[In the essay below, Brown discusses two modern stagings of Webster's play, stressing the role of actors' and directors' interpretations in making the difficult scenes of the play work theatrically. Brown suggests that the modern stagings in some crucial ways may have approximated the performance conditions in Webster's own theater.]

In country after country, people have told us how clever we were to choose such a timely play. But that's because a very rich stew builds up. It's about the supernatural. It's about sex. It's about politics. It's about redemption. It's about spirituality. Webster's characters are everywhere.¹

This is the report that Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, director and designer, respectively, of Cheek by Jowl's production of John Webster's Duchess of Malfi, gave to the press, just before this touring theater company's production reached the West End of London at Wyndhams Theatre early in 1996. They had taken the show to towns around England, to Blackpool, Cheltenham, Coventry, Oxford, and around the world, to Rome, Melbourne, Dublin, New York (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music); and everywhere the production had been acclaimed. After a month in London, it would go Valletta, Budapest, Ljubljana, Vienna, Hong Kong, Mexico City, and Bogota. Never has Webster's work had such an airing; never have so many and so diverse people had opportunity to judge the worth of his duchess “lively body'd” on the stage, as the actor-dramatist William Rowley wrote of his experience at an early performance.² Moreover, it was coming to a theater that in the same season had been home to another production of The Duchess that had originated at the Greenwich Theatre on the outskirts of London and had, similarly, reached town after a provincial tour. This earlier production had had nowhere else to go but stayed in the West End well beyond a hundred performances, until its leading actors were contracted elsewhere.

It might seem that the time had come for Webster's tragedy to reach a newly receptive audience. Seldom is a play by Shakespeare available in two productions so close in time to each other in a single city; still less frequently does the work of one of his contemporaries enjoy such popularity. Welcoming the production, John Peter wrote in The Sunday Times (London, 7 January 1996) as if The Duchess of Malfi had achieved top-of-the-line status:

There are few things in the English classical theatre to equal the scene in which the proud duchess woos her steward, or the portrayal of Bosola the mercenary whose soul is torn apart by respect and pity for his victim.

But other critics were not so sure of the play's virtues: most held that the triumph belonged to the director and actors, and they took Webster to task for the most obvious faults of stagecraft, as he has been ever since the start of the eighteenth century. The success of the two productions in 1995-96 does not prove that this Jacobean tragedy is once more safe material for commercial producers: the general opinion is that it needs a very special restoration job before it is playable. Only a couple of years earlier, John Peter had found that a strongly cast Duchess at the Bristol Old Vic was “impressively presented but doggedly under-acted”:

This is an efficient production, which is obviously better than a bad one; it is only that with this majestically poetic text, the gap between efficiency and greatness happens to be unusually wide.³

When Richard Allen Cave chose two productions to feature in his book on Webster in the series Text and Performance (1988), neither one had enjoyed a generally acknowledged success. This scholar rated Peter Gill's direction at the Royal Court in 1971 to be more successful than many journalist critics had done, but his praise of the acting was reserved for the Duchess and Antonio: only they had established “the psychological dimensions of Webster's tragedy.” The intimate focus that the director brought to the play had made his actors “particularly vulnerable and not all [the] cast could stand up to such rigorous scrutiny of their technique” (63). Of his other exemplary production, which Philip Prowse had directed for the National Theatre in 1985, Cave wrote that

By trying visually to realise the atmosphere of the play [the director had] drastically simplified or undermined Webster's meaning … and robbed the action of Webster's compassionate concern with the intricate, enigmatic impulses that shape his characters' moral natures.

(69)

Although Webster's art had not been entirely vindicated, the success and longevity of the two touring productions of 1995-96 have given an opportunity to inquire how this “poetic text” can be “restored” to find favor with a modern audiences and provide, perhaps, such a deeply moving experience as Thomas Middleton recalled in 1623:

For who e'er saw this duchess live, and die,
That could get off under a bleeding eye?(4)

They may also illuminate more than Webster's art. As modern directors, designers, and actors stage this text, with its history of misdirection and disappointment, they are tested more stringently than when working on the more familiar territory of a play by Shakespeare; they are likely to reveal more of their working methods and interpretative predilections than when they feel reassuringly at home. An observer may therefore learn something about the ways in which Shakespeare's plays are turned to modern advantage and a clearer view of what may be the costs of this treatment. Webster and Shakespeare have enough in common for success with the less accessible author to suggest ways in which the more congenial might be brought to fuller life on the modern stage.

