SOURCE: Rowe, Katherine. “‘That Curious Engine’: Action at a Distance in The Duchess of Malfi.” In Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern, pp. 86-110. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999.

[In this essay, part of a larger study of the repeated image of the dead hand in literature, Rowe discusses the image of the hand as it represents both marriage and the occult in The Duchess of Malfi. Rowe focuses on the scene in which Ferdinand offers the Duchess a dead man's hand in place of his own, considering it within contemporary discourse and beliefs about witchcraft.]

The question of whether human agency is something that can be located, fixed, and attributed properly to individual actors pervades the plays of the early seventeenth century. Metaphors of bodily shape and physiology that served well to ground earlier political allegories unravel the social and political fictions that define persons in these plays. Thus, to the alternate discomfort and thrill of generations of critics, Jacobean tragedy unseams the body in unseemly ways—staging dismemberments, rapes, virginity tests, poisoned kisses, and tortures that surpass the earlier Senecan dramas like Titus Andronicus in their frequency and vivid display. Recent scholarship has interpreted these spectacles in both aesthetic and political terms. For example, Peter Stallybrass's adaptation of Bakhtin's paradigm of classical and grotesque bodies makes it clear that Jacobean bodily aesthetics undermine any confidence in an “enclosed individuality that does not merge with other bodies and the world.”¹ Feminist scholars like Theodora Jankowski and Kathleen McLuskie have illuminated the gender politics of this aesthetic by concentrating on the challenges to patriarchal order posed by the female grotesque in these plays.²

The emphasis of such scholarship needs to be shifted from the display of bodies “that are open to the outside world,” in Bakhtin's words—“the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose”—to grotesqueries of action and performance.³ Jacobean tragedy dramatizes the permeable boundaries between acting subjects, staging an intellectual problem: what does it mean to make one person the bearer of another's deeds, the instrument of another's intentions? The graphic play of hands in this drama provides an important vocabulary for addressing such concerns, adapting the commonplace motifs of political theory—where hands stand for relations of office, deputation, substitution, or other mediating service—to the stage. Equally important is the related tradition of vicious servants, which translated these motifs into dramatic character during the mid- to late sixteenth century. Ambidexter, the Vice character of Elizabethan drama who “plays with both hands,” exemplifies this convention. His plot is probably most familiar from the moral-chronicle play Cambises, where he undermines the authority of every master he serves, playing each against the other and eventually bringing down the state. The history of his name clarifies the conceptual problems Ambidexter embodies. As early as the fourteenth century, Lollard polemics against Simoniac clerics (who bought and sold ecclesiastical preferment) labeled “such men of double estate” ambidexters.⁴ Later, the epithet was extended to judges or advocates who profited from their cases. And eventually, it came to include the general order of deceptive intermediaries: those who serve two masters or perform the letter of a command for their own profit. In this way, debates about delegation and proxy in early ecclesiastical and legal writings provided a ready vocabulary for representing similar conflicts as they developed in financial, political, and amorous relations.

The Machiavellian servants, duplicitous officers, and intelligencers that proliferated on the Jacobean stage inherited Ambidexter's plot and made it newly urgent. The principles that sustained social obligations in England underwent gradual but profound shifts at the beginning of the seventeenth century, which Henry Sumner Maine first identified as the movement from a status to a contract society.⁵ These changes are reflected both in the emergence of the notion of the agent as a conceptual category, and in the shifting terms of deputation and substitution the label comprises. The traditional obligations of social position that first define an agent simply as a “doer” expand in this period to include the self-interest of the “doer or meddler in a thing.”⁶ And the renovated Ambidexters of contemporary drama focus our attention on the problems of performance such meddling entails. Repeatedly, they pose questions raised by the possibility of conflicting self-interest in contracts for service: if actions by deputy or proxy are a matter of voluntary agreement by both parties rather than of traditional duties, how can their outcomes be secured?

