SOURCE: Pearson, Jacqueline. “‘To Behold My Tragedy’: Tragedy and Anti-Tragedy in The Duchess of Malfi.” In Tragedy and Tragicomedy in the Plays of John Webster, pp. 84-95. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980.

[In the essay below, Pearson maintains that while the first four acts of The Duchess of Malfi are clearly a tragedy, the structure of the play fragments in the final act, with notes of satire and tragicomedy. The mixture does not work, she argues, to blend those elements, but rather to distinguish true tragedy from other forms of experience.]

The failure of The White Devil in 1612 seems to have caused Webster to re-evaluate his own view of tragedy and its relationship with other dramatic genres. Certain methods of construction remain, clashing tones, the use of satirical commentary and ironic repetition, but differences between the plays are perhaps more striking. The Duchess of Malfi makes little use of the moral redefinitions of The White Devil: good and evil are more clearly meaningful, and ambiguity less an expression of the real nature of the world than an evasion. The Duchess is a far less ambiguous heroine than Vittoria, a good woman who is forced by the threatening society around her into an equivocal situation, hiding behind ‘masks and curtains’ (III.2.159) when she would prefer frank and open demonstrations of feeling, expressing herself ‘in riddles and in dreams’ (I.1.446) when she would prefer to speak clearly and unambiguously. The White Devil is centred on ambiguous characters, the later play on more obviously tragic figures, a great lady who loves too well and is murdered at the instigation of her brothers. The White Devil from the beginning introduces tragicomic incidents, ironic undermining and the modifying use of laughter. The later play seems at least to begin as a tragedy of passion.

However The Duchess of Malfi has created problems about structure and unity perhaps even more seriously than The White Devil with its ironic repetition and deliberate fragmentation. The first four acts seem to constitute a tragedy of a palpable kind, but Webster allows his heroine to die over an act before the end of the play. The Duchess of Malfi begins as a tragedy and only in the fifth act confronts tragedy with satire, tragicomedy, and a distorted view of the tragic absolutes. This method of construction causes critics much uncertainty about the unity of the play. William Archer found it ‘broken-backed’, and Ian Scott-Kilvert finds this final act an ‘anti-climax’ which is ‘fatal to the unity of the play’.¹ However I think this is far from our experience of the play in the theatre, and I want to examine the fifth act and its relationship with what has gone before.

The first four acts of The Duchess of Malfi form a coherent tragedy. Indeed tragedy seems inevitable from very early. As early as the end of the first act, Cariola defines the play as a tragedy: to her, the Duchess's wooing of her steward seems ‘a fearful madness’ which deserves ‘pity’ (I.1.506). The tragic emotions of fear and pity are already implicit in the action. As the play progresses, the tragic emotions become more pressing and inescapable. In Act Four the Duchess's torment and death are posed as a formal ‘tragedy’ (IV.2.8, 36, 288) scripted by Ferdinand, enacted by Bosola, centred on the Duchess, and developing in the Aristotelian combination of ‘pity’ (IV.1.88, 90, 95, 138, IV.2.34, 259, 273, 347) and ‘terror’ (IV.2.189). Where The White Devil uses ‘tragedy’ or ‘tragic’, it usually includes mockery or at least uncertainty of response. The fourth act of The Duchess of Malfi uses such words far more simply and seriously.

The tragic centre of the play is menaced by bitter comedy and by images of fiction which the Duchess must oppose with her own tragic consciousness and her acute understanding of the line dividing truth from falsehood. Bosola's disguises, Ferdinand's equivocating vow, his sinister joke with the dead man's hand, the Masque of Madmen, Cariola's desperate attempt to escape death by improvising fictions, the ‘sad spectacle’ (IV.1.57) of the dead Antonio and his son, which turns out to be only ‘feign'd statues’ (IV.2.351), the ‘tedious theatre’ (IV.1.84), the ‘good actor’ playing a ‘villain's part’ (IV.1.289-90), all these create a pervasive sense of fiction and unreality which can only be defeated by the Duchess's acceptance of tragedy with her eyes open, ‘well awake’ (IV.2.224). Tragedy is surrounded by and tested by unreality and grim comedy. It is also tested by reminders of a happy past which contrasts poignantly with the present horror. The scene, as I have already suggested, is heavy with echoes of the wooing scene. Again, Bosola's view of the Duchess as an ‘unquiet bedfellow’ (IV.2.140) is a poignant reminder of Cariola's banter that her mistress is ‘the sprawling'st bedfellow’ (III.2.13). Under attack from black comedy, from fiction, from reminders of past happiness and illusive promises of a happy future, the Duchess must laboriously salvage the tragic absolutes, insisting upon her own identity and her own clear-sightedness.