Wyndhams is a small theater with a small proscenium stage; the Greenwich Theatre has no proscenium but a still more intimate auditorium. Not surprisingly, therefore, Duncan C. Weldon's Triumph Proscenium Productions, Ltd., in association with the subsidized Greenwich Theatre, had kept everything small in scale. The set was a wall of doors and panels, capable of variations to suggest a change of location rather than differences of wealth, power, or intimacy. The actors numbered only twelve, together with one young boy. The show was not to be sold on its spectacle or on the strength of its company, but on the presence in its cast of Juliet Stevenson and Simon Russell Beale; the former had won many awards on stage and in film, and the latter had recently been made an associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company after four seasons in which his roles had become progressively more challenging and more successful. The producers had made sure that the Duchess and Ferdinand, her twin brother, were in hands as safe as any to be found in British theater. Philip Franks, actor turned director, was comparatively inexperienced, although among his credits was a performance as Hamlet with the RSC; he also had recently edited an anthology with his leading lady, Shall I See You Again? for Pavillion Books.

From its two star actors, handled with care and respect rather than with interpretative or technical authority, the production took life. Among the consequences of this strategy were extensive cuts and rearrangements that brought the play within the grasp of the small company and reduced its playing-time to what was comfortable for its audiences. Out went the scene at the shrine of Our Lady of Loretto (3.4), Julia's wooing of Bosola in 5.2, and much else besides. These cuts inevitably damaged the context in which Webster had placed his leading characters so that their story was told as if they were persons who lived only in private. Individual courtiers were doubled or merged together, with the result that Castruchio, Silvio, and Delio were the only ones to remain in the list of characters. Ferdinand offers Malateste to the Duchess for a husband, but he is never seen on stage. As the program has it, “Courtiers / Armed Men / Madmen / Executioners [are] played by members of the Company.” Actors and actresses did what they could with the pomp and circumstance of the formal scenes and with the activity and turbulence needed for the emergencies at court in the wake of the birth of the Duchess's first child and Ferdinand's visit to her bedchamber (3.2); almost inevitably, however, with few actors on a small stage, these scenes were too awkward and ineffectual to suggest the tensions that go with the exercise of power or realization of danger. Little attempt was made to stage the interlude of the madmen in 4.2: it was played behind a grill with only hands and faces visible; its text was greatly cut and replaced with rhythmically repeated words, as in a students' acting improvisation.

Many incidental similes, illustrations, and elaborations were also cut. The naturalistic pulse of Webster's dialogue, which gives an impression of thoughts developing as if of their own accord, is the very characteristic that makes incidental verbal cuts easy to accomplish; it is like removing a few heartbeats from among many. Not surprisingly, Bosola suffered most. His trenchant irony and seemingly inexhaustible curiosity, and the energy driving his restless mind, had little chance of making the mark that the stage-history of this play shows to be one of its most constant attractions in the theater as well as on the page. His inward journey from cynicism and candor, through amazement and, perhaps, terror, and certainly through apprehension and pity, toward something like devotion and nobility (though cut through with despair and a still powerful cynicism) takes more time and many more words to be expressed than were allowable in this production.

How then did the play hold its audience? One answer was obvious: however much the text had been cut, time was taken to realize both the physical and the mental changes that lie behind the words that are spoken. The principal actors were given their heads so that they could think through everything they had to say, instead of allowing the words to take their own course. The actors set themselves to work so that, whether in pauses and silences or in collusion of thought and action, every antecedent and consequence of their words would be palpably present on stage in bodily and mental enactment. The Duchess was, indeed, “lively body'd” in the performance—that this phrase was William Rowley's for describing early performances suggests that something similar to this technique was practiced among the play's original actors.⁵

Following the advice of Stanislavski and many others, modern actors often believe that they must use their own emotional memories to bring reality to what they act and that they must discover and subsequently enact an appropriate “physical action” to create and release emotion. By these two processes they are to make their performances both “true” and “alive.”⁶ Instructions such as these stem from Chekhovian and later naturalism, but they offer such assurance to actors that they and their mentors and directors are apt to apply the same methods to any text that needs special care in production. Here it brought the thrill of actuality to many moments in Webster's tragedy: and the strangeness of the dramatic situation was able to make that immediacy grip attention, while the sensitivity of the dialogue made it revelatory of inmost experience. However, all was not always to the advantage of the play. Often the text suffered and the play's characters with it: physicality can be a heavy or dull virtue, and the mental processes of making a part one's own can hold back dramatic drive and interfere with the speaking of dialogue.

