[In the essay below, Goldberg discusses the political and intellectual context of The Duchess of Malfi, noting contemporary discussions of absolutism, the rule of James I, and individualism. Goldberg suggests that Webster was writing in opposition to the dominant worldview of the period.]

Webster's challenge to the rationalistic, hierarchic view of humanity that was a keystone of orthodox Renaissance philosophy is even more trenchant in The Duchess of Malfi than it had been in The White Devil. As I have pointed out, the “reason” the Cardinal talks about is only a tool of statecraft. And Ferdinand's assumption that people are better than other animals—or that they should be—makes him a destructive force, whereas his sister's passionate pursuit of her own fulfilment is graced by an essential humility and gentleness. In effect, Webster has reversed the traditional hierarchy so that the rational faculty lies lower in the scale of values than the sensory and emotive faculties that people possess in common with other creatures. The devastating effects of the myth of reason are explored simultaneously on two related planes: the human microcosm and the macrocosm of political society.

The idea that people alone among the creatures of the universe had been endowed with reason had always had hierarchical political corollaries. From Plato on, the conception of the human being as a creature whose “inferior” faculties (sensory, emotive) are controlled by the superior faculty of reason implied a social stratification in which the thinkers rule over the doers. In a well-ordered state, as in a well-ordered personality, everything is in its proper place in the hierarchy, performing its appropriate function. Since the best society is one in which reason reigns supreme, ideal rulers are the people who have most completely subordinated their other faculties to their reason. It would be as absurd for passionate individuals (or workers) to rule the state as it would be for the human heart (or hand) to rule the human head.

In the tradition of Aquinas and Hooker, this classical concept was supported by a further analogy to God as the supreme intellectual force, ruling the universe through immutable laws of “Eternal Reason.” The “operations of nature,” says Aquinas, “are seen to proceed in an orderly manner even as the operations of a wise man.”¹ Good rulers are analogous to God in that their dominating intelligence creates order and harmony in their realm just as the eternal intelligence has created order and harmony throughout the universe.

For Aquinas and Hooker, this implied the rule of law. Just as God could never violate the immutable laws of reason and nature that he had created, good rulers would never disobey the positive law that had been made in the image of the divine law.² In its original and orthodox form, the comparison between the king and God did not imply that the king was free to exercise absolute power according to his whims. In the seventeenth century, however, the traditional analogies became useful to those who, by shifting the emphases, could incorporate them into a justification of absolutism. In the writings of Richelieu and James, the traditional association of reason with the ruling class becomes a total identification of law with the king. People should be reasonable, but in fact most are not. Therefore, it is the function of the king to impose law and reason upon his subjects. Reason can only reign supreme if the sovereign power is absolute:

Common sense leads each one of us to understand that man, having been endowed with reason, should do nothing except that which is reasonable, since otherwise he would be acting contrary to his nature, and by consequence contrary to Him Who is its Creator. It further teaches us that the more a man is great and conspicuous, the more he ought to be conscious of this principle and the less he ought to abuse the rational process which constitutes his being, because the ascendancy he has over other men requires him to preserve that part of his nature and his purpose which was specifically given to him by Him Who Chose him for elevation.

To this point in the passage Richelieu is faithfully echoing the orthodox commonplaces of natural law philosophy. This is the “given” part of the argument, easily available to the “common sense” of the reader. What he is really aiming at is revealed in the next few lines:

This precept is the source of another, which teaches us that since we should never want the accomplishment of anything not reasonable and just, neither should we ever want the accomplishment of anything without having it carried out and our commands followed by complete obedience, because otherwise reason would not really reign sovereign.³

It is a short step further to James' assertion that “that which concerns the mystery of the King's power is not lawful to be disputed.”⁴

We can now grasp the full significance of the Duchess' impatience with outward form. It is relevant that she is reprehensible, according to traditional concepts of order, on both political and sexual grounds, for Webster has her stand for total antagonism to the supposedly natural system of hierarchies that, with considerable historical justification, he has come to associate with tyranny. Thus, she violates her subordinate position as a woman by wooing Antonio; she rejects the idea that her position as a ruler necessitates stricter repression of her animal nature; and she disregards the class structure of her society in marrying her social inferior. Her rebellion on the macrocosmic (social) level is enmeshed with her rebellion on the microcosmic (personal) level. And the “wilderness” that she deliberately enters is the chaotic, undefined abundance of life once the artificial limitations imposed by a hierarchical ideology have been discarded.

