SOURCE: Luckyj, Christina. “Concentric Design: The Duchess of Malfi.” In A Winter's Snake: Dramatic Form in the Tragedies of John Webster, pp. 126-47. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989.

[In this excerpt, Luckyj applies her model of Webster's use of repetition and juxtaposition to the structure of The Duchess of Malfi. Luckyj's analysis attempts to incorporate the fifth act into the structure of the play, responding to the frequent argument that the act fails to conform to the coherent pattern of the first four.]

Even more frequently than in The White Devil, Webster organizes scenes in The Duchess of Malfi concentrically, creating a strong, central dramatic focus framed by significantly opposed sequences of action. One of the most obvious examples of this kind of scenic construction is III.ii. The scene is important to the plot, tracing as it does the rapid fall of the Duchess and Antonio, from the intimacy of their bedroom exchange that opens the scene, to their separation and, finally, to the Duchess's unwitting betrayal of Antonio to Bosola. This is the clear linear movement of the lengthy scene. Yet the scene's internal organization complicates this simple linearity by establishing significant contrasts and emphases. The scene is clearly divided into five dramatic sequences; the first two are juxtaposed, as are the last two, while the central sequence links the two main parts. Finally, the last sequence of the scene recalls the first one; the Duchess's virtue remains constant even as her fortunes fail.

The first part of the scene is composed of two clearly juxtaposed dramatic episodes. The loving, domestic interview between Antonio and the Duchess as they prepare for bed is placed in sharp contrast to the highly charged interview between Ferdinand and the Duchess that follows. Between the two interviews, after Antonio and Cariola have left the stage and before Ferdinand has entered, the Duchess sits alone before her mirror. She talks aloud with warmth and confidence to an Antonio who is no longer there.

Doth not the colour of my hair 'gin to change?
When I wax gray, I shall have all the court
Powder their hair with arras, to be like me:—
You have cause to love me; I enter'd you into my heart
Before you would vouchsafe to call for the keys.

(III.ii.58-62)

This is the still center of the episode, and it emphasizes visually both the Duchess's strength and her vulnerability. Her strength is conveyed by her confident pose, even as she is at her most vulnerable physically (almost certainly clad only in a nightdress). While her vulnerability emerges as she looks anxiously for signs of aging, her confidence is clear in her gay response to her own question. The movement of thought in the Duchess's soliloquy is characteristic. From an anxious sense of her own mortality, she moves to a confident reconciliation with it, and finally to a self-assured declaration of her own courage. She will display the same characteristic ways of thinking and speaking at the moment of death. Yet even as she speaks, Ferdinand enters. While she speaks of the keys to her heart, her brother uses the keys to her bedchamber (a property to which attention has been drawn in the preceding scene), to gain entrance (Forker 350). The lines crystallize perfectly the contrast between the two worlds—the lovers' emotional world is set against the crude, literal world of Ferdinand. The stage property of the key draws attention to the ironic contrast. Yet the moment, even as it juxtaposes Ferdinand and Antonio, also implicitly compares them in their relation to the Duchess. As Ferdinand creeps into her bedchamber, the Duchess appears to be directing the lines to him. The bonds of family are as ineluctable as the bonds of love. The central point of the first half of III.ii places equal emphasis on the Duchess's strength and vulnerability. The Duchess is framed by the love of Antonio and by the fury of Ferdinand, both of which render her vulnerable, yet confirm her strength.

The dramatic encounters that frame this powerful central moment exhibit parallels as well as contrasts. In the first one, Antonio answers a question posed by Cariola regarding a choice between wisdom, riches, and beauty. His light-hearted response implies that judgment itself is confounded when faced with love and beauty. By going on to cite the case of Paris, Antonio introduces a range of mythological associations that become significant in the context of the scene. Of course Paris, like Antonio, chose Beauty, and the result was the Trojan war, undertaken by Helen's family for revenge. In the second encounter, Ferdinand makes reference to another triumvirate—this time of Love, Death, and Reputation. His identification of himself with Reputation is especially clear in performance, when he relates the parable in direct speech.

                                                            “Stay,” quoth Reputation,
“Do not forsake me; for it is my nature
If once I part from any man I meet
I am never found again.” And so, for you:
You have shook hands with Reputation,
And made him invisible:—so fare you well.
I will never see you more.

(III.ii.130-36)

If, in the first segment, love and beauty are clearly chosen by the Duchess and Antonio at the expense of wisdom and riches, here Reputation, in the self-appointed image of Ferdinand, deserts them. The design clearly restates in emblematic form the Duchess's choice in favor of Beauty at the expense of Reputation. Yet the emblematic level is at odds with the dramatic level of meaning. In fact, Ferdinand only imagines himself as his sister's reputation; Antonio is merely playing at being Paris. The formal, emblematic identifications point up the contradictions and ironies of the dramatic texture. Though in one sense the Duchess has indeed sacrificed her reputation for love, in another sense she has been absurdly punished for doing the right thing. The formal symmetry of the design not only allows a startling change of focus, but also invites comparison of the meaning of the clearly opposed episodes.

At the center of the entire scene, following Ferdinand's assault on the Duchess, there is a brief recapitulation and anticipation of its action. Antonio and Cariola reappear; in a replay of Ferdinand's attack on the Duchess, Antonio threatens Cariola with a pistol, and brandishes Ferdinand's poniard at an imaginary Ferdinand. The simultaneous exit of Antonio and entrance of Bosola at line 160 restages the preceding incident with new fear and urgency. The Duchess is again seen wheeling from her lover to her enemy—a stage image of the reversal of her fortunes. The choreography of this moment is replayed later, in III.v, when once again Antonio leaves the stage at the same time that Bosola enters with a guard. Again, a dramatic crisis, the reversal of the Duchess's fortunes, is evoked visually. She turns from bidding farewell to her family to heralding the arrival of a troop of men. Whether or not Bosola and his officers wear vizards, they are given impersonal significance by the Duchess when she says,

When Fortune's wheel is overcharg'd with princes,
The weight makes it move swift.

