical accomplice:

Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust,
Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.

(V.v.72-73)

All-powerful in life, both brothers end as cyphers of their own fashioning, and Webster reinforces the irony of self-destruction by having the Cardinal cry out for assistance (“Help me, I am your brother”), only to be dealt his death-wound by a lunatic Ferdinand who thinks he is on a battlefield and facing his betrayer: “The devil! / My brother fight upon the adverse party?” (V.v.51-52). As one evil sister eliminates the other in King Lear, so with the wicked brothers of The Duchess of Malfi. But, oddly, Webster complicates the relationship at the very last moment. Having consistently built up the Cardinal as the less human and more unfeeling of the pair, he imparts a touch of fraternal concern to the churchman in his dying utterance of which Ferdinand, even sane, would be incapable:

                                                                                                    Look to my brother:
He gave us these large wounds, as we were struggling
Here i' th' rushes. …

(V.v.87-89)

This confirms Antonio's earlier hint that the churchman has done “Some good” (I.i.167). In addition, it may be worth noting that Webster suggests a link between the deaths of the prelate and his sister by having him echo her final word, “Mercy!” (IV.ii.353), just before Bosola runs him through: “O, mercy!” (V.v.41). But the verbal parallel only reinforces an ironic contrast, for whereas the Duchess had directed her final appeal to God, the churchman seems to address his to a human being, the threatening Bosola. The impenetrable mystery of the Cardinal's emotion is never wholly dispelled.

Webster seems to have conceived the vengeful siblings of The Duchess of Malfi in a way that, while intelligible in social and moral terms familiar to the Renaissance, also anticipated some insights of twentieth-century pathology. In his Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Erich Fromm distinguishes two kinds of necrophilia: (a) an overt type that involves erotic or quasi-erotic attraction to dead bodies and often an obsession with graves, physical decay, the dismemberment of corpses, and the like; and (b) a more generalized type, sometimes manifested in political or military figures (Adolf Hitler is the principal example), that may be described simply as a deep-seated hatred of life, a desire to transform what is alive into its opposite, a love of destruction for its own sake, and an “exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical.”¹² Both types of necrophiliac personality may evince a considerable degree of sadism, but, in the second type, the cruelties tend to become bureaucratized and impersonal. Hitler, the murderer of millions, is said, for instance, to have evaded personal visits to the front during World War II because he was squeamish about seeing dead or wounded soldiers.¹³ The typical necrophile is quintessentially self-destructive and often has strong impulses toward suicide. He also tends to overvalue the past as this is symbolically embodied in established institutions, rules, laws, castes, traditions, and family property. In his thinking, whether personal, philosophical, or political, “the past is sacred, nothing new is valuable, drastic change is a crime against the ‘natural’ [that is, the rigidly conservative] order.”¹⁴ Fromm derives his conception of necrophilia from Freud's dualistic opposition of the life and death instincts, even going so far as to hypothesize a causal link between the child's incestuous or Oedipal attraction to the mother and the transformation of this magnetism in certain autistic or narcissistic individuals into a desire for burial. The child symbolically converts his mother, the life-giver and sustainer, into the smothering annihilator and bringer of death; the womb becomes the tomb.

Of course, we need accept neither Fromm's theories nor his assumptions to recognize in his clinical data a number of the symptoms or traits that Webster either invented or observed from experience in order to characterize his two savage antagonists. Obviously, Ferdinand with his incestuous fixation and his compulsive interest in artificial corpses, severed limbs, coffins, nooses, and the ritual details of execution, corresponds to Fromm's first model. The Cardinal, with his chillier, efficient, remote-control commitment to death, approximates the second type more closely. From Fromm's point of view such behavioral differences are less significant than examining the common sources from which they originate. What is clearest about the Aragonian brothers to a modern reader or theatregoer is their equally virulent hatred of natural vitality, of emotional freedom, of social flexibility, and of spiritual growth—the values with which their sister chooses to identify herself.