These concerns are staged most vividly in a scene that recurs across many of the plays in this period: when two characters, usually master and servant, take hands in compact or agreement—only to have that handclasp ironized or interrupted. The creepily erotic pledge between Iago and Othello, punctuated by Iago's ironic asides, is a familiar instance. Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling offers a later, more extended and more graphic example. Early in the play, the villain DeFlores murders a man betrothed to the woman he lusts for and cuts off the dead man's ring finger. Beatrice had asked for his help in murdering the man, for their betrothal was based on political interests and not her own choice. The severed finger that DeFlores returns with testifies to that broken troth, and it also symbolizes the new coercive compact that replaces it: the bargain between Beatrice and her henchman. In the ensuing action the finger haunts Beatrice as DeFlores does, a talisman of the permanent hold his service has over her and the sexual blackmail it permits. Loathing DeFlores, Beatrice had not meant to agree either to a continuing or a sexual relationship with him. But the contract for murder returns more than she contracted for. In the most famous line of the play, she becomes “the deed's creature” (3.4.138): the subordinate agent of an action in which she had imagined herself a distant and superior principal.

The central problems in Beatrice's perverse contract with DeFlores—the tenuous relation between intentions and outcomes, the equivocal nature of consent, and the role reversals of agent and principal, servant and master—are framed in the language of marriage and court service. Recent scholarship has illuminated the important role marital metaphors played in early explorations of contract, across the discourses of law, political theory, and literature. Feminist historians have emphasized the unequal distribution of rights and obligations naturalized—and sometimes critiqued—by marriage metaphors in early contract theory.⁷ Less attention has been paid to the related idiom of service in the period: despite the challenges a surplus of educated professionals posed to traditional systems of courtiership and patronage; despite important changes taking place in the common law that governed dealers, deputies, factors, and other agents; and despite the call of such resonant literary figures as DeFlores's verdict, “y'are the deed's creature.”⁸

The connections between the discourses of marriage and service that give rise to such complex relations between agent, principal, and act are particularly clear in the four scenes of formal agreement that punctuate John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1612). These scenes illuminate a third, equally important discourse brought to bear on these relations in this period: the discourse of witchcraft. The language of witchcraft permeates The Duchess of Malfi—with its familiars, invisible devils, mandrake roots, and digging up of the dead. These practices are associated throughout with problems of contract. Occult relations shadow most of the ritual handclasps that punctuate the action of the play, but they appear most explicitly in the last of these tableaux. In the first act, the Duchess secretly gives her hand in marriage to her steward Antonio; next her brother Ferdinand take hands with his Machiavellian servant, Bosola, as he hires Bosola to spy on her. Bosola pledges his service to the Duchess in a similar scene, even as he machinates to discover her secrets. And in the final, most infamous of these scenes, Ferdinand hands the Duchess a “dead man's hand” in revenge for her wayward choice. When he dramatically raises the lights, the Duchess responds in shock, “Oh, horrible! … What witchcraft doth he practise that he hath left a dead man's hand here?”⁹ Critics have long recognized the way Ferdinand's trick perversely evokes the rituals of marriage, but the Duchess's query tends to languish in footnotes that cite folk tradition and go no further. Yet the dead man's hand, or Hand of Glory, raises specific jurisprudential issues pertinent to understanding Webster's analysis of agency relations elsewhere in the play. The common law pertaining to its use in the practice of witchcraft defined the key problem of actions over distance: what kinds of evidence will help us trace the connections between intent and the consequences of a deed? The manual imagery that marks these scenes thus supplies a common vocabulary, linking shared concerns with self-interest, authority, and performance across disparate spheres. In this way, the discourses of marriage, service, and occult practice intersect in the figure of the dead man's hand, illuminating the epistemological challenges raised by changing notions of obligation in the early seventeenth century.