(III.v.96-97)

While she calls attention to herself as a victim of Fortune, she at the same time retains control of the stage, firing a series of questions at Bosola. Her deliberate allegorizing of her enemies as agents of Fortune also minimizes their hold over her as Ferdinand's henchmen. In both scenes she controls the exits and entrances of the other characters, ordering them on and off the stage and standing firmly at the center.

The second part of III.ii is, like the first, constructed as a pair of contrasting segments with parallel features. In the first segment, the “feigned crime” (III.ii.179) of Antonio is played out by the Duchess and Antonio before an onstage audience composed of Bosola and the officers; in the second segment, the feigned defense of Antonio is played out by Bosola before the Duchess and Cariola. In both cases, of course, the pretense is clear to the audience in the theatre, though it is accepted by the onstage audience. The officers believe the Duchess's account of Antonio and despise him, while the Duchess believes Bosola's account of Antonio and confides in him. In both sequences, pretense becomes entangled with reality. In the Duchess's confrontation with Antonio, she both rejects him and declares her love for him in a series of double entendres. Bosola's speech about Antonio is likewise both a pretense (as he is an intelligencer), and a clear repetition of his usual reflections on the abuse of good men like himself. The onstage audience in both cases selects the version of the “play” that they are disposed to hear and accept, though the offstage audience remains conscious of the ambiguity. The juxtaposition of the two episodes serves to illuminate, at a crisis in the narrative, the opposed perspectives that are at work in the play as a whole. There are those—like the officers—who are always prepared to believe the worst of someone else, while there are also those—like the Duchess—who are always prepared to believe the best. The scene is constructed to emphasize the opposition between them.

In the final segment of the scene, the staging is concentric, visually recalling that of the morality play. The Duchess stands at the center, attended on the one hand by Bosola, who coaxes her to reveal her secret marriage with his words of praise for Antonio, and on the other hand by Cariola, who silently tries to prevent her mistress from making any such revelations. Cariola's role during this scene is not immediately apparent from the text, but emerges chiefly in performance; she cannot remain simply a bystander while the Duchess betrays the secret she was so earnestly enjoined to keep. The Duchess finally listens to Bosola and ignores Cariola. The scene gathers its impact from its morality-play staging; its meaning, however, is rather more complex. The Duchess gives in to Bosola, her demonic tempter, and precipitates her downfall as a result, but the trustful openness of her confession is a sign of her virtue rather than her weakness. The final segment brings the scene full circle, dramatically reasserting the Duchess's virtue even as her enemies gain the upper hand in the plot.

The second scene of the third act is long and filled with action. Its formal design must have greatly simplified the construction of lengthy scenes like this one. Webster constructs the scene to emphasize important oppositions while advancing the narrative. At the center of the scene, the hurried exits and entrances of Antonio and Bosola clarify both the Duchess's firm centrality and the decisive turn in her fortunes. The parallelism between the segments that form each half of the scene, framing its center, is too deliberate to be coincidental. In the first half of the scene, Antonio's playful banter is juxtaposed with Ferdinand's psychotic rage; in the second half, the Duchess's account of Antonio's “crimes” is followed by Bosola's account of his virtues, the officers' meanness by the Duchess's trustfulness. In both the first and second parts of the scene, Webster sets the episodes side by side for maximum dramatic shock. Both the sudden fury of Ferdinand and the sudden warmth of Bosola come as dramatic surprises. Both characters prey on the Duchess's vulnerability as they find her virtually alone (in the first case, after the exit of Antonio and Cariola; in the second case, after the mass exit of the officers). The split structure of the scene allows an important concept to be emphasized through repetition and variation. Over and over the Duchess's choice of love is challenged by different forms of hatred. The crazed fury of Ferdinand and the coolly divided nature of Bosola are in fact built on an entire world of banal evil, represented in the officers. The scene begins and ends, however, with the Duchess's clear choice in favor of love and trust. As the centerpiece that links the two parts shows, the Duchess retains control even as her fortunes collapse.

Not all of Webster's scenes in The Duchess of Malfi are constructed according to this concentric plan. This scene does reveal, however, that Webster was a careful dramatic craftsman, and a master of what he himself calls “the ingenious structure of the scene” (Shirley 4). Different parts of the scene explore different aspects of Webster's main theme, contributing not only to the linear progression of the plot, but also to the elaboration of the dramatist's vision. The analogical relation between different segments of the scene, like that between different scenes or groups of scenes, binds Webster's “discontinuities” into a coherent whole that is nonetheless richly varied.

The same playwright who devoted laborious attention to the individual scene has been accused of carelessness in the whole play. Webster has frequently been criticized for his alleged failure to combine the parts of his play into a total vision. The chief target of this criticism is The Duchess of Malfi's final act. In this chapter, it will be considered as the second of a two-part structure which, like that of The White Devil, allows for a significant reversal in the overall pattern. Like the trial scene of The White Devil, the death scene of The Duchess of Malfi is a climactic set-piece that brings to a close the play's first part. Antagonists and protagonists change places at the midpoint of both plays. In the earlier play, the central scene only hints at a vision of universal suffering, in Giovanni's lament; in the later play, this vision is fully realized in the Duchess's death scene. The dramatist, who clearly understood the importance of scenic construction, applied the same formal principles to each play as a whole.