Phrasing, rhythm, and meter all suffered, and that sense of inspired and intuitive feeling that a silent reading of the play will often bring was too often missing. So the Cardinal speaks of seeing “a thing, arm'd with a rake” in his fish-ponds and then stops, as if still not fully realizing what he is seeing; after a pause he adds: “That seems to strike at me” (5.5.6-7). He has moved slowly and stubbornly toward apprehension, whereas the text seems to demand a union of thought and feeling, a flash of recognition that flows through two and half lines of verse with no hindrance—as appropriate for a man who is said to fall faster of himself than calamity can drive him (5.5.42-44). Speaking during her last minutes to Cariola, the Duchess says “Give my little boy …” and then pauses before adding “Some syrup for his cold” (4.2.203-4), as if she, or the actress, needed time to think about what is the correct medicine or what might be available in a prison; or as if she needed time to invent something to say, or found herself wanting to say something dangerous or rebellious, and then deciding not to at the last moment. Something within the actress's mind had broken the phrasing of the text. Perhaps the line-ending after “boy” had seemed to invite some change of thought and this took over from the duty of saying only what Webster had written.

These moments, and many like them, showed the actors taking time to re-create the thought processes implied by the words they had to speak, rather than speeding up or deepening their thoughts and feelings to keep pace with the aroused and exceptional mental activity that the play's action provokes in its characters. A broken and slow delivery changed the effect of Bosola's last lines:

Let worthy minds ne'er stagger in distrust
To suffer death, or shame for what is just—
Mine is another voyage.

(5.5.103-5)

To say “Mine [long pause] is another [short pause] voyage” is to make the process of his death into something quite different, emotionally and, perhaps, intellectually. These actors seemed ready to assume that the sound and syntax of their text, the shape and weight of each sentence, were not an intrinsic part of the play's message—of what it does for an audience in performance.

Ferdinand's treatment of one famous line shows how willfully this liberty was sometimes taken when stage business was added to explicate the verbal facts of speech. “Cover her face, my eyes dazzle” (5.2.264) is spoken as one phrase, as though Ferdinand is giving Bosola a single order; here the actor had decided to manage these words by running the two thoughts together, instead of negotiating and giving reality to the syntactical break. Then Ferdinand goes closer to his sister, bending down to her very face and scrutinizing it minutely; and then speaks only as he is rising, adding: “she died young.” The actor's determination to be sure of what he was doing in a way that “worked” in his own mind had caused this Ferdinand to sound like a doctor replacing an expected diagnosis with an irrelevant observation.

But the play as a whole worked for its audience and won over the critics, and by using these very same means. Not only could moments become thrillingly alive, when thought, feeling, speech, and action fused all into one impression, but some whole episodes were played in this way so that the audience sensed a deep and subtle involvement, in happiness, terror, joy, wonder, suffering, sexual desire, and guilt. The characters' fully realized responses to the more personal issues proved sufficient to carry the audience with them and restore the play to enthusiastic acceptance. Most remarkable were the opening sequences of 2.2 for which the Duchess and Antonio lay at ease on cushions, right downstage and close to the audience. He is almost naked, ready to take her to bed; she takes delight in provocation and delay. The jokes about naked goddesses and ugly faces, about labor and keeping an eye on the time, were accompanied by physical contact and playfulness. Cariola is drawn into their game because all barriers seem to be down between these lovers who are used to intimacy and satisfaction. The center of this scene is secure and calm—until the mood is wrenched aside by Ferdinand's entry, and violence and shouting take over.

Juliet Stevenson gave to the Duchess a cool, thoughtful sexual awareness, both yielding to desire and remaining in command of herself and others. When control slips, the underlying passion is seen, hard and narrow with frustration. In act 1, when she woos her steward, the mood is more mercurial, excited and nervous:

                                                                      and if you please,
Like the old tale, in ‘Alexander and Lodowick’,
Lay a naked sword between us, keep us chaste:—

(499-501)

is said in jest, mocking her own eagerness and taunting him for silence. The next two lines, her last in the scene, acknowledge deeper necessity and vulnerability:

O, let me shroud my blushes in your bosom,
Since 'tis the treasury of all my secrets—

There is no more text and thereby Webster has insisted that physical performance should take over in a silent exit, an opportunity that these two actors were very able to take. The presence of the Duchess was often most impressive in silence, as the text often requires and notably in act 4:

She will muse four hours together, and her silence,
Methinks, expresseth more than if she spoke.