The Duchess of Malfi does not believe in a universal harmony resting upon obedience, order, and rational limitation. Rather, she acts on the assumption that personal harmony with the universe depends upon the acceptance of the real laws of human nature, which, when the vain pretension to reason has been abandoned, appear to be much the same as those governing the rest of creation. If the Duchess is wrong, it is only in her failure to perceive that her isolated act cannot stand against all of society. As Calderwood puts it, she “displays a disrespect for external realities which is … dangerously naive.”⁵ This she learns as her earlier optimism gives way to a recognition of the vulnerability of her family. But in cosmic terms she is vindicated. Her harmony with nature leads to a harmony within herself that is not shaken by torment. And the echo that Webster sets up between the Duchess' affirmation that she is the Duchess of Malfi still and Bosola's affirmation that the stars shine still perhaps suggests a unity of personality with universal law—a triumph over the mutability that normally governs the sublunary world—which defeats the traditionalists on their own grounds.

The Duchess is Webster's highest tribute to human nature. Among the challengers of natural law philosophy, there were those, like Luther and Machiavelli, who found human nature to be essentially bad. Haydn makes the very good point that, after centuries of theological conditioning, it was inevitable that a naturalistic view of human beings would, to most people, mean a downgrading of humanity.⁶ The naturalistic image would be juxtaposed with the traditional ideal image and people would react either by violently rejecting the former as a heretical slander or by reluctantly accepting it as a harsh reality. It is remarkable, then, that there were those who, finding people to be irrational, did not consider this a cause for lament. Montaigne is at one with Machiavelli in rejecting the concepts of the “guiding role of reason, the hierarchical composition of the soul, the traditional linking of happiness and virtue under right reason.” But he differs in that he “still proclaims (with qualifications) the essential goodness of man's nature.”⁷ For Montaigne, however, this goodness does not reside in the development of a faculty that distinguishes human beings from animals; on the contrary, their goodness lies precisely in the instinctive qualities that they share with other creatures. In the Apology, as I pointed out earlier, Montaigne bitterly attacks reason as an interference in the smooth functioning of the universal laws of nature. Animals, he says, are kind to their young, ignorant of the art of war, and, in many cases, faithful to their mates, whereas human beings, with their supposed reason, are incapable of these natural virtues.⁸ In the Essays, this negative emphasis tends to give way to a positive one, an affirmation of the potential of human beings for true integration with natural goodness once they are liberated from the bonds of rationalistic philosophy.

Webster, retracing Montaigne's route, moves from the iconoclasm of The White Devil to the affirmation of The Duchess of Malfi. Haydn writes of Montaigne's Nature:

She is the indifferent mother of an infinite diversity and mutability, and her works are all equally good, all the children of her fertility in a world innocent of comprehensive systematizing and universal regulative principles of degree, vocation, etc. She is, if you will, Venus Genetrix, mother of instincts and senses, of biological motivation and uninhibited fertility.⁹

It is to this nature, rather than to the ghostly ideal of the philosophers, that people must conform their own behaviour, and in The Duchess of Malfi Webster creates such a human being, an intellectual creature who is possessed of the simple virtue and dignity that, in the Apology, Montaigne had reserved for animals. In creating this character, whose natural element is peace and love, and whose last thoughts, as she is about to die a violent death, have to do with cough medicine for her children, Webster seems to be asserting that it is possible for human beings to escape the curse of reason. In making her a member of the ruling class, he suggests the extension of this ideal to the level of the macrocosm.