There is no doubt that The Duchess of Malfi shows evidence of the “split structure” that has been identified in many of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.¹ Plays like Richard II, with its inversion of the characters and fortunes of Richard and Bolingbroke, or The Winter's Tale, with Polixenes in the second part assuming Leontes' former role as a jealous tyrant, are designed in two parts which mirror one another. And, as Emrys Jones points out, “Most of Shakespeare's other histories and tragedies gain in clarity if they are considered as plays conceived in two unequal movements” (81).² The total form of The Duchess of Malfi is probably closest to that of Hamlet. It has been suggested that Shakespeare's play, like Webster's, can be divided into a lengthy first part (ending at IV.iv), and a shorter second part. In the first part, Hamlet is the avenger of his father's murder; in the second part, Laertes assumes this role, while Hamlet becomes the object of his vengeance. Emrys Jones notes that the play's two-part structure clarifies their exchange of roles: “The second part of the play opens with a new situation, an ironical reversal of the first. Laertes is now the injured son, whose father has been murdered; Hamlet is now, from this point of view, the murderer who must be put to death” (80). In the second part of The Duchess of Malfi, the villainous revengers become the objects of revenge. As, in Hamlet, Shakespeare complicates our view of the hero by casting him as a murderer in the second part, so, in The Duchess of Malfi, Webster changes our perspective of the villains by presenting them as victims in the final act.

The two parts of The Duchess of Malfi are clearly defined. The play proceeds in one direction, culminating in the death of the Duchess, and then changes direction for the final act. The Duchess is present in the first part, absent in the second part. There are clear differences in tone and characterization between the two parts; the Arragonian brothers are cruel monsters in the first part, pathetic victims in the second.³ Critics have frequently noted the shift from a strong, unified world of order and value in the first part to a fragmented world of disorder and chaos in the second. As important as the differences between the two parts, however, are the parallels. In the first part, the Arragonian brothers carry out their “revenge” against the Duchess for marrying beneath her station; in the second part, Bosola perpetrates his revenge against the brothers for their murder of the Duchess. In both parts, the revenge accomplishes its desired end, while at the same time it is revealed to be futile; the victims of revenge cling to their “crimes” and evade simple formulations of necessity or justice. The actions of Bosola in particular serve to emphasize the symmetry of the play's two parts. Before and after the Duchess's death, Bosola appears a curiously muddled figure in whom blatant self-interest always masks a strong sense of loyalty and virtue. In the first part, he murders the Duchess in order to appear a “true servant” (IV.ii.333) to Ferdinand, and in pursuit of his “reward” (IV.ii.294); in the second part, he turns against the Arragonian brothers not only for their murder of the Duchess, but also for their neglect of his services to them. In the first part, Bosola incriminates the Duchess and delivers her up to her brothers; in the second part, he repeats the action by putting Julia at the Cardinal's mercy and thus becoming an unwitting accomplice in her murder. In both parts, Bosola's treachery is emphasized by stage action; twice he accepts a key from one of the Arragonian brothers (I.i.280; V.ii.327). In the first part, Ferdinand sets Bosola to spy on the Duchess; in the second part, the Cardinal sets Bosola to spy on Antonio. Bosola kills the Duchess almost unwillingly in the first part, and murders Antonio accidentally in the second part. The dignified deaths of both protagonists are followed by the desperate struggles for life of Cariola in the first part, and the Cardinal in the second, both of whom are finally murdered by Bosola.

The repeated actions that link the first part with the second clearly undercut Bosola's revenge and call into question the ethic of revenge itself. But more important is the readjustment of perspective on the villains that such parallels make clear. In a sense, the victim and the perpetrator of revenge have merely changed places in the final act, if Bosola can in the second part be considered the Duchess's self-appointed representative. When the antagonists are put into the same position as the protagonist, as victims of a driving and relentless revenge action, the audience's view of them must change. Bosola, despite his apparently radical reformation at the end of Act IV, remains consistent in both parts of the play; Ferdinand and the Cardinal change as the world of the play changes. The inhuman monsters of the play's first part become desperate, self-questioning men, struggling to sustain their inhumanity through their defenses of violence or madness, yet ultimately failing to do so. Tomlinson notes that, in his speech at the beginning of V.v, “the Cardinal is alive here, in a sense in which he wasn't earlier. He speaks personally, not merely with depersonalized brilliance, and he really is puzzled in a question about hell … so, indeed, is everyone else, including, notably, the mad Ferdinand: ‘Strangling is a very quiet death …’ Included in the beautifully Jacobean horror of this, there is a grimly striking note of genuine feeling” (153). The “genuine feeling” that suddenly emerges in the play's villains in the final act links them with the Duchess earlier in the play. The symmetry of the two-part structure of The Duchess of Malfi includes both protagonists and antagonists in a common tragic vision. And in Webster's tragic vision, as in Shakespeare's, human greatness is intimately linked to human weakness.

Webster strengthens the links between the opposed forces of his tragedy, and connects the two parts of the play, with his structural use of the recurring idea of madness. In the first part, Webster shows that the love and the hatred that are the driving forces of his play are rooted in the same mysterious, irrational impulses, while they have different effects. In the second part, Ferdinand's conscience-stricken madness connects him with the Duchess's tender humanity in the first part.

Madness first appears prominently in the tender wooing-scene between the Duchess and Antonio. In response to the Duchess's proposal of marriage, Antonio says fearfully,

Ambition, madam, is a great man's madness,
That is not kept in chains, and close-pent rooms,
But in fair lightsome lodgings, and is girt
With the wild noise of prattling visitants,
Which makes it lunatic, beyond all cure.