Although the Duchess preserves the status of a tragic heroine, she has an ambiguous relationship to some of the absolutes which we might expect tragedy to affirm. She chooses not to ‘pray’ (IV.1.95) but rather to ‘curse the stars’ (IV.1.96), and the world itself into ‘chaos’ (IV.1.99). Throughout the play the Duchess has appeared as spokesman for fruitful disorder by rejecting ‘vain ceremony’ (I.1.456), the traditional rôle of the nobility, and the traditionally passive rôle of women. She is contrasted with Antonio, whose conventional admiration for ‘fixed order’ (I.1.6) is only abandoned as he dies. Here for a moment the Duchess's acceptance of fruitful disorder almost slips over into the will for general destruction, but finally she dies in humility and ‘obedience’ (IV.2.169), kneeling to enter heaven, and insisting upon her own awareness and understanding, ‘well awake’ (IV.2.224).

The most extreme manifestation of anti-tragedy and menacing theatricality with which the Duchess is confronted is the Masque of Madmen. This masque not only attacks the Duchess: it also detaches us from the play-world by presenting a distorted version of it. The discordant music, dialogue in which no communication is made, and the ever more extreme vision of physical and spiritual degeneration reflect and comment on the play itself. 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. The Third Madmen clearly recalls the Cardinal, the corrupt sensual churchman. The Fourth, the mad doctor, may reflect Ferdinand, who imagines himself as a physician treating the ‘intemperate agues’ (IV.1.142) of the Duchess, who sent her the grim Masque of Madmen as a ‘cure’ (IV.2.43), and who finally needs a doctor to treat his own madness. He himself draws the connection for us: ‘Physicians are like kings’ (V.2.66). The Second Madman—perhaps also the one discussed in lines 103 to 105—is perhaps a distorted version of Bosola, who ‘shows the tombs’ (IV.2.102) and indulges in misogynistic and scurrilous stories of ‘the glass-house’ (IV.2.77, II.2.7). The Masque of Madmen, as well as presenting an attack on the Duchess by the forces of satire, also genuinely helps to keep her in her right wits by asserting her essential sanity in the face of the grotesque madness of her opponents, Ferdinand, the Cardinal, and Bosola.

This painful confrontation between tragedy and anti-tragedy is further complicated by links drawn between the representatives of the two. Bosola is not only like Antonio: he is also, in this scene, like the Duchess. The Duchess is ‘like a madman’ (IV.2.17), and she believes at first that Bosola is ‘mad too’ (IV.2.114). She compares her suffering with that of ‘the tann'd galley-slave’ (IV.2.28), and we recall that Bosola had served a sentence in the galleys for a murder commissioned by the Cardinal (I.1.71-3). The two are not only enemies but are also almost allies. Bosola's tissue of questions helps the Duchess to arrive at her self-definition, and his pessimism throws into relief her affirmation.

The death of the Duchess, then, is poised as the play's tragic centre, described as a ‘tragedy’, surrounded by ‘pity’ and ‘terror’, fighting off anti-tragedy, and finally leading to a triumphant affirmation of her own identity, ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’ (IV.2.142). The Duchess is both a tragic heroine reaching a tragic affirmation, and the heroine of a tragical comedy, like R. B.'s Virginia, escaping from tragedy into a heavenly afterlife. However this posed tragedy disintegrates into anti-tragedy after the death of the Duchess. Tragedy is parodied in Cariola's high-spirited fight for life. She creates a tissue of fictions, like ‘I am quick with child’ (IV.2.254), which Bosola clear-sightedly recognises as fictions. Cariola is driven into subterfuge, into taking shameful ways to avoid shame. Unlike her mistress, she cannot free herself from fiction even as she dies, and the only kind of love and motherhood she can claim for herself exist in fiction only.