In characterizing the Duchess, Webster faced several related difficulties. First, he had to idealize her sufficiently to serve as a worthy counterweight to her depraved brothers without sacrificing the vulnerability—indeed, the fallibility—that would make her credibly human. He needed also to emphasize the private nature of a public woman, to show the personal charm and individuality that would not only explain but make emotionally acceptable the unusual relationship with her lover. At the same time, he could not compromise the dignity essential to an authentically royal and tragic, as opposed to bourgeois or merely pathetic and sentimental, heroine. Finally, since the facts of the Duchess's story cast her so prominently in the role of sufferer and victim, it was important to devise a means for avoiding the impression of abject helplessness and passivity and for making the character dramatically compelling. Obviously, no simple solution to such problems was available, but in adjusting a fundamentally strong, free, and commanding personality to a situation of extreme restraint, Webster had to suggest untapped reserves of stamina in the character and rely heavily on psychic conflict within her. By defying her brothers' wishes, the Duchess enters a pathless “wilderness” without “friendly clew” or “guide” (I.i.359-361). The tragic journey on which she embarks is largely solitary in both the physical and spiritual senses, and, ironically, this is true despite her romantic motivation. Her husband cannot protect her nor even be at her side in the crisis—a crisis that Webster dramatizes as a wrenching ordeal of self-discovery.

In addition, the playwright structured his drama so as to prevent, or at least to minimize, the damaging effect of resolute evil in simple black and white or melodramatic conflict with unexamined and untested virtue. The lady's marriage and its consummation constitute the primary events of the first act.¹⁵ Here we are introduced to the Duchess in both her public and private spheres, the dramatist carefully establishing both her regal self-possession under pressure and her strength of will. The second act centers on her pregnancy and lying-in with its ominous aftermath—the brothers' nasty reaction to the news of the childbirth. Webster cleverly delays the face-to-face confrontation between the duke and his sister until Act III, the birth of additional children and Ferdinand's curious stasis having intervened. The duke's shocking intrusion then leads naturally to the flight of the lovers and the forced return of the Duchess to Amalfi. Such an arrangement allows the dramatist to devote the whole of the fourth act to the imprisonment, torture, and climactic death of his heroine, nevertheless keeping her atmospherically present in Act V by means of the echo scene and memorially so in Ferdinand's madness and in the rapid accumulation of deaths that directly or indirectly stem from her murder. By compressing the tragic career of his title figure into four acts and thereby placing the emotional catharsis early, Webster risked a letdown after her disappearance from the stage, but he knew the even greater risk of trying to prolong dramatic tension in a character who is the receiver rather than the initiator of the action.

Although Webster intends his audience to respond positively to the Duchess, he does not rob her behavior, particularly at the beginning, of a certain ambiguity. In this, of course, he shows her kinship not only to her brothers but also to the other major figures of the tragedy. She herself verbalizes the idea during her proposal to Antonio:

                              as a tyrant doubles with his words,
And fearfully equivocates, so we
Are forc'd to express our violent passions
In riddles, and in dreams, and leave the path
Of simple virtue, which was never made
To seem the thing it is not.

(I.i.443-448)

Her point, of course, is that in a world of inequality—a world in which social station and political power govern human behavior more forcibly than romantic feeling—honest emotion and therefore the actions and language employed to express it must to some extent take on the protective coloring of the alien moral environment. Indeed, the Duchess employs some of the same “politic equivocation” in her own affairs that she later scorns in a Ferdinand who wants Antonio's “head in a business” (III.v.28-29). Forbidden love, however commendable by some higher standard, may involve a conscious deviation from “the path / Of simple virtue” as ordinarily or conventionally understood. Webster opens the play with Antonio's eloquent report of the French court, a court where the king is “judicious” and his council “provident,” where nobility of character, genuine merit, and the pursuit of justice, truth, and other enlightened or humanistic ideals promote “a fix'd order” and “blessed government” (I.i.6-17). Strategically placed as it is, this passage defines by contrast the corruptions that the Duchess courageously opposes and by which she is also touched.