(I.i.420-24)

This is what Maynard Mack has called an “umbrella speech” (26)—one which allows a wider consciousness than that of its speaker to shelter beneath it. It allows all the dramatic possibilities connected with madness to emerge early in the play, while it avoids associating these only with the villains. The speech of course anticipates the prison scenes, but in its immediate context it introduces the idea of madness into a love scene that is otherwise “fair” and “lightsome.” Love is its own madness, Webster seems to imply; this is further emphasized by Cariola at the end of the scene when she accuses the Duchess of “a fearful madness” (I.i.506). Though the Duchess acts in accordance with desire in choosing to marry Antonio, her desire is neither logical nor rational, but “mad” in its own way. In Painter's version of the Duchess's story, Webster's chief source, the madness of the lovers is repeatedly invoked. In one of his frequent moralizing digressions, Painter exhorts, “But let us consider the force of Lovers rage, which so soone as it hath seased upon the minds of men, we see how marvellous be the effects thereof, and with what straint and puissaunce that madnesse subdueth the wise and strongest worldlings” (195). Although Webster deviates from Painter in treating the lovers far more sympathetically, he nonetheless retains suggestions of the madness of love. On the stage, Webster chooses to introduce his audience to the irrational not only through Bosola and Ferdinand, but also through the lovers themselves. Throughout the early part of the play, other characters continually draw attention to Antonio's irregular behavior. “You do tremble” (I.i.450), the Duchess remarks to him during the first scene. “Methinks 'tis very cold, and yet you sweat: / You look wildly” (II.iii.19-20), Bosola says to Antonio later. While the lovers remain guiltless, the “madness” of their love, rather than the “madness” of Ferdinand's hatred, appears to propel the action forward, so that they seem less its victims. By the end of the second act, when Ferdinand screams that he has “grown mad” (II.v.2), the lovers have already established the idiom in the play.

Scenic juxtaposition illuminates the different, but equally irrational, perspectives of love and hatred at the beginning of the third act. At the end of III.i, Ferdinand and Bosola exchange views on the nature of love. From their diseased perspective, love is “sorcery” (III.i.63) and “witchcraft” (III.i.78). At the beginning of the next scene, an apparently aimless discussion between Antonio and Cariola centers on the futility of judgment in matters of love. From Antonio's perspective as a lover, love is a magical force which transforms lovers “into the olive, pomegranate, mulberry … flow'rs, precious stones, or eminent stars” (III.ii.31-32). Bosola's and Ferdinand's view of love as a demonic force of astrological origin is juxtaposed with Antonio's view of love's mysterious mythological powers of transfiguration. Both perspectives, though firmly opposed to one another, see love as founded on irrationality and mystery. Similarly, the virtuous love of Antonio and the Duchess and the motiveless hatred of their enemies are both ultimately mysterious and unaccountable. Neither of these interchanges has any apparent plot function, but their juxtaposition illuminates the nature of the play's central opposition, and links all the play's characters with some form of madness.

Webster of course makes distinctions between different kinds of madness in his play. Unlike Painter, who places the blame sometimes on the lovers' passion, sometimes on their enemies, Webster clearly presents the lovers' “madness” as a form of sanity. Their decision to marry, however risky and irrational, brings them a new courage and clarity of vision. Throughout the first part of the play, Webster contrasts their sanity with Ferdinand's psychotic rage. In the second part of the play, however, after the death scene, Ferdinand plunges into real madness. While in the first part Ferdinand suffers from delusions fostered by his own diseased “imagination” (II.v.40), in the second part those delusions have become images of his own actions and of his horror at those actions. As the lovers' “madness” is in the first part a sane response to a mad world, so is Ferdinand's madness in the final act a “sane” reaction that the world considers mad. Before her death, the Duchess cries,

Th'heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass,
The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad.

(IV.ii.25-26)

Her hallucinations are an appropriate response to the chaos engulfing her, and attest to her sanity. After the death scene, Ferdinand's lycanthropia and “cruel sore eyes” (V.ii.64) are an appropriate recognition of his own savagery. The structural repetition of madness in the play allows Webster both to distinguish between his opposed groups, and to suggest their common experience. The play's split structure emphasizes the links between the lovers and their enemies; Ferdinand's madness in the final act connects him with the Duchess and Antonio as much as it recalls his earlier bouts of fury.⁴ In the 1985 National Theatre production, in fact, the connection between Ferdinand and the Duchess was reinforced visually. In the first part, the Duchess was the only figure wearing white among a cast clad entirely in black, while in the final act Ferdinand alone changed into white. His tattered garment looked a good deal like a ravaged version of the Duchess's white nightgown, and further emphasized Ferdinand's own admission that they “were twins” (IV.ii.267). “As their physical twinship implies,” Forker observes, “the two characters are complementary as well as opposed” (312).

At the structural center of the play, in the death scene, the masque of madmen functions as a rich and complex dramatic focus for the madness throughout the play. Many critics have noted that “the masque and its characters provide a grotesque image of the world of the play, and some of the madmen reflect quite accurately some of the play's central characters” (Pearson 86). Ferdinand's furious jealousy, the Cardinal's misogyny, and Bosola's decayed cynicism are all quite obviously suggested by the madmen's ravings. The first speech of the second madman, for example, conjures up all three male characters:

Hell is a mere glass-house, where the devils are continually blowing up women's souls, on hollow irons, and the fire never goes out.

(IV.ii.77-79)

The speech recalls by association Bosola's and the Cardinal's images of glass manufacture for female sexuality, as well as Ferdinand's violent fantasy of having the lovers “burnt in a coal-pit” (II.v.67). Yet at the same time the speech describes the Duchess's experience in the play; her enemies are intent on destroying her “soul” by inflicting on her “the greatest torture souls feel in hell— / In hell: that they must live, and cannot die” (IV.i.70-71). The speech conflates the vision of the torturer and the experience of the tortured. The first madman's speech is similarly ambiguous:

Doomsday not come yet? I'll draw it nearer by a perspective, or make a glass that shall set all the world on fire upon an instant: I cannot sleep; my pillow is stuffed with a litter of porcupines.