(4.1.9-10)

Although she knows that “reason / And silence make me stark mad” (4.2.6-7), she accepts this risk:

—What think you of, madam?
—                                                                                Of nothing:
When I muse thus, I sleep. …

(4.2.15-16)

In this production, the actress could take the audience into that almost desperate musing, her performance even more subtle and commanding than in speech. When Bosola, as the Common Bellman, tells her to “don clean linen, bathe your feet,” she does just this, preparing her body solemnly and gently for death. This scene was often played very quietly but this was sufficient in the intimate theater to hold the focus of attention.

With Simon Russell Beale's Ferdinand the production's determination to provide physical realization of inward experience magnified the hints in the text of an incestuous obsession with his sister. He paws her longingly in the very first scene. In 2.4, when he imagines himself digging up a mandrake, he sweats visibly; as he visualizes the “strong thigh'd bargeman” who enjoys his sister, he shudders with frustrated desire. By act 3, he is torn with pain and rendered physically incapable of confronting Antonio or even looking at his sister. In act 4, when she is dead, he presses against her and attempts to slake his passion; he grasps her discarded clothes against his groin and smells them ravenously. In act 5, no doctor attends this Ferdinand, so he chastizes himself; the gown to which he refers is his sister's, which he carries wherever he goes.

Repeatedly this production staged the physical actualities implied by “this majestically poetic text” and often went beyond its suggestions. The Cardinal takes Julia onto the floor and assaults her from behind. Not only does the Duchess return to the stage for the echo scene (5.3), but she is also there is the last scene: as Delio says his concluding lines, cradling his friend Antonio, the Duchess enters and joins her husband. Toward the end of the play, as death, cunning, and complication begin to dominate its action, this practice accentuated what was fortuitous and grotesque. The audience might well have greeted the strange antics and inadequate speech with incredulous laughter, assuming that something had gone absurdly wrong, or that the author had set all at odds, destroying the subtlety previously present and making a mockery of whatever any character could achieve. At first the actors and their director must have been troubled by such a response and, not surprisingly, they tried to preempt the audience's laughter by giving their characters outbursts of cynical and hopeless laughter that showed they recognized the shift into desperate or futile expediences.⁷ By doing so they had, perhaps, discovered a way of responding to another strand of the text: the characters' instinct to withdraw from brutality and from both “reason and silence” into recognition of their helplessness or the onset of madness. Consequently the tragedy could awaken wider issues at its close by emphasizing the debasement that is the consequence of a pursuit of “ambition, blood, and lust” (5.5.72). That laughter which denies good sense and silence had become a necessity at a time when tears and sensitivity were no longer possible.

Webster has often been criticized for writing a muddled and ineffectual last act, for keeping the play going long after the death of the Duchess who alone could hold all together. Perhaps that is because critics have failed to acknowledge a crucial change in how the play is meant to work in performance. Experimentally these actors, who had insisted on realizing the text's suggestion of inner tensions and physical activity, found that to retain control over the audience during the last scenes they had to resort to strained or compulsive laughter. If the author had foreseen this, he might have been working against the audience's earlier empathy with his characters and establishing a new distance from them. In this way the tragedy would provoke questions about the worth of men and women who spend their lives aspiring to “greatness.” The characters sometimes express this view of their author's purpose, as in Delio's concluding speech:

                                                  These wretched eminent things
Leave no more fame behind 'em than should one
Fall in a frost, and leave his print in snow;
As soon as the sun shines, it ever melts.
Both form, and matter.

(5.5.113-17)

Earlier, Antonio's dying words had expressed the same idea, making ambition sound still more ridiculous and defeatist:

                                        In all our quest of greatness,
Like wanton boys whose pastime is their care,
We follow after bubbles, blown in th'air.

(5.4.64-66)

Still earlier, in a moment of stillness after he has confronted his sister in the bedchamber, Ferdinand had conjured up an image of the peaceful and loving life that is possible without ambition:

                                                                                Love gives them counsel
To inquire for him 'mongst unambitious shepherds,
Where dowries were not talk'd of, and sometimes
'Mongst quiet kindred that had nothing left
By their dead parents.

(3.1.126-30)

While bitter and self-generated laughter can make the audience remain attentive to the desperate happenings at the conclusion of this tragedy, it may also help to shape the kind of response that its author envisaged. In his earlier White Devil, Flamineo's false death and his puns and mockery up to the very last moments are unmistakable clues that Webster saw the value of this kind of laughter and worked to arouse it.

The Greenwich production of The Duchess of Malfi showed that when staging Elizabethan and Jacobean plays actors can find good use for those techniques that have helped them realize the subtextual life of modern plays that deal more obviously with reflections of actual lived experience. Sometimes this leads to the adoption of strange stage business and idiosyncratic interpretation or phrasing of the text but, equally and more importantly, it can hold attention and carry the action forward strongly; it may also discover qualities in the play that would not have been recognized in other ways.