It is odd that Webster critics have not made much of the very striking fact that both of his great tragedies have women as heroes.¹⁰ Shakespeare did not write a single tragedy in which the hero is a woman (Cleopatra shares the honours with Antony). Nor do Webster's heroines conform to the type of long-suffering female that was becoming increasingly popular with patrons of the private theatres. In fact Webster's heroines conform to no type, which is in itself a challenge to an audience accustomed to seeing stage females as saints or sinners.

Other challenges are implicit in these characterizations. In the introduction, I mentioned what I conceive to be the most important fact about Webster's heroines: that they combine assertiveness with what was taken to be femininity. Without in any way implying that there is such a thing as femininity, I would like to suggest that for Webster and his audience, femininity had to do with an affinity with nature. The notions of fertility as essential to a woman's role, of the Earth as feminine, of women as creatures of passion and impulse rather than reason—these were parts of the mentality of the period. For that very reason, women were not suitable heroes: the hero of a tragedy must possess (even if he fails to use it) the highest of human faculties, which is reason. That Webster chose to centre his tragedies around women is one of the most significant manifestations of his rejection of the hierarchic ideology of his time.¹¹ What Webster's protagonists possess in the highest degree is not the ability to reason, but the impulse to live in harmony with nature.

The psychological opposite of the Duchess is represented, as we have seen, by her brothers. Perhaps the most intellectually innovative aspect of The Duchess of Malfi is its close examination of the psychological implications of traditional hierarchical thought. The final evidence of the superiority of the Duchess' concept of natural law—and the major irony of the play—is the degeneration of Ferdinand to a subhuman level as he suffers from lycanthropy. But the fact that Ferdinand is dangerously out of harmony with the real laws of nature has been symbolically evident all along, for it is he, not the Duchess, who is associated throughout the play with the storms and earthquakes that traditionally symbolized disruption of the universal order. For all her violation of social order, the Duchess is incapable of cursing the world “to its first Chaos” (IV, i, 119), whereas Ferdinand's very existence calls forth the corresponding tempests and whirlwinds that reflect, on a cosmic level, his inner disquiet.¹²

On the individual psychological level, then, the myth of reason is a barrier to true self-knowledge and self-fulfilment. On the political level, those who act in the name of reason and order are brutal and tyrannical. The Cardinal, like Richelieu, finds it convenient to use the word “reason” when what he is talking about is reason of state. Ferdinand is more complex, because, whereas the Cardinal's ideology is purely secular, Ferdinand's hierarchical convictions are fortified by a very literal rendering of the traditional analogy between ruler and God. In this respect, Ferdinand bears an intriguing resemblance to James I, the crux of whose political philosophy was an image of the union of judge, king, and God in one personality. The people, said James, must acknowledge the king to be “a Judge set by God, over them, having power to judge them, but to be judged onely by God.”¹³ And he told his son that God had made the king a “little God, to sit on his Throne, and rule over other men.”¹⁴ One could find no better words to describe Ferdinand's image of himself, an image that I have already discussed from a less political point of view. In his characterization of Ferdinand, Webster has fleshed out the doctrine of divine right, connecting the political theory with its psychological counterpart in self-worship. He had not far to go. James' speech to Parliament in 1609 would have been sufficient in itself to provide the raw materials for the portrait of Ferdinand:

Kings are justly called Gods, for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of Divine power upon earth … they make and unmake their subjects: they have power of raising, and casting downe; of life, and of death. … They have power to exalt low things, and abase high things, and make of their subjects like men at the Chesse; a pawne to take a Bishop or a knight.¹⁵

It is a similar breathtaking egotism that we sense in Ferdinand as he goes about destroying the Duchess in his god-like way, an egotism that finds satisfaction in the possession of absolute power over another life.