(IV.ii.73-76)

The mad astrologer's desire to hasten doomsday recalls Ferdinand's impatience to have the Duchess murdered and the Duchess's own urgent wish for death. The apocalyptic imagery echoes both the Duchess's vision of the earth engulfed in “flaming sulphur” and Ferdinand's frequent use of the imagery of fire to describe his revenge (II.v.24,47). The madmen's speeches are sufficiently general to suggest all the play's main characters. The song that opens the masque suggestively conflates Ferdinand's image of the Duchess as a “screech-owl” (III.ii.89) with the Duchess's tenacity in remaining “Duchess of Malfi still” (IV.ii.142) and anticipates her serenity at her death:

As ravens, screech-owls, bulls, and bears,
We'll bill and bawl our parts,
Till irksome noise have cloy'd your ears
And corrosiv'd your hearts.
At last when as our choir wants breath,
Our bodies being blest,
We'll sing like swans, to welcome death,
And die in love and rest.

(IV.ii.65-72)

The masque breaks down the distinctions between the Duchess and her enemies; each is deeply affected by the other, and both crave relief from their suffering.

In many productions of the play the Duchess herself becomes physically involved in the masque. In her review of the 1980 Royal Exchange production, Pearson wrote, “Hunched and angular, her hair clipped, she goes among the madmen, immersing herself in the destructive element in order to master it.” Though the Duchess herself declares that she is “not mad” (IV.ii.26), the masque replays and releases her deep involvement in the chaos around her. It is a displaced image of both the psychotic frenzy of Ferdinand and the horror and despair of the Duchess herself. As Joan Lord comments, the masque is “a violent exacerbation and release of one side of her nature (the undisciplined squads of emotion) before her sense of ceremony takes over and allows her to create the form of her death” (314). Throughout the fourth act, the play's “climactic plateau” (Beckerman 42), the Duchess is inextricably linked with her murderers. The masque of madmen is a concentrated dramatic image that illuminates the universal chaos in which all are involved, and thus encapsulates the connections explored through repetition and juxtaposition in the two-part structure of the play.

Like the individual scenes examined above, The Duchess of Malfi as a whole is concentrically organized. Every other scene either anticipates or recalls the play's “central referent” (Beckerman 61), the long death scene at the end of Act IV, which marks the end of the first part and the beginning of the second. The Duchess's death scene is the focal point of virtually every theatrical review and critical study. Ewbank writes: “It is a part of the play to which no critic of Webster has been indifferent; it stirred Lamb's and Swinburne's most prostrate praise and Archer's most nauseated denunciation, and later critics have only less ardently condemned or lauded it. Its complexity has been sensed, but hardly satisfactorily analysed” (“Impure Art” 204). The complexity of the death scene is reflected in the diversity of stage interpretations of the Duchess. The Times's review of Poel's 1892 production found that Mary Rorke aroused “a certain amount of sympathy for the hapless Duchess” (“Independent Theatre”). Peggy Ashcroft's first performance of the Duchess in 1945 brought praise from the Times's reviewer on her ability “to communicate the horror of the tortures and to reveal the resistant spirit of the doomed woman” (“Haymarket Theatre”). The conception of the Duchess as a defiant woman challenges and complicates the pathetic interpretation. Peggy Ashcroft's second version of the Duchess fifteen years later seems to have emphasized a slightly different quality. According to the Times's critic, she displayed a serene transcendence over her tortures, as “the only one of his characters to see, or think she sees, beyond the mist” (Review, “Webster's Play Well Handled”). Similarly, of the 1971 Royal Court production, Wardle noted that “Judy Parfitt plays the Duchess on a steady note of quietly masterful resignation. … In the death scene she seems quite untouched by the surrounding events” (Review, “Uninhabited Nightmare”). From the pathetic to the rebellious; from the merely stoical to the serenely transcendent—the richness of the scene is reflected in the diversity of its possible interpretations. That all of these are possible dramatic choices for an actress playing the Duchess in the death scene implies complexity in the scene itself. And, though an individual actress must choose to emphasize one interpretation over another, it is the job of the critic to explore the richness of a text which allows for such choices.

During the death scene, Ferdinand is absent. Bosola, the otherwise morally ambivalent instrument of Ferdinand's revenge, has taken on the disguise of an old man who reminds the Duchess of her mortality and delivers her up to death. In his disguise, he seems to have shed his dramatic function in the play to take on a purely symbolic one, as Death or Time itself.⁵ As Ewbank notes, Bosola “turns the mock wedding-masque into what reminds us of a Dance of Death” (“Impure Art” 215). The progressive stages of the death scene unfold as a foreordained ritual rather than as a successive series of shocks. The atmosphere is one of hushed expectation rather than of ghastly surprise. Bradbrook points out that “the scene is not laid in a definite place: it is, as it were, in a different dimension; there is a curious stillness and hush about the scene, a static quality and a sense of timelessness” (Themes 197). In this atmosphere even the hubbub of the madmen that precedes Bosola's entrance seems part of the ritual—the feverish futility of life's chaos that must be followed by the calm, inevitable release of death. Bosola's reminder to the Duchess that “this flesh” is no more than “a little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste” (IV.ii.125-26) gives expression to the scene's air of heavy fatalism. In his speeches to her, Bosola transforms the death scene from a murderous outrage against an innocent young woman to an inevitable and universal act of fate. Bosola's message, vividly rephrasing the deeply ingrained medieval notions of contemptus mundi, becomes even more powerful when it is embraced by the Duchess herself as a means of maintaining her dignity and mastering her fear. While at some points she challenges Bosola, at others she colludes with him, calmly discussing the folly of “fashion in the grave” (IV.ii.155), and taking her final cue from his conceit of the soul imprisoned in the body.

The powerful atmosphere that is created in the death scene, of life as “a slow but irreversible process of decay” (Alexander 95), with death as its inevitable end, is at odds with the dramatic situation itself, however. The audience's knowledge that the Duchess is a vital young woman, “more sinned against than sinning,” unjustly brought to a premature death, works strongly to counter the scene's fatalism. The scene derives much of its power from this vital tension. The Duchess's famous assertion, “I am Duchess of Malfi still” (IV.ii.142), is richly ambiguous. On the one hand, the Duchess bravely and rebelliously asserts her individual identity against villainy and death itself. On the other, youth and beauty confront mortality, a familiar emblem of vanitas. The Duchess's cry is both a strong, valid self-assertion, and the lost wail of Everyman confronted with his necessary end. Alexander comments, “It is one expression of that continual declaration of human independence which proclaims the unique value of a particular human existence in the face of the inevitable and eternal triumph of death. This self-assertion is both necessary and vain” (95).