When the Cardinal alludes with some hostility to his sister's “high blood” (I.i.297), he himself enforces the double meaning of the phrase, correctly perceiving that aristocratic rank and sexual passion are correlative ingredients of her personality. Webster leaves us in no doubt about the sincerity of the Duchess's romantic feeling for her steward, but the play does raise questions about her prudence in selecting him, about her single-minded refusal even to consider the objections of her brothers, and about her devious means both of prosecuting her suit and of concealing it from the world. In his “character” of the lady, Antonio prepares the audience for her initial entrance by underlining her social graces—her “discourse,” which is “full of rapture” yet not overvoluble, and the characteristic “look” that she “throws upon a man” causing him “to dote” upon her “sweet countenance.” He quickly adds that these smiles, far from being flirtatious, bespeak “divine … continence” and “such noble virtue” as extends even to her “very sleeps.” But his summary encomium, that she is the mirror of perfection in whom all other ladies should “dress themselves,” elicits a skeptical laugh from Delio: “Fie Antonio, / You play the wire-drawer with her commendations” (I.i.190-206). The steward's praise is winning enough and wholly plausible in a future lover, but it is also hyperbolical. We think of Browning's injudiciously cordial Duchess of Ferrara, whose “looks went everywhere.” When Cariola ponders in soliloquy “Whether the spirit of greatness or of woman” (I.i.504) predominates in her mistress, she speaks not only for herself but for us, for Webster insists strongly on the double-sidedness of the character and makes drama out of the tension.

The tenacious will with which Webster so often endows his major figures is evident in the Duchess from the start. Young, self-confident, and beautiful, she has already decided to take a second husband before the action begins, and we learn of her unshakable determination at an important dramatic moment—just after her brothers have pummeled her with sinister warnings and she has promised, or at least seemed to them to promise, “I'll never marry—” (I.i.302):

Shall this move me? If all my royal kindred
Lay in my way unto this marriage,
I'd make them my low footsteps. …

(I.i.341-343)

These are brave but rash words. Although not unaware that she is inviting danger, the Duchess does betray signs of overconfidence, if not of naiveté. When Antonio during the betrothal asks in bewilderment about the ferocity of her brothers, she can answer,

                                                                      Do not think of them—
All discord, without this circumference,
Is only to be pitied, and not fear'd:
Yet, should they know it, time will easily
Scatter the tempest.

(I.i.468-472)

If Ferdinand and the Cardinal do not realize of what stuff their sister is made, she, equally, misestimates them. Bosola's praise of Antonio gains her trust too easily, and she worsens her plight disastrously by volunteering her husband's identity and by allowing her false confidant to determine the strategy of her escape to Loretto. She also exacerbates Ferdinand's rage needlessly by the glib tone in which she defends second marriages: “Diamonds are of most value / They say, that have pass'd through most jewellers' hands” (I.i.299-300).

Webster implants a few hints that in spite of her admirable resistance to tyranny, the Duchess is less than totally honest with herself. She may give her heart without restraint to Antonio, but she is willing to “let old wives report” that she “wink'd” (I.i.348-349) in choosing him; if this verb does not carry some slight feeling of guilt (as Brown's gloss suggests), it surely conveys a capacity for shutting her eyes to unwelcome realities. Nor does she consider that damaged reputation should be the price of her romantic unconventionality. In making Cariola witness to her legal contract “Per verba de presenti,” she stresses that concealment is everything: “To thy known secrecy I have given up / More than my life, my fame:—” (I.i.350-351). For all her courage and intelligence, the Duchess is unpracticed in court intrigue. Failing to foresee or provide in advance for emergencies, she is driven to improvise defensive measures that arouse more suspicion than they allay—wearing unfashionable gowns to disguise pregnancy, locking the palace guard into their chambers on a pretext of theft, arranging Antonio's departure for Ancona under color of his having mismanaged household accounts. Without detracting from her generosity and essential goodness, Webster manages to give the impression that danger heightens the Duchess's passion and lends it spice. Words that she puts into her husband's mouth at the tense moment when her brother has silently entered behind her back reflect an aspect of her own psychology: “Love mix'd with fear is sweetest” (III.ii.66).