Although Ferdinand worships a hidden God, it would be a mistake to conclude that Webster is implying in this a criticism of Puritanism, for strict Calvinism was only one stream in a very various movement. And in his view of the relationship between the individual and the state-church establishment, Webster had much in common with the Puritans. The secular power of the church, manifest in the structure of its hierarchy and in the continued power of the ecclesiastical courts, was a major issue to Jacobean Puritans. In opposition to clerical control of matters of faith and morality, the Puritans stressed the personal nature of religion and denied the right of the church courts to punish deviations. A corollary of the conviction that religion cannot be imposed by law was a rejection of penance and a corresponding emphasis on the penitence of individuals who felt they had violated their covenant with God.¹⁶ A similar emphasis on the primacy of the individual covenant led to a rejection of the anti-divorce position of the established church. Many Puritans seem to have felt, as Milton was to put it, that “it is not the outward continuing of marriage that keeps whole that covenant.”¹⁷ Although remarriage after divorce was forbidden by law, Puritan ministers repeatedly performed such marriages.¹⁸

This set of interconnected ideas is echoed in both The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. The treatment of marriage in both plays might be summed up by the Puritan thesis that “to command love and sympathy, to forbid dislike against the guiltles instinct of nature, is not within the province of any law to reach.”¹⁹ This is a major theme—perhaps the major theme—of both plays. Another major theme is the perniciousness of the alliance of state and church. In The White Devil the secular power of the church is attacked in Webster's portrayal of the Cardinal as judge and avenger. In The Duchess of Malfi, where the fusion of church and state is symbolically represented by the fraternal relationship of the Cardinal and Ferdinand, clerical control of personal morality is shown in the most devastating light. Both plays plainly demonstrate that the secular power of the church, far from making the state holy, only facilitates tyranny.

But the most striking echo of Puritan doctrine in The Duchess of Malfi is the dramatized opposition between penance and penitence incorporated in the conflict between Ferdinand and the Duchess. Ferdinand's desire to inflict penance on his sister's “delicate” body does not stem from a real desire to make her penitent, but from his own perverse needs. She, on the other hand, converses with God in her own way, in spite of her casualness about the outward forms of religion. In this respect (as in the partnership-marriage of the Duchess and Antonio), The Duchess of Malfi comes much closer to Puritan ideology than does The White Devil; for while the earlier play shares Puritan criticism, The Duchess of Malfi expresses, in the character of its heroine, the Puritan ideal of the individual conscience. Talking about Clarissa Harlowe, Christopher Hill says:

Clarissa's attitude is a logical application of the Protestant theory of justification by faith, with its emphasis on the inner intention of the believer rather than on his external actions. Purity of motive, chastity of mind, is more important than formal rectitude of behaviour.²⁰

I believe that the Duchess embodies this doctrine with a fervour and a heroic grandeur that was no longer possible in the time of Richardson. Confident in her own election, impatient with ritual and superstition, humble when alone in the presence of God, and strenuously devoted to the Puritan ideal of marriage, the Duchess is a perfect Puritan heroine.

We can begin to sense the power of this play in its own time. Major causes of declining deference towards the aristocracy in pre-revolutionary England were, in Stone's words,

the pervasive influence of the rise of individualism, the Calvinist belief in a spiritual hierarchy of the Elect, and the Puritan exaltation of the private conscience, which affected attitudes towards hierarchy and obedience in secular society.²¹

The spiritual hierarchy of which the Duchess is a part is pitted against the hierarchy of power represented by her brothers. As their earthly power crumbles, the Duchess' spiritual strength prevails. Nor is this an otherworldly message, for Bosola is fired by her example to fight for what is right in this world.²²

But if The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi express a revolutionary individualism akin to the Puritan emphasis on the individual conscience, they do not share Puritan faith in the potential regenerative power of a purified common law. Whereas the Puritan party in Webster's time looked to the common law as the basis of resistance to established power, both The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi depict the futility of appealing to any law when law is synonymous with power. Vittoria appeals to the law upon her trial—and the demands she makes anticipate legal reforms that were to take place during the revolutionary period—but it is useless to appeal to law in Monticelso's court. In The White Devil, destruction of the individual is a tragic inevitability.