The tension between the dramatic and symbolic interpretations of the scene reaches its highest pitch at the moment of execution. The Duchess kneels to meet her death:

Yet stay; heaven-gates are not so highly arch'd
As princes' palaces, they that enter there
Must go upon their knees.

(IV.ii.232-34)

This recalls her kneeling during the wooing scene, a gesture which there suggested her voluntary submission of herself to her lover. Here, her willing gesture of love and humility heightens by contrast the cruelty of her imposed sentence. Her executioners, whether they are the agents of Death or her brothers, are carrying out an atrocity against the Duchess. Her kneeling posture, while it allows her to retain her dignity, silently recalls the love for which she is to be put to death. Just before the Duchess kneels, the executioners may also kneel, as was conventional, to ask her forgiveness. Her words “I forgive them” (IV.ii.207) may well be a response to the executioners' kneeling. In The White Devil, Vittoria admonishes Lodovico:

                                                                                do thy office in right form;
Fall down upon thy knees and ask forgiveness.

(V.vi.212-13)

Visually, the executioners' kneeling is a ghastly parody of Antonio's earlier prostration to receive the Duchess's wedding ring. By imitating these movements of mutual affection, the death scene becomes a grotesque reenactment of the wooing scene. Rather than suggesting that the Duchess's “need for love [is] the force which dooms her” (Pearson 61), the echoes of the wooing scene simply heighten the death scene's brutality. The Duchess's kneeling is powerfully ambiguous. She is both a humble Christian, quietly kneeling to meet her inevitable fate, and a controlling, assertive individual, still the rebellious victim of a terrible injustice. The kneeling itself is an aggressive, as well as a humble gesture, for it forces the executioners to stoop uncomfortably in order to pull the noose tight around her neck.⁶ Visually, the moment is a significant emblem of the play's total action—the Duchess, by “stooping” to marry her inferior in an act of love and humility, has actually exposed the degradation of those around her. The Duchess herself forces the scene's underlying tension to the surface. By appearing humbly to concede the inevitable justice of death, she in fact calls attention to the injustice of Death's ministers. “Regal calm becomes the outward expression both of protest against injustice and of tragic acceptance of the inevitable,” Forker observes (326). At the moment of death, she both refutes and colludes with the scene's symbolic dimension. Her final defense is to complete the interpretation that has been forced upon her, crying, “Come, violent death, / Serve for mandragora to make me sleep!” (IV.ii.234-35). In this way she can ignore her illegitimate human executioners and summon up her courage to die. But her final, bitter words to Bosola emphasize again the cruel injustice of the dramatic situation:

Go tell my brothers, when I am laid out,
They then may feed in quiet.

(IV.ii.236-37)

The Duchess is a consummate actress in the death scene. She gains dramatic control over her assassins and maintains her dignity by colluding with Death, who ultimately controls even her brothers. By supporting the scene's symbolic dimension, the Duchess avoids becoming, like Cariola, merely a pathetic victim. Yet her demeanor at the same time exposes the contradictions inherent in the scene, between the assassins' pose as impersonal ministers of death and their brutal, murderous action. The highly formal, ritualistic structure of the death scene allows the Duchess to be both mistress and victim of the occasion, to control a situation over which she has no control. The richness and complexity of the scene are illuminated by the tendency of different actresses to exploit its different aspects; the Duchess is both resistant and pathetic, defiant and humble, as she goes to her death. And this complexity is derived from the “impurity” of Webster's art—from the interplay of allegory and narrative, convention and realism. Ewbank notes that “in this scene he holds the tension between the two and draws strength from both sides—the kind of strength which tempts one to suggest that Webster's art is most ‘impure’ at the centres of meaning in his plays; that his peculiar skill, not only as a dramatic poet but as a poetic dramatist, lay in the ability to utilize the very impurity of his art” (“Impure Art” 220).

The formal complexity, or “impurity,” of the death scene, has a number of important consequences for the play as a whole. First, because the scene's symbolic dimension complicates the audience's response to the Duchess's immediate plight as the innocent victim of her brothers, its pathos and melodrama are attenuated. The scene hints that the play is to transcend mere catastrophe, the destruction of a good character by villains, and will offer some larger vision. In the death scene itself, the play hovers between melodrama and fatalism, injustice and inevitability, but settles on neither. Because the tone and the situation of the death scene are at odds with one another, each tends to neutralize the other's single impact, while at the same time combining to enrich and intensify the scene's meaning. Second, because the death scene also distances the audience from the villains—the brothers are absent, Bosola is in disguise—their crimes are mitigated. Throughout the third act, the brothers are distanced by means of commentary (III.iii) and dumb show (III.iv), while Bosola becomes increasingly depersonalized.⁷ As a result, the humanity of the villains in the final act is more credible because it does not sharply contradict their outright villainy. The distance from both the Duchess and her enemies that results from the death scene's ceremony helps to ease the transition from the first part of the play to the second. Finally, at the structural center of the play, Webster deliberately creates a powerful image of the ineluctable universality of death, which, superimposed on the Duchess's individual fate, prepares us for the collective tragedy of the fifth act. Bosola's dirge, for example, reaches beyond the immediate situation to anticipate the universal experience of mortality:

Of what is't fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth weeping;
Their life a general mist of error,
Their death a hideous storm of terror.

(IV.ii.186-89)

Both the Duchess's courageous virtue and her enemies' struggles of conscience are set against this nihilistic vision of life made meaningless by death. The death scene transcends the personal calamity of the Duchess's destruction at the hands of her brothers to suggest, in its tone and its language, a general struggle for meaning in the face of the inevitable death that embraces all the characters in the play.