The powerful effect that The Duchess of Malfi can make in the theatre results largely from the vitality of its heroine in the midst of so macabre and deadly a setting. What everyone remembers about the character apart from her impressive fortitude is her appetite for life. Webster of course associates her with nature and natural processes. She contrasts herself with those happy “birds that live i' th' field” that “may choose their mates” freely and “carol their sweet pleasures to the spring” (III.v.18-21); later in her prison she pursues the bird metaphor by observing darkly that “The robin-redbreast, and the nightingale, / Never live long in cages” (IV.ii.13-14). The Duchess is a free spirit in a world of stifling constriction. Strangling is the appropriate symbol of her doom, and her momentary revival, Desdemona-like, suggests the tenacity of her grip on survival. The play underlines her beauty but only as an aspect of moral character and humaneness. Bosola mentions the “shape of loveliness” more perfectly discernible “in her tears, than in her smiles” (IV.i.7-8), a winsome presence that Webster sets in obvious antithesis to the repulsive cosmetic deformities of the grotesque Old Lady.

Royal bearing in no way undercuts the Duchess's healthy physicality. The drama does not spare us the clinical details of her pregnancy, allowing us actually to witness her “most vulturous eating of the apricocks” that Bosola offers both to confirm his suspicions that she is “breeding” (II.ii.1-3) and to degrade her with fruit ripened in “horse-dung” (II.i.140).¹⁶ A by-product of this episode is the perception that her ready enjoyment of nature's “dainties” (II.i.143) overrides any fear of poison. The delightful scene in which she and Antonio prepare for bed shows us her lighthearted domesticity, combining it with both a sense of exalted rank and the verbal equivalent of erotic foreplay:

ANTONIO:
I must lie here.
DUCHESS:
                                                            Must? you are a lord of mis-rule.
ANTONIO:
Indeed, my rule is only in the night.
DUCHESS:
To what use will you put me?
ANTONIO:
                                                                                                    We'll sleep together:—
DUCHESS:
Alas, what pleasure can two lovers find in sleep?

(III.ii.7-10)

Such warm and relaxed merriment provides the perfect context for Ferdinand's chilling invasion of her privacy, but the sense of humor thus revealed is all-important to Webster's effect of three-dimensional humanity. So, too, is the evidence of the Duchess's maternal instinct:

I pray thee, look thou giv'st my little boy
Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl
Say her prayers, ere she sleep.

(IV.ii.203-205)

One of the ways in which Webster successfully conveys the impression of dual role in his title figure, insisting equally on her public image as regnant princess and on her private personality as wife and mother, is to define her internal struggle in terms of a dialectic between heroic self-assertion and religious humility. The Duchess never abandons her Christian faith in toto, but, in attempting to reduce her to despair, her persecutors bring her very close to the abyss into which they themselves have fallen. Her spiritual welfare requires the patience of a saint and martyr, but her role as tragic protagonist demands a more egoistic, less passive display of energy. Again, Webster does full justice to both emphases, mixing and alternating them fluidly enough to produce that mysterious amalgam of sympathy, sentiment, and awe essential to major tragedy.

Fundamentally Christian values inform both the attitudes and actions of the Duchess. She regards her secret union, despite its irregularity, as “a sacrament o' th' church” (IV.i.39) and clearly intends to have it publicly solemnized as soon as this should become feasible: “We are now man and wife, and 'tis the church / That must but echo this …” (I.i.492-493). Her belief in the afterlife is strong. She parts from her husband in the hope of rejoining him “in the eternal church” (III.v.71), she speaks of the “excellent company / In th' other world” that a condemned person “Know[s]” she will “meet” (IV.ii.211-212), and she greets death on her knees, confident of entering “heaven-gates” (IV.ii.232). Bosola is impressed by her willingness to die and by a quiet composure under duress that implies spiritual depth. He speaks of her “noble” behavior, of the “majesty” she lends “to adversity,” and of “her silence” that “expresseth more than if she spake” (IV.i.5-10). She can ask pardon of her brother at one point (IV.i.31) and, with becoming piety, forgive her executioners. Webster suggests that her retention of sanity in the midst of howling madmen is “a miracle” and adds to the imagery of divine judgment (“molten brass” and “flaming sulphur”) a distant echo from Isaiah that perhaps associates the Duchess with messianic sacrifice:

I am acquainted with sad misery,
As the tann'd galley-slave is with his oar;
Necessity makes me suffer constantly,
And custom makes it easy. …

(IV.ii.23-30)¹⁷

But, of course, the religion of the Duchess is not free of conflict or inconsistency. Feigning a pilgrimage, what Cariola calls “jesting with religion,” gives her conscience no pause, and she is impatient with her servant for objecting to the ruse: “Thou art a superstitious fool— / Prepare us instantly for our departure” (III.ii.317-320). She is torn between repudiating the tendency of her baser-born spouse to accept injustice too supinely (“Must I, like to a slave-born Russian, / Account it praise to suffer tyranny?”) and the orthodox notion that earthly chastisement may be a necessary form of divine guidance:

And yet, O Heaven, thy heavy hand is in't.
I have seen my little boy oft scourge his top
And compar'd myself to't: naught made me e'er
Go right but heaven's scourge-stick.

(III.v.76-81)

She questions whether identity, as human beings know it, continues after death (“Dost thou think we shall know one another, / In th'other world?” [IV.ii.18-19]), and her pessimism at its lowest ebb takes on a tone close to nihilism: “I could curse the stars … nay the world / To its first chaos” (IV.i.96-99). She threatens to teach her children to curse before they can prattle “since they were born accurs'd” (III.v.115), and she begs “heaven” to “cease crowning martyrs” long enough to “punish” her brothers (IV.i.107-108). At one juncture she seems ready to pervert penitence into suicide: “The church enjoins fasting: / I'll starve myself to death” (IV.i.75-76). She moves from a savage hostility toward Bosola (“Were I a man / I'd beat that counterfeit face into thy other” [III.v.117-118]) to an embrace of the death wish: “I long to bleed” (IV.i.109).

The dynamics of the fourth act—what might be called the “passion” of the Duchess—are built upon her psychic progression from outward control through frustration, rage, and near-despair to a deeper kind of serenity rooted in self-recognition, the tragic acceptance of evil, and quickened religious faith. As Sir Walter Raleigh, another great prisoner, wrote at about the same time that Webster was composing his play, “It is … Death alone that can suddenly make man to know himselfe.”¹⁸ First we hear of her sorrow in terms of its external manifestations—of her majestic bearing, of her tears, silences, and “melancholy … fortify'd / With a strange disdain”; but Bosola observes that this very “restraint” causes her to “apprehend / Those pleasures she's kept from” (IV.i.11-15) with emotional intensity. After the gift of the dead hand and her exposure to the wax corpses, the Duchess desires only to escape from life, to join her husband in death. Informed that she must continue to live, she begins to suffer mental “daggers,” describing herself as having forfeited even her sentience, as “a thing so wretch'd / As cannot pity itself” (IV.i.89-90). At this point she comes near to losing her self-possession, and Webster marks her transition to a more precarious state of soul by her abandonment of prayer: “I'll go pray: no, / I'll go curse:—” (IV.i.95-96). Impotent anger follows as she thrashes out at the hostile stars, the seasons, the very universe, and as Bosola reminds her tauntingly that “the stars shine still” (IV.i.100). Ironically, his underlining of her cosmic helplessness also asserts a remote and mysterious order, suggests that, even in so black a world as Webster's Italy, light is not wholly extinguishable. In trying to loosen her hold upon coherence, Bosola unwittingly affirms that, in some sort, it exists.

The battery of torments to which the Duchess is subjected seems to shift emphasis from physical shock to mental disturbance—from mortuary and Grand Guignol horrors to the rout of madmen, conceived of as a means of forcing disintegration of the mind upon her. The protracted antimasque, made up of music, dance, lyric verse, and satiric prose, is an orderly representation of chaos, a grotesque ballet of rational collapse that not only puts the lady's psychic strength to its severest test but that, in doing so, also nerves her to combat fear in its most existential form, the threat to her very selfhood. Out of the proliferating references to physical dissolution in the tradition of contemptus mundi, out of the wild confusion of Bedlam identities and Bosola's protean disguises, the Duchess somehow plucks the fierceness to overpower despair and to recapture the sense of who and what she is. Her torturers try to shatter her inner core by surrounding her with a kaleidoscopic swirl of frenzied movement, sepulchral chatter, and macabre ritual, and so attempting to erase the boundaries that separate her from her enforced context. But in a person of the Duchess's independence the barrier between sanity and insanity is not so easily breached. They succeed only in prompting her to more resilient self-definition: “I am Duchess of Malfi still” (IV.ii.142).¹⁹ She stands for a moment against staggering external and internal forces like a female Coriolanus, “As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin” (Coriolanus, V.iii.36-37).