It is not just, then, that in Act Five the play moves away from tragedy: the Duchess' hard-won tragic moment is precarious and collapses as soon as she dies, and the return from tragedy is illustrated in several small inversions or parodies of tragedy. If Cariola parodies the tragic actors, Ferdinand parodies the tragic audience. His reaction to the death of his sister is a perversion of the tragic catharsis experienced by the audience. He first denies (IV.2.259) and then accepts the validity of tragic ‘pity’ (IV.2.273), sees the event as one of ‘horror’ (IV.2.311, 314), and interprets the whole as a ‘tragedy’ (IV.2.288). However for Ferdinand pity and fear are not purged: they are violently awakened, so that he rushes out ‘distracted’ (IV.2.336). This inversion of catharsis also brings Ferdinand to the reverse of a tragic understanding of the situation: he tries to throw all the blame on to Bosola, to imagine a fictional happy ending, and to retreat into obviously false motives and images of fiction.

At this point, with Ferdinand parodying the reactions of tragedy, in another inversion of tragedy the Duchess revives for a moment. It seems momentarily that all that has gone before is only a tragicomedy which wants deaths. For Bosola, this rich confusion of tragedy and tragicomedy poses insoluble problems. Even the tragic emotions are confused, until it seems that ‘pity would destroy pity’ (IV.2.347). Where the Duchess faces and accepts the truth of her situation and Ferdinand recoils from it, Bosola is faced with divided loyalties to fact and fiction, and he presents the dying Duchess with a half-real, half-unreal account of Antonio alive and reconciled to her brothers. Bosola's confrontation with tragedy leaves him still prepared to use fictions, and however kindly his motives this deliberate falsehood suggests that Bosola's dependence on fiction and deception is to shape his actions even now that he has rejected ‘painted honour’ (IV.2.336). Where Ferdinand retreats from tragedy, Bosola accepts it in modified form, throwing off his disguise. This acceptance, though, is complex and ambiguous. His change of direction is achieved only when he is convinced he has lost his chance for reward, so that it has a strong undercurrent of personal spite. Moreover it is a change in attitude which does not seem much to affect the way he acts, but only the people who are his friends and enemies. To see Bosola's move to the Duchess's side only as a new commitment ‘to doing what he knows is morally right’ or even as ‘redemption’² seems to oversimplify. It is a strange kind of conversion which is only second choice to material advancement, and which produces the same kind of murder and betrayal as his unregenerate self.

Moreover this change in Bosola is not wholly for the good. It expresses itself not only in a discovery of his own ‘guilty conscience’ (IV.2.356), but also in a significant dimming of his clear moral insight. Before this he always showed a clear moral understanding even when this was rigidly excluded from his actions. From this point he no longer stands in a special relationship with the audience, he is less self-critical, and we can accept his evaluations less readily. His vow, for instance, to give the body of the Duchess to ‘some good women’ (IV.2.372) is made apparently without irony, although he has just participated in the murder of the play's two good women. Bosola, as he himself would have been the first to realise earlier in the play, returns as arrant knave as he set forth, because he carried himself always along with him.

The fourth act of The Duchess of Malfi, then, presents a tragedy in which a good woman achieves a tragic self-assertion. This tragic centre, however, emerges from a mass of anti-tragic material: a masque which provides a grotesquely distorted view of the play itself, a parody of the tragic moment as Cariola refuses tragedy and Ferdinand perverts tragic catharsis, and a miniature tragicomedy in which the Duchess briefly revives. The act tries to suggest as richly as possible the variety of human reactions to disaster without compromising the centrality of the Duchess's positive statement. For the strong few there is the possibility of tragedy: for the majority there is only uncertainty, ambiguity, or the rejection of the difficult absolutes of tragedy. There is never any real doubt about the Duchess's courage and her essential innocence: the play's central ambiguities lie rather in the effect of her love and death on those around her. In the final scene the focus shifts from tragedy to inversions and parodies of tragedy, and from the Duchess to Bosola and Antonio. Without the tough integrity of the Duchess, tragedy falls apart into satire, self-deception, despair and madness.