The trial scene of The White Devil and the death scene of The Duchess of Malfi both achieve the “rich florescence that makes the center of a Shakespearean play such an overwhelming dramatic experience” (Beckerman 45). Both scenes gather into themselves various strands of meaning, and powerfully synthesize and transform them into a resonant dramatic experience. The death scene of The Duchess of Malfi suggests that the death and the chaos that appear to divide the different groups actually in some sense unite them. The play's two-part structure, with its major role reversal reinforced through repetition, confirms this vision. Thus the death scene marks not only the play's dramatic and symbolic center, but also the shift in direction from the first part to the second. At the end of the fourth act, “we have reached a point of partial fulfilment and rest (a provisional ending), but the situation is rich in unrealized potentialities (a provisional beginning)” (Emrys Jones 73). In The White Devil, the same point is reached, as in many of Shakespeare's plays, at the end of the third act. In each of Webster's major tragedies, the major shift in tone and characterization at the end of the first part is marked by a change in the role of the tool-villain. Like Flamineo in The White Devil, Bosola abandons his satiric pose and changes his perspective on the main action. As the characters who stand in closest relation to the audience, Flamineo's and Bosola's adjusted view of the play in turn has a significant effect on the audience's response.

Webster makes use of repeated stage action in the death scene in order to clarify the play's change of direction, while at the same time emphasizing the links between different characters. The death scene opens with the Duchess and Cariola alone together on the stage. The Duchess is clearly in despair and suffering deeply. From Cariola's plea, “Pray dry your eyes” (IV.ii.14), it is obvious that the Duchess weeps. She describes her suffering in terms of an apocalyptic vision:

Th'heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass,
The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad.

(IV.ii.25-26)

Her pain comes from her double vision; she can see simultaneously the perspective of madness, as it is forced upon her, and the perspective of her own sanity. The long scene ends with another pair of characters alone on the stage together. This time Bosola crouches over the corpse of the Duchess, recalling Cariola as he attempts to minister to her needs and call for help. But in his final soliloquy Bosola recalls the Duchess herself. While the Duchess wept at the beginning of the scene, here Bosola weeps.

These tears, I am very certain, never grew
In my mother's milk.

(IV.ii.362-63)

Like the Duchess, Bosola suffers deeply at the divided perspective he sees, this time one of innocence and guilt.

O sacred innocence, that sweetly sleeps
On turtles' feathers, whilst a guilty conscience
Is a black register, wherein is writ
All our good deeds and bad, a perspective
That shows us hell!

(IV.ii.355-59)

The “hell” that Bosola sees and the “flaming sulphur” that the Duchess sees are aspects of the same vision, seen from opposite points of view. The Duchess sees a possible hell of madness even as she remains sane and virtuous in her misery; Bosola's vision of hell emerges from his simultaneous consciousness of the possibility of innocence and goodness. At the center of the same scene, Ferdinand suddenly sees a vision of reality superimposed on his own madness;⁸ when he sees his sister's corpse, he suddenly realizes that “she died young,” and his eyes “dazzle” (IV.ii.264), starting with tears. The tears shed by the Duchess, Ferdinand and Bosola in the course of the scene unite them. The scene's design allows victim and murderers to share a common human vision, so that the play's meaning deepens into tragedy. Moreover, the shift from the Duchess to Bosola as a moral focus for the action anticipates the play's overall change in direction for the final act.

Bosola's moral regeneration at the end of Act IV depends primarily on his vision of the play as pure melodrama, of the Duchess as “sacred innocence” put to death by a “cruel tyrant” (IV.ii.372). His voice rings with the certainty and purpose of this simplified vision at the end of the death scene:

                                                                                                                                            Come,
I'll bear thee hence:
And execute thy last will; that's deliver
Thy body to the reverent dispose
Of some good women: that the cruel tyrant
Shall not deny me. Then I'll post to Milan
Where somewhat I will speedily enact
Worth my dejection.

(IV.ii.368-75)

Yet his confident tone is undercut, both by his awkward action, as he drags the Duchess's body off the stage, and by his own more complex vision of hell, in which good and bad deeds seem to confound each other in a hopelessly futile struggle. This underlying tension at the end of the first part is repeated at the close of the play.⁹ At the end of the final act, Bosola gives a reductive summary of the play's action, and his own part in it:

Revenge, for the Duchess of Malfi, murdered
By th'Arragonian brethren; for Antonio,
Slain by this hand; for lustful Julia,
Poison'd by this man; and lastly, for myself,
That was an actor in the main of all.

(V.v.81-85)

Bosola's self-righteous tone is undercut, however, by both the debacle surrounding him on the stage and his implied dual role as perpetrator and object of his own revenge.¹⁰ A few lines later, he turns from this apparent moral certainty to cry despairingly,

We are only like dead walls, or vaulted graves,
That ruin'd, yields no echo:—Fare you well.

(V.v.97-98)

Bosola's final speeches move back and forth between stoical aphorisms and a deep vision of futility, which casts doubt on the efficacy of his own actions. The underlying tension in Bosola that rises to the surface at the end of both parts lies at the heart of the play itself. On the one hand, like Bosola's neat summary, The Duchess of Malfi traces the actions willfully imposed on some characters by others in a clear linear chain of events. On the other hand, it presents all the characters as victims, caught in a tragic universe of “good deeds and bad” (IV.ii.358). This tragic vision is articulated, not primarily through the linear narrative, but through the web of repeated themes and actions that find their most intense expression at the structural center of the play.