Similar reflections arise from Declan Donnellan's modern dress production for the Cheek by Jowl Theatre Company, only here a further modern acting technique was given greater scope: the use of improvisation as a means of involving the actors' own instinctive reactions in performances and making their own individualities more adventurously and strongly present.⁸ Journals and newspapers hardly knew what to make of the result, variously calling the production “startling, revelatory, jolting, arresting, dynamic, tough, rich, smart,” and “ponderous”;⁹ spurred on by these comments, audiences had filled the London theater daily. This company had forced a new appraisal of the text and, in keeping with its usual way of working, the production changed during its tour, from day-to-day reflecting the concerns of both actors and audiences, finding still further nuances and excitements. Performances were altogether more bold, outgoing, outrageous, and playful than those of the Greenwich Duchess. This production was often like the other in calling for close and quiet attention, and yet it also had a stronger and more obvious energy running throughout. A sense of committal and competition between the actors brought it closer to a style that might have been appropriate to the outdoor conditions of the original performances at the Globe Theatre and to the improvisation required by the large and daily-changing repertoire of the King's Men, whether at the Globe or at the more intimate Blackfriars.

The strength of the acting was in the company, rather than in two star actors, and in its way of rehearsing and playing. Still more of the minor characters had disappeared, to be replaced by a group of actors who took on a number of functions, as nameless courtiers, soldiers, acolytes, madmen, executioners, and doctors. They were given some of the functions of a Chorus in that their positions on stage around the protagonists acted as a kind of set, restricting space or opening it out, and defining the occasion. They gather tightly around the Duchess as she is slowly strangled, only her hands visible to express the agony. They line up as acolytes to take communion at Mass, so providing the ordered submission of a religious setting in which the Duchess and her husband are refused the sacrament. They follow the mad Ferdinand as doctors, multiplying the confident impertinence of the single one named in the text. In the mad scene, instead of using Webster's dialogue, they invent and play a childish game with a crown and an infant at the moment of birth. They are also used with the named characters to stand stone-still and unresponsive at the beginning of the play as dialogue between one or two characters sets the action going. At the end of the play the whole cast again assembles still and silent on stage, the principals posed in a group as if for a family photograph. The effect of all this was to place the tragedy in a simplified and well-drilled world. The stage set was nothing more than tall, dark green curtains along the back and a few scattered chairs, so that little besides this variable human context for action was there to distract attention from the performances of the principal actors. Yet the handling of these supernumerary actors was so incessantly inventive that it drew attention to the theatricality of the production, giving the audience a sense that all was being put on stage with the help of a mastermind that did not hesitate to act on its own account without any text in support.

The production as a whole was a demonstration of how actors can “play” with a text. Those who took the main roles had discovered in improvisational rehearsals a wealth of business that could subvert meaning or thrust a new interpretation into sudden prominence, or force a readjustment between one character and another, or contrive shock or absurdity in a moment. Over the years, actors in Cheek by Jowl have described how Declan Donnellan achieves this kind of performance in rehearsal:

PETER Needham:
He creates an environment where all sorts of things can and mostly do happen, and then we go in that direction collectively. … one of Declan's great strengths is that he can respond to the individual actor. What Peter Needham wants is what Peter Needham wants; my needs are my needs; somehow Declan is intuitive enough to realise those needs in each of his individual actors.
ANNE White:
Declan allows the actor to bring what they have to a part. … He brings things out of you that you didn't know you had. He has a favourite phrase which is “Turning on a sixpence.” In other words, the quickfire of emotions rather than getting stuck into one.
DUNCAN Bell:
He doesn't insist on analysing the text. It's very much an on-your-feet experience.(10)

Nothing is permanently fixed; the director and designer accompany the actors on their extensive tours giving fresh notes and calling more rehearsals as they went. “Performances would grow and change, and then grow and change more because of their constant input.”¹¹

The costumes gave the actors freedom for large movements, being almost as simple as the physical setting. In place of elaborate Renaissance dress were items of modern clothing, many of them in the styles of the first decades of the twentieth century. The bodies of the actors were more visible than they would have been if conforming to the outlines of broad gowns, corsets, and doublets, or if hidden by the many layers that were then in use. They were also unencumbered by period manners. The production was free to take on the appearance of a parade of uniform figures, or a high-strung dance of wooing, taunting, or intimidation, or of variable oppositions in contest, or of persons locked in close physical contact. Although its visual means were spare with mostly muted colors, the action had flamboyance, daring, and sustained energy; and kept providing a sequence of arresting images dominated by the presence of the principal characters.