Dorothea Krook sees tragedy as an interlocking sequence of four units, ‘the act of shame or horror’, the ‘suffering’ which this causes, the special ‘knowledge’ generated by this suffering, and the ‘affirmation or reaffirmation of the dignity of the human spirit’ which this new and special knowledge produces.³ If this is a valid scheme for tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi seems to use the tragic framework in a peculiarly sceptical and ironic way. In the fourth act, the death of the Duchess forms a genuine tragic centre. The end of the act, and the fifth act, provide a series of inversions or parodies of the tragic scheme, in which almost all the tragic values are negated. The first three acts present an ambiguous view of the tragic ‘act of shame or horror’: the Duchess's unequal marriage is seen as shameful and horrifying by Ferdinand, though not necessarily by the audience. Act Four juxtaposes an authentic tragic ‘knowledge’ with knowledge of a more dubious kind. Act Five ends the play on an ambiguous view of tragic affirmation.

In many ways in style and in imagery Act Five is very different from the play which has gone before. The play has arranged tragedy as the peak, the highest in artistic form and in moral achievement, from which the final act charts a sharp decline. The language itself changes to emphasise this change of quality. The end of Act Four and Act Five itself are full of negatives, ‘silence’ (IV.2.5, V.4.83), ‘never’ (V.5.90), ‘no’ (V.5.108), ‘not-being’ (IV.2.301), and especially ‘nothing’ (IV.1.138, IV.2.15, V.2.33, 39, 54, 231, 330, 347, V.5.59, 79, 118), which echoes through the last act. After the affirmation of the Duchess's life and death the society she leaves behind her is negative and sterile.

Again in the final act the play's images of comedy and tragicomedy become more extreme and grotesque. Julia's wooing of Bosola begins as an enacted tragicomedy in which she threatens him with a pistol, and ends in tragedy in earnest, rather like Flamineo's death in The White Devil. The ‘fatal judgement’ (V.2.85) which falls on Ferdinand, the play's leading exponent of satirical comedy, is that he becomes frozen into this one posture, a comic madman afraid of his own shadow. The Cardinal too dies surrounded by laughter, doomed by the fictions which he thought he controlled.

Act Five, then, is deliberately separated from the first four acts by a change in vocabulary and by an increase in pressure from comic and tragicomic incidents. It is also separated by a change in focus on certain characters. We become increasingly distanced from the characters, and it becomes less and less easy to accept what they tell us at face value, until we can view even the last words of the play with critical objectivity. Those characters who have stood as delegates of the audience, Bosola, Antonio and the Duchess have either disappeared from the play or had this special relationship shattered. Antonio especially, who began the play by guiding our judgements, has shrunk in stature since the death of his wife. His character has fallen apart. Bosola has taken over his clear-sighted grasp of character and Delio his stubborn integrity. Only his less attractive characteristics remain, his subconscious with for disaster, his helpless indecision, poor judgement, desire for ‘any safety’ (V.1.67). His death at least frees him from fear and from his conventional awe of the ‘fixed order’ (I.1.6) of the courtly life, which he never shakes off and which helps to doom him. Like Ferdinand and the Cardinal, he is destroyed by the death of the Duchess.