“THAT FIRST GOOD DEED … THE SACRAMENT OF MARRIAGE”

From at least as early as Chaucer's “Wife of Bathe's Tale,” medieval and early modern literature deploys the language of obligation in two registers: the Pauline rhetoric of mutual debt and affection owed by husband and wife, a debt that is often imagined as generative, returning more than it exacts; and the mercantile language of exchange and economic value, which seems to promise due equivalence for property or service. By the early seventeenth century, the difference between kinds of debt began to be negotiated as a difference between modes of affiliation or promise: parties to an agreement would be bound either by status and condition (which carried their own moral obligations) or by voluntarily committing themselves to a contract. As scholars like Don Wayne and Luke Wilson have shown, the rise of the common-law action of assumpsit (legal “promise”), reflected what Wayne calls “an unmistakable tension between, on the one hand, the traditional moral doctrine of social obligation according to status, and on the other, the more modern principles of rational self-interest and voluntary contractual obligation.”¹⁰ Marital contracts remained an important vehicle for exploring this tension, for traditionally, they unified the notions of obligation based on status and voluntary contract. However, promises to marry came increasingly to be tried under the common law of assumpsit, as Wayne notes. This shift emphasized less the legal fiction of one person—and couverture—that marriage created, and more the voluntary—and thus paradoxical—nature of the agreement required to sustain that fiction. The conflict between the voluntary nature of marital consent and legal absence of female will in marriage became an important idiom for the conflict between kinds of contract: motivated either by self-interest or affectionate duty, based either on voluntary agreement or on status.

This is a dramatic trope that Webster returns to over and over again in his plays, as if it offers a particularly fruitful or intractable intellectual puzzle. For example, The Devil's Law Case opens with a forced betrothal, explicitly setting the claims of voluntary agreement against those of subordinate status, when the merchant Romelio gives his sister Jolenta away in marriage against her will. The play goes on to rehearse a variety of conditions that might obviate her consent, some legitimate, others not: duress, madness, bewitchment, the prior claims of filial duty, and the youth of the parties involved. Similarly, Webster's The White Devil explores the variety of ways consent might be suborned: by deception, lust, and surprisingly, loyalty. When the Duke Brachiano divorces his wife Isabella, for example, Webster stages a vow that paradoxically dissolves itself. “I will make / Myself the author of your cursed vow,” Isabella says, loyally initiating a divorce that she does not wish, while emphasizing the self-division her loving submission entails.¹¹

Thus, when Webster's Duchess woos her steward, Antonio, by dictating her will, her language negotiates familiar territory. The scene replays the gesture of handfasting in several registers, enacting their mutual consent. Early modern audiences would have understood the traditional logic of this gesture implicitly; as the physician John Bulwer later summarizes it: “What we put our hand unto we are infallibly understood to will and intend, and with counsel and advice to undertake, and promise our concurrence.”¹² First, the Duchess puts her ring on Antonio's finger as he kneels and then urges him to stand up, metaphorically raising him to her rank by means of the ritual gesture: “Raise yourself, / Or, if you please, my hand to help you: so” (1.1.408-9). Continuing this verbal play, Antonio responds that he was not fishing ambitiously for advancement of this kind: “Conceive not I am so stupid, but I aim / Wherto your favours tend; but he's a fool / That, being a-cold, would thrust his hands i' th' fire / To warm them” (1.1.415-17). Finally, she closes the scene by asking him to take her hand again: “I would have you lead your fortune by the hand, / Unto your marriage bed / … O, let me shroud my blushes in your bosom, / Since 'tis the treasury of all my secrets” (1.1.485-86, 492-93).

As this last line suggests, their language crosses the different registers of debt, combining amorous and economic rhetorics in a way that is both erotic and logically vexed. The Duchess flirtatiously offers to submit her will, voluntarily, to the legal person of her husband:

DUCH:
O, you are an upright treasurer, but you mistook,
For when I said I meant to make inquiry
What's laid up for tomorrow, I did mean
What's laid up yonder for me.
ANT:
                                                                                                                        Where?
DUCH:
                                                                                                                                                      In heaven.
I am making my will, as 'tis fit princes should
In perfect memory, and I pray, sir, tell me
Were not one better make it smiling, thus,
Than in deep groans, and terrible ghastly looks,
As if the gifts we parted with procured
That violent distraction?
ANT:
                                                                                                    O, much better.
DUCH:
If I had a husband now, this care were quit;
But I intend to make you overseer;
What good deed shall we first remember? Say.
ANT:
Begin with that first good deed begun i'th'world
After man's creation, the sacrament of marriage;
I'd have you first provide for a good husband,
Give him all.
DUCH:
                                                            All?
ANT:
                                                                                Yes, your excellent self.