This reaffirmation is more than a simple assertion of the self as dramatized earlier in the lady's defiance of marital conventions. It implies spiritual enlargement and growth, deepened perception, indeed a fundamental readjustment of values. Certainly it includes the readiness to face execution in an expanded frame of reference, for the Duchess no longer seeks merely to escape further suffering:

                                                                                                    tell my brothers
That I perceive death, now I am well awake,
Best gift is they can give, or I can take.

(IV.ii.223-225)

Regal calm becomes the outward expression both of protest against injustice and of tragic acceptance of the inevitable. Perhaps some such ambivalence is to be inferred from her puzzling image of death's doors as double-hinged and opening “both ways” (IV.ii.222). At any rate, authority and dignified submission in about equal measure define the Duchess's voice as she approaches her end, and the two tones blend movingly in her death speech:

Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength
Must pull down heaven upon me:—
Yet stay; heaven-gates are not so highly arch'd
As princes' palaces, they that enter there
Must go upon their knees.—[Kneels.] Come violent death,
Serve for mandragora to make me sleep!
Go tell my brothers, when I am laid out,
They then may feed in quiet.

(IV.ii.230-237)

The Duchess does not go gentle into her good night, but in addition to the aristocratic poise there is a feeling of appropriate release from long struggle and a satisfying sense of tragic closure.

Like Gloucester in King Lear, Webster's heroine moves from limited awareness (with perhaps a touch of self-deception and complacency) through torture and despondency to a deeper comprehension of evil and to a more accepting and transcendent vision of reality. But Webster makes her seem sturdier than Gloucester by virtue of her vulnerability as a woman and by adding the stimulus to mental breakdown to which even Lear succumbs and to which she proves miraculously impervious. The sanity that the Duchess preserves even at the heart of her long nightmare lends her a special quality of heroism. It nullifies in a sense Cariola's earlier comment about the “fearful madness” (I.i.506) of marrying Antonio, and it also prepares the theatrical contrast to Ferdinand's lunacy after her exemplary life has been blotted out. The whole spectacle of the Duchess's suffering and death represents a dramatic verification in a profounder sense than Antonio could know of his distilled praise of his future wife: “She stains the time past, lights the time to come” (I.i.209). Indeed, the tragedy does characterize its title figure as a source of effulgence enclosed temporally and spatially by darkness. And Webster works this symbolism almost surrealistically into the tenebrous staging of the echo scene where Antonio, musing significantly on ruins, suddenly glimpses the image of his murdered wife as “a face folded in sorrow” illuminated by “a clear light” (V.iii.44-45).

Our complexity of response to the Duchess as a personality in whom egoism and religious submission are somehow coordinated would seem to be related, as so often in Webster, to her own consciousness of self as a tragic protagonist. This reflexiveness, like that of Shakespeare's Richard II (whom Webster might have recalled), may imply a tendency to solipsism. Somewhat indulgently, perhaps, she can regard herself—or enjoy being regarded—as an appropriate subject for the painter, the sculptor, or the tragedian:

DUCHESS:
                                                                                          who do I look like now?
CARIOLA:
Like to your picture in the gallery,
A deal of life in show, but none in practice;
Or rather like some reverend monument
Whose ruins are even pitied.
DUCHESS:
                                                                                                                        Very proper:
And Fortune seems only to have her eyesight
To behold my tragedy. …

(IV.ii.30-36)