Despite Webster's deliberate use of contrasting modes in the final scenes, they are nevertheless tightly connected in theme with what has gone before. The final act might have been a second tragedy arising from the Duchess' murder, an ‘act of shame or horror’ which might have driven her murderers to tragic knowledge and affirmation. However in the final act, tragic structures are suggested only to be negated, inverted, or parodied, or are accepted only in a limited sense. Brooding over this series of anti-tragedies is the strongly contrasting presence of the Duchess. In a significant, almost indeed in a literal, sense the dead Duchess haunts the final act, a constant poignant reminder of a better way of living. After what seems her death she revives momentarily, she ‘haunts’ Bosola, perhaps even appearing as he imagines he can see her, ‘there, there!’ (V.2.346). She is heard again in the echo scene, and again perhaps is seen, ‘a face folded in sorrow’ (V.3.45). Of course she is constantly talked about in the last act, and is metaphorically present in the echoes and summaries of the past with which the ending of the play is permeated. When she appears three times after her apparent death it seems as if she and the life force which she represents are proof against death. Her tragic affirmation confronts the sceptical world left behind her, and the tragicomic discords created by this antithesis modify the effect of the final act.

Act Five contains a rich number of parodies or incomplete versions of tragedy. Deliberately fictional versions of tragedy have replaced the genuine tragedy of the Duchess: the Cardinal's quite baseless story of the ominous haunting of the family by a woman killed by her own kinsmen ‘for her riches’ (V.2.94) is the nearest he can get to understanding tragedy. This fabrication is a parody of the story of the Duchess: we are reminded of Ferdinand's claim that he had hoped to gain ‘infinite mass of treasure by her death’ (IV.2.285). The Cardinal who tries to define tragedy only in these blatantly fictional terms meets an appropriate death. He is the centre of dangerous fiction in this last act, as he uses ‘fair marble colours’ to conceal his ‘rotten purpose’ (V.2.297-8). In order to dispose of the body of Julia safely, he designs an elaborate fiction, and he warns his followers not to disturb it:

When he's asleep, myself will rise, and feign
Some of his mad tricks …
And feign myself in danger.

(V.4.14-16)

He is also threatened by black comedy. His courtiers believe that his shouts for help are simply ‘counterfeiting’ (V.5.20), and they imagine how the Cardinal will ‘laugh’ (V.5.33) at them if they mistake his fiction for reality. By his attempt to manipulate fictions the Cardinal dooms himself, and his death provides both an exact judgement upon him and an exact inversion of the tragic process. Suffering is surrounded by comedy, knowledge brings only despair, and instead of affirming his own identity and his human dignity the Cardinal is reduced to ‘a little point, a kind of nothing’ (V.5.79) who only wishes to lose his sense of self and to be ‘laid by, and never thought of’ (V.5.90).

The Cardinal's death forms a clear anti-tragedy in which the precarious tragic moment achieved by the Duchess disintegrates. The death of Ferdinand follows the same pattern, and is also surrounded by fiction and comedy instead of dissipating them in the positives of tragedy. Ferdinand's madness is another opposite of tragic knowledge. Instead of, like the Duchess, asserting his own individuality, he imagines himself a soldier in a battle which turns into a comment on the breakdown of the family. Both Ferdinand and the Cardinal have a momentary flash of self-knowledge, but it allows them no such affirmation as the Duchess's. Ferdinand quotes Giovanni in The White Devil to recognise that ‘Sorrow is held the eldest child of sin’ (V.5.55), but he retains little sense of personal identity or personal involvement. His fate seems to him not to be his own fault, but only to be caused by the nature of the world: ‘Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust’ (V.5.73). The Duchess manages to look to the future as she dies. Ferdinand can only look backwards, and the Cardinal only welcomes oblivion. Their deaths give only negative versions of the Duchess' affirmation.

The Duchess's tragedy is followed by a number of distorted versions of it which become increasingly foreign to the spirit of tragedy. Cariola resists and lies, Julia refuses to evaluate her own life, the Cardinal and Ferdinand invert and parody the achievement of tragic knowledge and affirmation. The death of Antonio is also posed as an anti-tragedy. The scene of the Duchess's murder is carefully prolonged to allow her to make her final affirmation: Antonio is killed casually and accidentally. This painfully ironic scene casts doubts on the whole possibility of just action in a post-tragic world. Bosola, who tries to commit himself to ‘Penitence’ (V.2.348), ‘a most just revenge’ (V.2.343), finds himself inescapably trapped in fictions: the murder of Antonio is seen simply as ‘such a mistake as I have often seen / In a play’ (V.5.95-6). Antonio's death allows the murdered man some knowledge and affirmation: at least in the face of death he finds himself able to ‘appear myself’ (V.4.50). However it is of so subdued a kind that it seems a parody of the Duchess's intensity. He achieves a limited kind of self-definition, but it is a weary kind which consists so largely in regret for his past deeds and the admission that throughout the play his judgement has been faulty. At the beginning of the play he praised the ‘fixed order’ (I.1.6) of the French court. Now he dies with a profound distrust of the ambiguous ‘order’ imposed by great men, wishing that his son should ‘fly the courts of princes’ (V.4.72). Tragedy is replaced by horrifying accident and a disturbing pessimism.