The physicality of this production was often realistically conveyed, as in the Greenwich production—for example, Bosola actually measures the Duchess for her coffin with a pocket tape measure, and Cariola has a portable crucifix so that she can kneel and pray even in public—but it often surpassed realism with exaggeration, sudden surprise, and lack of restraint. The Duchess of Anastasia Hille is restless, easily aggressive or dismissive, laughing harshly or nervously, switching suddenly to simple and sustained silence, or simple speaking a few affecting words. The Ferdinand of Scott Handy is a badly behaved doglike boy-man, given to fighting or hugging his sister. The Cardinal of Paul Brennen employs a slow and sardonic delivery and has a brutal relationship with Julia, who has to take the sexual initiative. George Anton's Bosola (as at Greenwich, losing about half his lines) has assumed a dour Scottish accent and plays against the dominant style of the production by standing coldly apart and seeming to lack a personal instinct toward action. The play became a doomed entanglement, a game-playing in which each character strives by all means to out-do the others. So absorbed are the actors that each character seems impelled to do what he does: when Ferdinand says his sister's “guilt treads on / Hot-burning coulters” (3.1.56-57), or when she declares herself to be “full of daggers” (4.1.90), they seem to speak no less than truth. Moreover, as the narrative unfolds from one crisis to another, a shared energy and restless invention drive the action forward more strongly than a more sober and well-mannered production could ever manage.

The more extravagant inventions of the actors and their director forced the audience to be aware of impulses that go beyond any obvious meaning of the words their characters speak. When early in the play Ferdinand says “You are my sister” (1.1.330), she has been lighting a cigarette but now turns suddenly and gives him a slap across the face. When on parting he calls her “lusty widow” (1.1.340), he lunges toward her and she laughs harshly. When in 3.2 she confesses, “I pray sir, hear me: I am married” (82), she takes him off guard, brings him to the floor, gets astride him, and brandishes the dagger at him. During his subsequent rant, she goes on drinking whiskey. When he touches a deeper note of pain:

For thou has ta'en that massy sheet of lead
That hid thy husband's bones, and folded it
About my heart,

she replies loudly and sarcastically, “Mine bleeds for it” (3.2.112-14), and breaks off into coarse laughter. By the time Ferdinand starts to tell the story of “Reputation, Love, and Death” (119-35), both are near exhaustion and are sitting side by side on the floor, like children after too rough a game. He then gathers his strength again and, crying out “I will never see you more,” clasps his hands over his eyes, rushes from the stage, and trips over a chair as he exits.

Above all, it would seem, the director had encouraged his actors to be as dynamic and as varied as possible. At the beginning of 4.1, in the prison, Ferdinand and the Duchess are again fighting each other on floor, but they also embrace and feverishly exchange greetings. In contrast, the business of the dead man's hand is taken slowly: she is blindfolded and Bosola has plenty of time to bring the hand onstage and deliver it to Ferdinand. The audience sees the whole deception as it is being arranged, not with the sudden surprise of the Duchess as she experiences its effect, but in deliberate slow-motion in the half-light. Her scream on realizing the trick is horrible, as the text demands, but soon the tempo and pitch of performance drop again. “There is not between heaven and earth one wish / I stay for after this” (61-62) is one of the Duchess's most quiet and simple moments—only to be back at high power to express anger and frustration. More fully aware of her situation, she rejects the wish for a long life and vows “I'll go pray” (95), as if preparing herself for death, and then she stops; this is not the end of a verse line, but from this point a very long silence is maintained during which the audience and the Duchess have time to notice that Cariola is kneeling apart and already praying. Eventually this near silence and stillness are shattered by a dangerously angry, “No, / I'll go curse,” shortly to be followed by “and say I long to bleed,” at which point, “turning on a sixpence,” she suddenly breaks down in terror and gives way to loud weeping.

Sometimes it seemed as if these actors could never be satisfied with what they had discovered to do with any line of text and had gone on adding to it. When death is very close and Bosola has announced that he is her tombmaker, “I am Duchess of Malfi still” (4.2.142) is said as if the Duchess is tired of the very thought; and then, wearing a toy crown left by the madmen, she gives a dismissive and harsh laugh. After “What death?” (206), which is as controlled as its sparse language, she adds another reaction by taking a long drag on her cigarette. When the text calls for violent reactions, the actors would often take the instruction to extreme lengths. When the eating of apricots causes the pregnant Duchess to go into labor, she has to be carried offstage struggling and screaming with pain. When Ferdinand enters in the grip of Lycanthropia, he does so nearly naked, crawling along the floor, howling and slobbering like the wolf he thinks he is. In the first act, when offering herself to Antonio as his wife, the Duchess slips off her dress to bare her breasts; coming as this does in a scene where contact between mistress and servant is hedged around with protocol and danger, the gesture forces the scene forward, grabs attention, and provides a coup de thèâtre, which The Daily Telegraph called “the most erotic on the London stage” (4 January 1996).