In The Duchess of Malfi, too, the only kind of law that exists is the law that Bacon was talking about when he admitted that there is a “kind of force which pretends law, and a kind of law which savours of force rather than equity.”²³ In a fit of remorse, Ferdinand denounces Bosola for having executed the Duchess without legal warrant:

FERDINAND:
By what authority did'st thou execute
This bloody sentence?
BOSOLA:
                                                                      By yours—
FERDINAND:
Mine? was I her Judge?
Did any ceremoniall forme of Law,
Doombe her to not-Being? did a compleat Jury
Deliver her conviction up i'th' court?

(IV, ii, 320-325)

On the face of it, Ferdinand's statement would seem to imply that there is some difference between law and force in the world of The Duchess of Malfi. In reality, this difference is as shadowy and elusive as it was in the real world of Jacobean England. The realities of the Jacobean legal system—or lack of system—are reflected in the world of The Duchess of Malfi. Ferdinand may momentarily regret his disdain of the forms of common law, but the fact is that he lives in a world in which such disdain is possible for those in power. As the ruler of his little kingdom, and a judge, he wields the legal machinery of the state. That he is unaccustomed to concern himself about whether or not he is acting according to the rules of law is revealed when he ends his little speech about the ceremonies of law by threatening to judge and execute Bosola as peremptorily as he had the Duchess. In essence, Ferdinand, like James I, believes himself to be above the law. And in a very real sense, he is.

In such a world of lions and foxes, the Duchess cannot survive. The beauty she embodies is a real potential for humanity (Antonio says that she “lights the time to come” [I, i, 213]), but she is destroyed by a world in which goodness appears to be incompatible with power. And yet there is a strong suggestion at the end of the play that goodness could—and should—be stronger than it is. For the world has changed, albeit in small ways, as a result of the life and death of the Duchess. A piece of the hierarchy has crumbled away, revealing its internal weaknesses. And one man has learned that it is necessary to act according to the dictates of conscience, for there is no greater defeat than a life spent in cynical obedience to a corrupt master.

Criticism has been very divergent on the question of Bosola's role in the play. While some have seen in the fifth act a conversion that implies some sort of hope for the future, others have contended that Bosola does little or nothing to dispel the sense of a “meaningless universe”²⁴ that we are left with at the end of the play. Clifford Leech, for example, concludes that “hope cannot go very deep” at the end of the play because Bosola is such a sorry excuse for a hero:

For the dominant strain in the play's ending, the key is in the presentation of Bosola. In this last act we have seen him drawn into sympathy with Antonio and his dead wife, yet slaying an innocent servant without compunction, mistakenly killing Antonio, complaining always of being neglected. As an instrument of justice he is pitifully imperfect, while he had shown address as tormentor and executioner.²⁵

In a recent variant of this view, Jacqueline Pearson argues that as the focus shifts at the end of the play from the Duchess to Bosola and Antonio, the generic focus “shifts from tragedy to inversions and parodies of tragedy.” According to Pearson, Webster's aim is to “define tragedy objectively and to place the tragic affirmation of a heroic individual in the perspective of an anti-heroic society.”²⁶

While I agree with critics who refuse to orchestrate Bosola's fifth act changes into a heroic symphony, I would also contend that it is precisely because Bosola has not suddenly, miraculously metamorphosed into a tragic hero that we can believe in his change. And because we are able to believe that his change is not just a literary convention—that it could really occur in life—the play should not leave us despairing.

Webster seems to be saying that, although the Duchess embodies an ideal, it is the Bosolas of the world, “pitifully imperfect” as they are, who determine to what extent such ideals affect events. That Bosola is crucial is such a disquieting point that Webster devotes an entire act of the play to impressing it upon the audience. Leech's dissatisfaction with Bosola as “an instrument of justice” is understandable. Fortinbras would make a cleaner job of it. Not only is Bosola ethically imperfect, capable of total coldness in the face of human suffering, and almost incurably opportunistic, but he is also (I know no better word for it) creepy. I think it is this—the decay he seems to exude like bad breath—that makes it so hard for us to accept him as the avenger of the Duchess.