Cariola, Julia, Ferdinand, the Cardinal and Antonio is each the centre of a tiny anti-tragedy in which the values of the Duchess cannot be maintained but are inverted or distorted. The final act, though, centres on Bosola, and his anti-tragedy is the most complex of all. From the beginning of the play, of course, Bosola has been an ambiguous character: ‘very valiant’ but poisoned by ‘want of action’ (I.1.76, 80), he ‘would look up to heaven’ but the devil stands in his light (II.1.94-5). This ambiguity is increased rather than resolved in the final act. Like the Cardinal Bosola becomes enmeshed in fictions, despite his newly good intentions. He uses fiction with the Cardinal and Julia, but also, and this is a new development, with himself. He claims ‘Penitence’ (V.2.348) and uncritically claims to be taking part in a ‘most just revenge’ (V.2.343), apparently without recognising the irony of revenging a crime which he has himself committed. This is underlined by the ironic divergence between his intention of joining with Antonio and his accidental murder of his would-be ally.

In the final act the included incidents move further from the paradoxical calm of formal tragedy. Antonio's death is casual, ironic and muddled, Ferdinand and the Cardinal are destroyed by fiction and comedy. Finally the scene reaches the farthest stage from tragedy in the death of Bosola. Flamineo recognised some ‘goodness’ (WD V.6.269) in his death, the last of the play's many ironic inversions of value terms. Bosola similarly believes it can do him ‘no harm … to die / In so good a quarrel’ (V.5.99-100). His play has not, however, like The White Devil established this kind of moral inversion as a valid way of summing up a perverse and divided world. Bosola's redefinition of the adjective ‘good’ seems less convincing, an uncritical shifting of responsibility which is the opposite of tragic knowledge. This sense of his own rightness is deeply undermined by the accidental murder of Antonio and the casual murder of his servant, by the stress placed on Bosola's grudging sense of being ‘neglected’ (V.5.87) which lingers to the very end of his life, and by images of uncertainty and of fiction, ‘in a mist’ (V.5.94), ‘in a play’ (V.5.96). Bosola's definition of himself as a justified avenger is also cut across by the brutally simple summing up of his career by Malateste, ‘Thou wretched thing of blood’ (V.5.94).

The final irony in this ironic play is the untrustworthy nature of its last words, which we are forced to regard critically and with detachment: the affirmation of the Duchess's death is dissipated in facile pessimism and incomprehension. Flamineo's critical agnosticism in the face of death sums up the whole effect of his agnostic play. Bosola's does not: the affirmative tragic action of the play which precedes undermines his narrow and conventional stoic sentiments. He insists that men are only ‘dead walls or vaulted graves, / That ruin'd yields no echo’ (V.5.97-8). However we are forced to question this reductive view of human life by remembering that we have just heard the Duchess's grave returning an echo in a literal sense. Again, Bosola speaks of the ‘deep pit of darkness’ in which mankind lives, ‘womanish and fearful’ (V.5.101-2). This quotation from Sidney's Arcadia⁴ seems to have been altered specifically to create ambiguity about the adjective ‘womanish’, when the play's heroine has been anything but ‘fearful’, and has died refusing to see the world as only a ‘pit of darkness’. Bosola's flip pessimism is discredited by our memory of what has gone before: a world that has produced the Duchess and been coloured by her values might seem to be more than simply a pit of darkness. Bosola's two most negative definitions of human life, therefore, are negated by their context, but this ambiguous and indirect affirmation is the only one which the final act of the play has to offer. Finally Bosola urges ‘worthy minds’ not to fear death in the service of ‘what is just’ (V.5.103-4). This final attempt at affirmation, however, is qualified at the last moment by the sudden insight that he himself is not one of these worthy minds whose death will allow tragic affirmation: ‘Mine is another voyage’ (V.5.105).