Comparison of the overall structures of Webster's major tragedies illuminates his use of similar formal strategies to achieve different ends in the two plays. In The White Devil, Brachiano and Francisco are designed as analogues for the purpose of clearly distinguishing one from the other; in The Duchess of Malfi, the villains' position as objects of revenge mirrors that of the Duchess, and all find themselves victims grappling with their fear and their humanity. In the earlier play, Webster's tragic vision is focused primarily on the protagonists, while in the later play both protagonists and antagonists share a similar vision of human suffering. Thus repetition, while obviously central to the bipartite structure of both plays, works mainly to achieve contrast in The White Devil, and parallelism in The Duchess of Malfi. In both plays, moreover, the ends achieved through repetition are fulfilled in the central emblem. In The White Devil the contrast between antagonists and protagonists conveyed through the mirroring of the first half in the second is encapsulated in the famous trial scene. In The Duchess of Malfi, the affinities between heroes and villains suggested by the play's two-part structure are concentrated in the climactic death scene of the fourth act. And, at the dramatic center of each play, Webster emphasizes the complexity of his play's world: the Duchess is both victor and victim in her death scene; her death itself is both cruel and inevitable. Brachiano and Vittoria, too, are shown in their trial scene as both innocent and guilty, mired in a similar, morally complex world.

Notes

1. The term is Beckerman's (43), but see also Emrys Jones 66-88 and Rose 20-21.

2. Emrys Jones also points out (85) that the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists expanded, but did not invent, the bipartite structure which is evident in many morality plays.

3. An interval after the first part may have facilitated this major shift. See Emrys Jones 66-88.

4. Of course many commentators emphasize the differences between the Duchess and her enemies. John Selzer, for example, remarks, “Where the Duchess died with silent dignity, with acts of virtue, Ferdinand acts and howls like a beast; while Ferdinand had hoped to drive the Duchess mad, it is he who actually goes mad” (95).

5. Death and Time were linked in conventional iconography, and both were generally represented by an old man. See Panofsky's chapter on “Father Time” (69-93). See also Ewbank, “Impure Art” 214-15 and Forker 339.

6. I am grateful to Professor A. M. Leggatt for this suggestion.

7. Bosola may already be wearing a disguise when he comes to apprehend the Duchess in III.v. See John Russell Brown, Duchess 103n.

8. For a lengthy discussion of this, and other aspects of Webster's “perspective” technique, see Ewbank, “Webster's Realism.”

9. Emrys Jones identifies this kind of repetition in Shakespeare's plays as “structural rhyming”: “the two parts of the play having like endings” (77).

10. Whigham makes a similar point about Bosola, who “casts himself finally and summarily as an agent, a vicarious actor on behalf of all the victims, not least for himself, murderer and murdered at once. … The supposed restorative of revenge has littered the stage, but the body count, though lavish, is sterile” (181).

The methodology for this chapter was suggested to me chiefly by Rose's Shakespearean Design, although Emrys Jones's Scenic Form in Shakespeare, Hirsch's The Structure of Shakespearean Scenes, and Beckerman's Shakespeare at the Globe were all extremely helpful. For an account of the work done by critics on spatial form in classical and Renaissance poetry, see Rose's first chapter, “Contexts of Design.”

Works Cited

Books and Articles

Alexander, Nigel. “Intelligence in The Duchess of Malfi.” Morris 95-112.

Beckerman, Bernard. Shakespeare at the Globe, 1599-1609. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

Bradbrook, Muriel Clara. John Webster: Citizen and Dramatist. London: Weidenfeld, 1980.

———. Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1957.

Brown, John Russell. Introduction. The Duchess of Malfi. By John Webster. Ed. John Russell Brown. London: Methuen, 1964.

Ewbank, Inga-Stina [Ekeblad]. “The ‘Impure Art’ of John Webster.” Review of English Studies 9 (1958): 235-67. Rpt. in Hunter 202-21.

———. “Webster's Realism; or, ‘A Cunning Piece Wrought Perspective.’” Morris 159-78.

Forker, Charles R. Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1986.

Hirsch, James E. The Structure of Shakespearean Scenes. New Haven: Yale UP, 1981.

Jones, Emrys. Scenic Form in Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971.

Lord, Joan M. “The Duchess of Malfi: The Spirit ‘of Greatness’ and ‘of Woman.’” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 16 (1976): 305-17.

Mack, Maynard. “The Jacobean Shakespeare: some observations on the construction of the Tragedies.” Jacobean Theatre. Ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris. Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 1. London: Edward Arnold, 1965. 11-41.

Morris, Brian, ed. John Webster. London: Ernest Benn, 1970.

Painter, William. The Palace of Pleasure. Rpt. in John Russell Brown, ed., The Duchess of Malfi 175-209.

Panofsky, Erwin. Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

Pearson, Jacqueline. Tragedy and Tragicomedy in the Plays of John Webster. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1980.

Rose, Mark. Shakespearean Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1972.

Selzer, John L. “Merit and Degree in Webster's Duchess of Malfi.” English Literary Renaissance 11.1 (1981).

Shirley, Frances, ed. The Devil's Law-Case. By John Webster. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1972.

Tomlinson, Thomas Brian. A Study of Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1964.

Whigham, Frank. “Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi.” PMLA 100 (1985): 167-82.

Theatrical Reviews

“Haymarket Theatre.” Rev. Haymarket Theatre, London, 18 April 1945. Dir. George Rylands. Times 19 April 1945.

“Independent Theatre.” Rev. Independent Theatre Society, Opera Comique, London, 21 Oct. 1892. Dir. William Poel. Times 22 Oct. 1892.

Pearson, Jacqueline. “Man Bites Man.” Rev. Royal Exchange, Manchester, 16 Sept. 1980. Dir. Adrian Noble. Times Literary Supplement 26 Sept. 1980: 1064.

Wardle, Irving. “An Uninhabited Nightmare.” Rev. Royal Court, London, 18 Jan. 1971. Dir. Peter Gill. Times 19 Jan. 1971.

“Webster's Play Well Handled.” Rev. Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company, Aldwych, London, 15 Dec. 1960. Dir. Donald McWhinnie. Times 16 Dec. 1960.