But the Duchess's response to or use of these artistic and theatrical allusions also reflects an attempt (as is traditional in revenge tragedy) to objectify and therefore to understand and place her own experience. Silence is more threatening to her than noise because it throws her back upon the formless terrors of her own worst imaginings. Like Richard, she needs to hear sad stories of the death of kings as a way of enlarging and, in one sense, depersonalizing her situation:

DUCHESS:
                                                                                                                                                      sit down;
Discourse to me some dismal tragedy.
CARIOLA:
O, 'twill increase your melancholy.
DUCHESS:
                                                                                                    Thou art deceiv'd
To hear of greater grief would lessen mine—. …

(IV.ii.7-10)

In spite of the obvious analogue to Shakespeare, this is a far cry from the sentimentalism of Richard's “Tell thou the lamentable tale of me / And send the hearers weeping to their beds” (Richard II, V.i.44-45).²⁰

As a royal and necessarily ceremonial figure, the Duchess is by definition a player of roles; her acceptance of the tragic role forced upon her by her cruel brothers and by her own desire for emotional fulfillment is more a means of self-confrontation than a mawkish escape from reality: “I account this world a tedious theatre, / For I do play a part in't 'gainst my will” (IV.i.84-85). She has earlier complained of the topsy-turvydom of a state in which decency and genuineness must disguise themselves to the forces of corrupt power: “O misery! methinks unjust actions / Should wear these masks and curtains, and not we:—” (III.ii.158-159). By seeing herself as one of the numerous tragic “princes” with which “Fortune's wheel is overcharg'd” (III.v.96), the Duchess connects herself psychologically with a whole pattern of history and literature, at once establishing a traditional context for her fall and serving, for the moment, as her own chorus. Nor does Webster invoke the Mirror for Magistrates concept lazily or as a mere cliché. Antonio introduces the image of the looking glass, as noted earlier, when he suggests in his “character” of the Duchess that she is the model for lesser ladies (I.i.204-205). The familiar metaphor then comes alive in an unexpectedly dramatic way when “the glass” (III.ii.1) is imported as a stage property. We mark the downward acceleration of her ill fortune from the ironic moment that the Duchess, looking into her glass as she undresses, observes that her “hair tangles” and begins to “wax gray” (III.ii.53-59). It is this same glass, apparently, that a few seconds later reflects not only her own changing image but the freezing presence of her twin. A perception about identity is wedded to the sudden awareness of external danger, a link with which the tragedy in other respects is much concerned. (Both Ferdinand and the Cardinal, as we have noted, also have to contend with alien terrors in the form of self-images—shadows or reflections in water.) The Duchess of Malfi not only appropriates some of Richard II's tragic self-consciousness; she also has a “mirror scene” of her own—one as fully theatrical and thematically suggestive as his.

Notes

1. J. R. Mulryne, “The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi,” in Jacobean Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 1 (London: Edward Arnold, 1960), p. 222.

2. Various critics have pointed out that Ferdinand could scarcely hope to profit materially from his sister's murder inasmuch as her son by her first husband would logically inherit the duchy. John Russell Brown in his note on this passage suggests (rightly, it seems to me) that the duke's words represent “an instinctive attempt to ‘cover up’ … deep feeling” (The Duchess of Malfi, p. 132).

3. The Bawd in Shakespeare's Pericles, for instance, employs the term in its sexual meaning: “she'd do the deeds of darkness …” (IV.vi.28). See also King Lear: “A servingman … serv'd the lust of my mistress' heart, and did the act of darkness with her …” (III.iv.84-87). Jonson uses the phrase in The Devil Is an Ass (V.vi.50). Emilia puns on the expression in answer to Desdemona's question, “Woulds't thou do such a deed for all the world?”: “I might do 't as well i' th' dark” (Othello, IV.iii.66-69).

4. Vernon, The Garden and the Map: Schizophrenia in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), pp. 23-24.

5. Brennan, “The Relationship between Brother and Sister in the Plays of John Webster,” Modern Language Review, 58 (1963), 493-494.

6. Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. and ed. Harry Tucker, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), p. 33.

7. See R. E. R. Madelaine, “The Duchess of Malfi and Two Emblems in Whitney and Peacham,” Notes & Queries, 29 (1982), 146-147.