Bosola's death, like all the other deaths in this final act, provides an ironic inversion of tragedy with ambiguous knowledge and affirmation. The whole scene, too, takes on the shape of these ironic versions of tragedy. Even Delio's last lines, presented to us as a final summary, turn out to be ironically undercut. Delio attempts to redefine greatness and to sum up the play's suggestions that greatness lies not in birth or power but in moral excellence. The play's ‘great men’ (V.5.118) Ferdinand and the Cardinal have lost their identity as completely as footprints melting with melting snow. Men are truly ‘great’ only when they are ‘lords of truth’ (V.5.119). Only ‘integrity of life’, a complete and moral life, leads to immortal ‘fame’ (V.5.120). The Duchess, like the heroine of a tragical comedy, is assured of some kind of immortality because of her intensity and her goodness. However if Webster intended his audience to be aware of the source of his quotation it could only add disquieting ironies to what might seem a conventional summing up. Horace's ode which begins ‘Integer vitae …’ (Odes, 1, xxii) praises the man of perfect purity and innocence. His goodness protects him even from physical danger, for even the savage wolf will not attack the truly virtuous man. In Webster's play, however, even the Duchess's ‘integrity of life’ cannot protect her, her husband or her children, from Ferdinand the wolf. The play's last lines which seem to offer a ‘reaffirmation’ turn out to be complex and ambiguous, and so does the play's vision of the future. Antonio's son is to become Duke ‘in's mother's right’ (V.5.113), and we might think that this is a restoration of political and moral order. However the real heir is, as Webster clearly points out to us earlier in the play (III.3.69-71), the Duchess's son by her first marriage, and this child of Antonio's who seems poised to re-establish order is the child whose horoscope predicted a ‘short life’ and a ‘violent death’ (II.3.63), and whom Antonio wished to ‘fly the courts of princes’ (V.4.73). Even the play's final restoration of order, then, is profoundly ironic. The Duchess's tragedy is posed at the summit of a descending scale, and the play returns from this height to the confusions, ironies and uncertainties of our real life.

The Duchess of Malfi seems to me not to be broken-backed or confused but to establish a significant relationship between tragedy and other kinds of experience. Comic, satiric and tragicomic elements are posed to define tragedy objectively and to place the tragic affirmation of a heroic individual in the perspective of an anti-heroic society. Fletcher's definition of tragicomedy made clear the kind of play he was not writing, that which mixed ‘mirth and killing’ and which included both violence and festivity, ‘laughing together’.⁵ This is, however, exactly the kind of play that Webster is writing in The Duchess of Malfi, where tragic affirmation defeats comedy and satire but is refused by an unheroic society which rejects the tragic values of the Duchess, wilfully misunderstands them, fails to live up to them, or fatally misinterprets them. Tragedy has learned to tell the Whole Truth. The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi include miniature tragicomedies and ironically qualify tragedy: after this in his career Webster specialised in formal tragicomedy, with The Devil's Law-case (1617) and A Cure for a Cuckold (1625).

Notes

1. William Archer, review of 1919 production of Malfi, Nineteenth Century (vol. 87, no. 515, Jan. 1920): Ian Scott-Kilvert, John Webster (1964), p. 25.

2. C. G. Thayer, ‘The ambiguity of Bosola’, (Studies in Philology 54, 1957), p. 168, 170.

3. Dorothea Krook, Elements of Tragedy, (New Haven, 1969), pp. 8-9.

4. Sidney, Arcadia V (Works II.177): ‘in such a shadow, or rather pit of darkness, the wormish mankind lives …’.

5. Introduction to The Faithful Shepherdess, Glover and Wallace, (Cambridge 1906), volume II, p. 522.