A degree of wilfulness in all this elaboration was plain to see, but it served the play better than might have been expected. While the production was chiefly memorable for its many moments of shock, disrespect, harsh feeling, physical brutishness, and sexual activity, and for its contrasting moments of hushed simplicity and softer feeling (often seeming too contrived to carry full conviction), that was not all: the play as a whole also had an undeniable narrative power because the director had heeded Webster's use of varied stage images to alert the audience to narrative development. A silent reading of its text can give little idea of the succession of events that are called into being. As these follow each other, a slowly maturing sense is given that these characters are striving restlessly to reach an end that was predicated long before they could have foreseen it. However strongly the elaboration of certain episodes threatens to confuse the narrative line, the main story of the Duchess, her brothers, her husband, and Bosola continually reasserts its pole position. The imposed and silent groupings used by the director in setting the first and last scenes enhanced the sense of a foreseen conclusion that is latent in the text itself in its repeated setting of key scenes in a “presence chamber.” The large demands made on the actors' physical resources also contributed to the sense of a story moving to completion, the action becoming like a game played ruthlessly—the actors seldom made it easy for each other—until everyone is played out. Perhaps Webster planned something like this, because the ordered groupings, sustained encounters, and deliberate watchfulness required in performance of the earlier acts are followed by slow and painful concentration in the prison scenes of act 4 and then by the dispersed and individual movements, extreme attitudes, stubborn but failing energies, and accelerating and rending dissolutions that make up the last act. Exhausted and now only briefly assertive, the actors present their characters stumbling toward disintegration and the audience watches spellbound, even by the mere spectacle.

For experienced playgoers, the Cheek by Jowl production also held attention through a tension between what was expected and what was provided. The character of the Duchess was at the center of this interest, for Antonio's description of her “sweet countenance,” “continence,” and “noble virtue” (1.1.187-205) was clearly contradicted by a nervous, taut, and potentially violent woman. An ability to inspire Bosola with a vision of heaven and hope of mercy (4.2.347-49) was a most unlikely attribute for such a protagonist. The new interpretation would have found little justification in a reading of the text—as if the director had not bothered to analyze it for meanings and instructions—yet at certain times the text itself emerged with entirely new force and conviction, as if responding to the mistreatment, as if the wrenching of meaning and sudden shifts of attention and mood were appropriate to Webster's way of writing for performance. Improvisation, boldness, and violence appeared as more suitable than sober calculation as a way of reacting to the often confusing messages of the play's dialogue.

Both productions were driven by their actors' invention and realization of individual character. Both were performed in a theater whose overall dimensions are not much larger than those of the Globe Theatre and allow a similarly close focus. The play had immediacy and seemed both timely and vital. It was nervously, sensuously, and sexually alive in ways that caught the audience's attention for its strange and dated fictions. Duchess, Duke, Cardinal, and Steward could not be confused with persons in contemporary society, but nevertheless they seemed to belong there: as Declan Donnellan said, “Webster's characters are everywhere”—if given the chance, it may be added, to leap out of the past into present consciousness and actuality. However, both productions were stronger in private moments than in sustained and public scenes; and in both Bosola failed to make a strong impression.

One reason for these shared characteristics and shared success was the small scale of each enterprise. Elaborate stage effects did not detract attention from the actors or slow up the play's progress while elaborate stage images were assembled. This suggests that the expensive and eye-catching set designs and stage management preferred by more established theater companies across the world are not necessarily advantages when staging English Renaissance plays: a close focus and actors actively and freshly engaged are to be valued more highly.

However, the limited budgets did have disadvantages. Had they wished to show the allure of great wealth and self-esteem, these productions did not have the funds to do so. Nor did they have the manpower to stage a full court in which the power-game is played with quiet watchfulness and where public ceremony is the occasion for careful manipulation and covert exchanges. Neither of them succeeded in showing how the “consort of madmen” could terrify the Duchess by expressing repetitive and destructive sexual fantasies. Neither could show the confinement caused by the exercise of power contrasted with the precarious freedom of escape and isolation. These are all qualities in English Renaissance plays that are expensive to stage in modern conditions because of the number of actors required. (In time, perhaps, new technology will find a quick and reasonably priced way to give these scenes a virtual reality in the theater.)