8. F. L. Lucas, although he notices the hint of incest in The Fair Maid of the Inn, regards this element in The Duchess as “merely a suggestion, and an inessential one” (Works, II, 24). To Gunnar Boklund the motive of incest “seems … improbable” because “the tenor of the decisive passages” is so like that of Painter (“The Duchess of Malfi”: Sources, Themes, Characters, p. 99). Muriel Bradbrook, while granting that “the modern reading of [Ferdinand's] impulses as incestuous allows a valid presentation,” believes that “in Webster's day the same effect upon the audience would have been reached by different means” (Bradbrook, John Webster, Citizen and Dramatist [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980], p. 159).

9. In the first scene, Webster establishes Ferdinand's disturbing habit of abruptly changing the subject of discourse.

10. See Gabriele Baldini, John Webster e il linguaggio della tragedia (Rome: Edizioni dell' Ateneo, 1953), p. 169.

11. Conceivably Webster also remembered Shakespeare's haughty Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, whom the Earl of Salisbury describes in 2 Henry VI as being “More like a soldier than a man o' th' church …” (I.i.184).

12. Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1975), p. 369.

13. Ibid., p. 450.

14. Ibid., p. 377.

15. The first edition of The Duchess (1623), unlike that of The White Devil (1612), specifies divisions by act. Since Webster carefully supervised the publication of his own tragedy, these divisions would appear to be authorial or at least to possess authorial sanction.

16. The apricock episode does not appear in Painter. R. W. Dent cites a passage, based on an incident in Livy, from Guevara's Diall of Princes (a book from which the dramatist drew other matter) as a conceivable source; Dent, John Webster's Borrowing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), p. 193. Webster may also have taken a hint from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (ed. John D. Jump [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962]) in which the title figure, with the aid of Mephistopheles, produces grapes out of season for the pregnant Duchess of Vanholt. Webster's “dainties” could be an echo of Marlowe's “rare and dainty” morsels (xvii.12-13). Also Bosola's role as betrayer of the Duchess has its Mephistophelean aspect, for Webster identifies the cynic closely with devil imagery: Antonio says, for instance, that Bosola “would look up to heaven” but “The devil … stands in [his] light” (II.i.94-95). And Bosola earlier refers to himself as a “familiar” and “a very quaint invisible devil, in flesh” (I.i.259-260).

17. The Duchess's reference to “molten brass” derives, at least indirectly, from the threatened punishment of God as referred to in Deuteronomy 28:23. The comparison of her sufferings to those of a “galley-slave” is appropriated from a passage in Grimestone's General Inventorie of the History of France (p. 817) in which the author quotes Jacqueline d'Entremont (widow of the Protestant martyr Admiral Coligny), who was also persecuted for her religion and, like the Duchess of Malfi, imprisoned and tortured in Italy. Dent documents both sources (John Webster's Borrowing, pp. 234-235). But Webster's phrase, “acquainted with sad misery,” is curiously reminiscent, whether fortuitously or not, of the King James rendering of Isaiah's prophecy of Christ's Passion: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3).

18. Raleigh, The History of the World (1614), Book V; see the abridged edition by C. A. Patrides (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1971), p. 396.

19. Eugene M. Waith suggests that for the Duchess's most famous line Webster may be indebted to Seneca's Medea, who asserts “Medea superest” (Medea, l. 166) at a point when all help has deserted her; Waith, Ideas of Greatness: Heroic Drama in England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 145. John Studley, the sixteenth-century translator of Medea, renders the statement “Medea yet is left”; see Thomas Newton, ed., Seneca His Tenne Tragedies, 1581 (London: Constable and Co., 1927; rept., 2 vols. in 1, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), II, 62.

20. The execution scene may contain one further reminiscence of Richard II, although the echo (if it is one) is rather faint. The Duchess's exasperated phrase directed to Bosola and her other persecutors, “any way, for heaven-sake, / So I were out of your whispering” (IV.ii.222-223), sounds suspiciously similar to Richard's impatience with Bolingbroke at the end of the deposition scene: “Whither you will, so I were from your sights” (IV.i.316).