And yet the Duchess herself sees so much goodness in Bosola that she makes the fatal error of trusting him in what I conceive to be the moment of climax and peripety in the play. The Duchess' tragic flaw (to use another old-fashioned term) has been, all along, that she is too trusting.²⁷ At a moment when she crucially needs friends, Bosola delivers a lengthy defence of Antonio, whom the Duchess has pretended to find guilty of dishonest management. There is nothing in it for Bosola. Opportunist that he is, his move would be to support her denunciation, hoping to raise himself in her eyes. But he does the opposite. He commits himself totally to the position that she is wrong, that Antonio is incapable of dishonesty. The Duchess concludes that Bosola is a good man and she fatally entrusts him with her secrets: that she is married to Antonio and that they are about to flee. Bosola lengthily expresses his amazement that virtue (Antonio) has been so recognized and rewarded by authority (the Duchess). As the scene ends, with the Duchess employing Bosola to help her and her family, we wonder what Bosola will do. I think we really know.

Bosola will return to his boss and report what he knows. He detests himself for it. His defence of Antonio, his praise of the Duchess for marrying Antonio, are sincere; but he cannot act upon his ethical premises because basically Bosola is a slave, with the mind and will of a slave who simultaneously detests and grovels before his master.

A controlling image of the play, stated in the very first scene, is a comparison between a virtuous court and a clean water-source, as opposed to a defiled court, or fountain, contaminating everything as it descends. The play bears out the image: the Duchess is a pure source; Ferdinand, the more powerful stream, carries infection. Bosola, a mass of contradictory impulses, is infected by the force of Ferdinand's disease. Called upon to utilize his worst impulses, he complies, although the love of goodness is always there, in one form or another. I do not believe that he is really much of a tormentor. As I read the fourth act, I see Bosola as curious, probing, testing the Duchess' apparently boundless gift of sanity. He is Ferdinand's tool, with all that that implies, and as such he cannot help but act out Ferdinand's wishes. Yet he pleads with Ferdinand to end the torture. He would like to see the Duchess fall because that would justify his cynicism. But he would like to see her win because he loves her.

It is the nature of tragedy that, if the characters had known at the outset what they know at the end, the tragedy would never have happened. If the Duchess had not trusted Bosola, she and her family might have escaped. If Bosola had had the courage to cease being Ferdinand's cesspool, her trust would have been justified. When Bosola finally reverses the course of the stream, something very important has taken place. In giving us Bosola rather than, say, Antonio as avenger, Webster makes the profoundly disquieting suggestion that it is up to just such bumbling sinners as ourselves to resist the infection of corrupt authority.

Notes

1. Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York: Scribners, 1950), p. 132.

2. Ibid., p. 133.

3. The Political Testament of Cardinal Richelieu, ed. and trans. Henry Bertram Hill (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), pp. 71-72.

4. See above, Chapter 3, p. 103.

5. James L. Calderwood, “The Duchess of Malfi: Styles of Ceremony,” in Norman Rabkin, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of the Duchess of Malfi (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 79.

6. Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance, p. 382.

7. Ibid., p. 405.

8. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, ed. and trans. Donald Frame (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960), pp. 130-160.

9. Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance, p. 465.

10. Muriel Bradbrook takes note of Webster's general concern with women's problems (John Webster: Citizen and Dramatist [New York: Columbia University Press, 1980], pp. 119, 142, 430, and elsewhere), but by and large it has been in more general works on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama that Webster's sympathy with women has been noted (see above, introduction, note 31). Simon Shepherd does not deal with The White Devil, but he does note that the fact that the Duchess is in the centre of her play distinguishes The Duchess of Malfi from other plays ca. 1612 that have active and sexual female characters (Amazons and Warrior Women [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981], pp. 116-118).