Another reason for underplaying the political implications of Webster's text and others from the same period is the prevalent emphasis on moments of truth in both rehearsal and actor-training: actors do not give the same level of attention to the development of an argument or a consistent point of view. This failing is encouraged by Webster's dialogue that is particularly concerned to represent fragmented thought and thus can be cut easily; in doing so, however, a director can lose the shaping power of the writing, its often concealed but tenacious hold over the development of ideas, through all its repetitions, hesitations, and digressions. With his speeches pruned of any farfetched or not strictly necessary detail, and with some speeches removed altogether, Bosola did not stand a chance of offsetting the play's extraordinary events with an inward-tuned consciousness, nor could he present clearly his change from malcontent to revenger, cynic to moralist, hired intelligencer to surrogate protagonist. None of this can be made apparent to the audience with a series of isolated moments of “truth,” however delicately real or blatantly theatrical their enactment. In a foreword to a celebratory book about the company, Michael Racliffe noted that Cheek by Jowl's Hamlet was one of the two productions in their first ten years that had disappointed him when he followed their work as a critic: its “intended simplicity,” he wrote, “seemed, most uncharacteristically, to give the play no firm direction or narrative shape.”¹² The sustained and tormented inward life of Hamlet can be given its central place in the tragedy only by the same means as those needed to bring Bosola to full life on the stage; directed to achieve only moments of truth, both Hamlet and The Duchess of Malfi will lose coherence and these two characters their prominence.

A third reason why the political and philosophical aspects of the tragedy were undervalued is that both productions concentrated attention on the sexual relationships of Duchess to Ferdinand and Antonio, although only one of them had given star-treatment to the actors playing them. Both also emphasized the Cardinal's sexual proclivities rather than his power over others that derives from his intellect and his position in the church. When actors are encouraged to work from their own sense of their characters' situations, a Renaissance play is very likely to be reduced to the measure of those aspects of modern life that are most readily related to the dramatic text, and not those deriving from political realities that are outside the experience of ordinary citizens or from ideas that are far from easy to understand and define. Putting on such plays as The Duchess of Malfi should involve more than the actors and director finding what “works” for them and how “life” can most readily be breathed into the text. The incessant exploration of Cheek by Jowl productions and the self-imposed critical sense of the experienced actors in the Greenwich production will always help to reach beyond what is merely conventional or easily successful, but a more rigorous intellectual inquiry and a greater concern for historical processes are also required if texts such as this one are to yield further secrets and productions realize their less accessible possibilities.

No one who cares for the plays of the English Renaissance can be other than grateful and glad that these two companies brought so much finesse and energy and such open-ended and committed exploration to their productions of The Duchess; these are techniques needed to restore plays like this to favor in our theater, and these companies have shown others the way to follow. Their success has also demonstrated that large theaters and expensive stage settings are not important but rather militate against suitable performance and reception. Better finance should rather be used to pay four or five more actors and to allow longer initial rehearsals; with these advantages, both productions would have been better able to tackle the play's political and intellectual issues.

Notes

1. “Dramatic restorers at work,” Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod interviewed by Benedict Nightingale, The Times (London, 29 December 1995).

2. From verses prefixed to the first edition of the play, 1623; quoted, as all passages from The Duchess of Malfi, from the Revels Plays edition, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Methuen, 1964).

3. The Sunday Times (London, 13 February 1994).

4. From verses prefixed to the first edition of the play, 1623.

5. The performance described in this article was given on 15 May 1995, shortly before the production's hundredth performance in London; some details were checked in subsequent discussion immediately afterward with Robert Demeger, who played the Cardinal.

6. John Harrop's Acting (London: Routledge, 1992) offers a clear compendium of such advice: on sense-memory see esp. 39-42; on physical action, 54-55.

7. According to Robert Demeger (see note 5), the characters' laughs had been added during the pre-London tour as the actors and director learned what was needed to retain their audiences' attention and belief, and to stop them from laughing at their performances.

8. The performance that is the source for most of the following observations was on 4 January 1996.

9. These comments are from the following sources, named in the order in which they have been quoted: The Guardian, The Independent, The Evening Standard, The Financial Times, The Observer, The Sunday Telegraph, The Spectator, The Independent on Sunday, The Daily Express.

10. Simon Reade, Cheek by Jowl, Ten Years of Celebration (Bath: Absolute Classics, 1991), 107, 101, 102.

11. Amanda Harris in ibid., 101.

12. Reade, 7.