11. There has been an unfortunate tendency in some feminist criticism of Shakespeare to accept without protest the Bard's refusal to put women at the centre of his tragedies. Thus Linda Bamber is content to find women at the centre of comedies: “The feminine other … is Shakespeare's natural ally in the mode of festive comedy. Precisely because she is Other, precisely because her inner life is obscure to her author, she seems gifted with precisely the qualities that make for comedy: a continuous, reliable identity, self-acceptance, a talent for ordinary pleasures” (Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare [Standford: Stanford University Press, 1982], p. 41). A similar line of thought is pursued by Paula S. Berggren in “The Woman's Part: Female Sexuality as Power in Shakespeare's Plays” (in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Lenz, et al. [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980]). Berggren says: “The comic world requires childbearers to perpetuate the race, to ensure community and continuity; the tragic world, which abhors such reassurance, consequently shrinks from a female protagonist. Such women as exist in tragedy must make their mark by rejecting their womanliness, by sublime sacrifice, or as midwives to the passion of the hero” (pp. 18-19). Berggren does refer to The Duchess of Malfi in a footnote, but her generalizations still stand.

    The Duchess, of course, possesses in abundance “the qualities that make for comedy” according to these critics. Webster's play demonstrates that these qualities can also make for tragedy. Shakespeare did not write The Duchess of Malfi because he was more committed than Webster to the rationalist ideology, with its built-in hierarchical and sexist implications.

    Shakespeare is an imposing figure, of course, but we must resist what a recent critic has referred to as “the domination of the patriarchal Bard” if it leads us to entertain seriously a view of women as good for laughs. (See Kathleen McLuskie, “The patriarchal bard: feminist criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure,” in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985]).

12. On tempests, etc., see E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1944), p. 86.

13. The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles McIlwain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918), p. xliii.

14. Ibid., p. xxxv.

15. “A Speech to the Lords and Commons of the Parliament at Whitehall,” in Political Works, p. 308.

16. Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714 (London: Nelson, 1961), pp. 79-80.

17. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in Complete Prose Works, gen. ed., Don Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), vol. II, p. 258.

18. Ernest Sirluck, ed., vol. II of Milton, Complete Prose Works, p. 146. The relations between Puritan ideology with respect to marriage and women's roles, on the one hand, and the English Renaissance drama, on the other, is one of the prime concerns of Juliet Dusinberre in Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1975).

19. Doctrine and Discipline, p. 345.

20. Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), p. 385.

21. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 351.

22. It is illuminating to consider the Duchess in the light of Simon Shepherd's discussion of Spencer's Britomart, the type of his warrior woman (Amazons and Warrior Women [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981]): “Britomart's lover is the knight who represents justice; she herself represents chastity. True justice can only be saved and re-established when chastity defeats its opposite, lust” (p. 5); “It is in pursuit not only of her own destiny but of her historical obligation to Britain that Britomart fights her way towards Artegall” (p. 27); “The true warrior woman will challenge men to greater bravery and their true militancy” (p. 28). Shepherd makes us aware that Webster was working within a tradition that associated female virtue with political rejuvenation.

23. Quoted by William Holdsworth, A History of English Law (London: Methuen, 1922), vol. V, p. 249.

24. Normand Berlin, “The Duchess of Malfi: Act V and Genre,” Genre 3 (1970), p. 360).

25. Clifford Leech, Webster: The Duchess of Malfi (London: Arnold, 1963), p. 27.

26. Tragedy and Tragicomedy in the Plays of John Webster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), pp. 89-95. Her chapter on The Duchess of Malfi essentially restates the position expressed by Berlin in the article cited above.

27. Compare Leonora Leet Brodwin: “Her tragic error lies not in choosing to love but in overestimating the ability of a hostile world to accept her vision of moral health” (Elizabethan Love Tragedy 1587-1625 [New York: New York University Press, 1971], p. 286). My perception of this play coincides with Brodwin's at several points, especially where she says that the “Duchess' ‘feareful madnes’ lies in her desire to fulfill both the claims of her greatness and of her femininity” (p. 284).