(1.1.363-79)

Yet the fiction of making a will maintains their separation by rank—duchess and steward—and hence the separate executive status of her voluntary agreement.

DUCH:
I thank you gentle love,
And, cause you shall not come to me in debt,
Being now my steward, here upon your lips
I sign your Quietus est.

(1.1.451-54)

Here Webster plays on the contradictory positions the hierarchies of marriage and courtly service offer the Duchess and Antonio. But less obviously, he also dramatizes the tension between affiliations by moral obligation and by mutual agreement that Wayne describes. The Duchess invokes the fiction that promises of the heart will be fulfilled here and that such promises morally quit their differences in rank and value. Yet in the next lines, she complains that her rank forces her to woo by equivocal metaphors, “as a tyrant doubles with his words” (1.1.433). And the dangers inherent in court service, rampant elsewhere in the play, lurk in this courtship as well. She might all too easily become a corrupt and ungrateful ruler like her brothers, dispensing largesse and preferment according to her whim rather than his desserts; like other agents, he might act with dangerous autonomy, according to his own self-interest rather than the duties defined by his station.

The dangers of such service rapidly overtake the principles of mutual obligation and affectionate duty that make the Duchess and Antonio equals in marriage. For when her brothers separate husband and wife, they are forced to play the roles of tyrannical prince and vicious retainer. The Duchess banishes Antonio with the fiction that he defrauded her estate and punningly conceals their marriage by calling his work bad stewardship. Antonio fakes a corresponding complaint, using language that sounds conventional but soon becomes urgent: “O the inconstant / And rotten ground of service!” (3.2.199). After Antonio departs, Bosola pretends to defend him, in a similar vein. He rehearses the terrible uncertainty of reward in the current court climate:

I would sooner swim to the Bermudes on
Two politicians' rotten bladders, tied
Together with an intelligencer's heart-string,
Than depend on so changeable a prince's favour.

(3.2.268-71)

This is Bosola's refrain, begun in the opening scene and repeated throughout the play: the principles of court service have fallen from the heroic model of feudal duty and affection; we cannot count on largesse or advancement in return for faithful service to our princes. Instead, as his vivid comparisons suggest, the obligations of prince and steward, lord and servant are Machiavellian—founded on self-interest rather than the pull of the heart. This thin basis for obligation defines the role of the intelligencer as such.

Bosola's complaint, in turn, initiates a plot shift that plays out the threats implicit in the Duchess's equivocal wooing. When Bosola takes Antonio's part, the Duchess immediately reveals her marriage and chooses him as her new “executor,” echoing her words to Antonio: “Sir, your direction / Shall lead me by the hand” (3.2.313-14). In Antonio's mouth, the charge of quixotic ingratitude is a fake one, prompted by the need for subterfuge and defense. But it animates Bosola's character entirely, and as the Duchess offers him her hand she chooses her undoing. For Bosola takes Antonio's part in a second sense, playing out the consequences of a Machiavellian contract. The doubling of plots in this scene is suggestive: to the extent that the Duchess's marriage to her steward assimilates their court relationship to a nonhierarchical, consensual one, the new, mixed bond becomes vulnerable to the wayward interest of both parties.

The intrusion of self-interest into established forms of duty—not just incidentally, but as a new basis for obligation—is figured in the severed hand that Ferdinand offers the Duchess. The prop evokes the widespread allegory of the body marital, common in contemporary marriage discourse as a way of describing the subordination of a wife to her husband. It literalizes the gift of hands and hearts that she and Antonio rehearse in the wooing scene. But its prosthetic, disembodied form challenges the fiction of marital couverture, or single person, that that symbolic gift is meant to sustain. A contemporary analogue, from Thomas Gataker's 1623 Protestant marriage sermon “A Wife In Deed,” clarifies Webster's logic in this scene. Gataker defines marriage in terms of the conflict between the female volition required to execute male intention and its extreme forms—wayward and continuing willfulness. Playing on his title, “A Wife In Deed,” he punningly defines subordinate office (subordination “in deed”) as the true and natural role of a wife:

But the Woman that beareth the Name, and standeth in the roome of a Wife, but doth not the office and dutie of a Wife, is but as an eye of glass, or a silver nose, or an ivorie tooth, or an iron hand, or a woodden leg, that occupieth the place indeed, and beareth the Name of a limbe or a member, but is not truly or properly any part of that bodie whereunto it is fastened; it is but equivocally so called.¹³

Gataker's insistence that a wife internalize her subordinate status, consenting to the loss of her separate will, typifies the self-alienation Webster is at pains to illuminate whenever he raises the paradox of marital consent on stage. As a limb of the marital body, the wife executes the husband's will; but she also ratifies their mutual rights and obligations by doing so. Or, as in Gataker's example, she fails to ratify them. The looseness of a wife not well fastened to her husband clarifies the symbolic exchange of the dead man's hand: the severed part marks the eruption of wayward volition into relations of office and duty—suggesting the potentially disastrous results for other kinds of social arrangements, like political or financial contracts, ratified by similar voluntary gestures of consent.

Gataker's misogyny echoes in the rants of Bosola and Ferdinand, who are prone to explode about the sexual waywardness of women, exemplified by the Duchess—“a sister damned; she's loose i'th'hilts, / Grown a notorious strumpet” (2.5.3-4). The play as a whole, however, has a more complicated agenda than Ferdinand does in offering this hand. Webster is interested not so much in female willfulness alone, but in the larger mechanism of volition loosed from the traditional obligations of degree and place that female willfulness types. Like Gataker, he locates this looseness not just beneath the skin but in action or deed: as the cryptic phrase “loose i'th'hilts” implies, suggesting an unwieldy instrument. In this way, the Duchess's own hand comes to exemplify the paradoxes of the dead man's hand. It is redescribed as an instrument that may not perform its proper office or submit to the will of its employer. Just after he tricks her into revealing her marriage, Bosola praises the Duchess with a grim double entendre. He describes her hand in words that recall the testamentary language she used to woo Antonio:

… the neglected poets of your time,
In honour of this trophy of a man,
Raised by that curious engine, your white hand,
Shall thank you, in your grave, for't; and make that
More reverend than all the cabinets
Of living princes.

(3.2.293)

Several sixteenth-century senses of the word “engine” operate here to suggest the self-alienation brought about by her marriage and figured in her hand. First, the notion of engine as a snare, as skill in contriving, or trickery—reinforced by Webster's only other use of the word, early on in the play. When her two brothers confront the Duchess, they moralize, “Hypocrisy is woven of a fine small thread, / Subtler than Vulcan's engine” (1.1.304-5). The parable of Vulcan underwrites Bosola's use of “engine” with a plot of lust discovered that the play acts out—as if the Duchess's handfasting carries in it its own inevitable urge to publish. Her very capacity to choose, Bosola implies, will catch her up; and her subsequent choice of Bosola confirms this prediction. This is one version of what it might be to be the deed's creature.

Bosola develops a second reading of “engine” as stage machinery: describing the marriage as a tragic action that will unfold, will she nil she, to remake the Duchess into her own monument. Here he echoes the rhetoric of the wooing scene, with its language of wills, death, winding-sheets, and shroud. He suggests that the Duchess has given herself away by a kind of mortmain or testamentary “dead hand.” The echo scene, late in the play, certainly confirms the reach of her will beyond the grave. But this is not the posterity she contracted for in choosing Antonio. Indeed, she says the opposite when she tells him to kiss her: “This is flesh and blood, sir; / 'Tis not the figure cut in alabaster / Kneels at my husband's tomb” (1.1.443-45). Thus, the plot initiated by this “curious engine” directly reverses her intentions, and in this way, it anticipates a third sense of “engine”: the modern notion of a mechanism that drives itself, sui generis, like the automata of Hobbes's famous opening to Leviathan.¹⁴ In Bosola's description, the Duchess's hand operates partly under its own power, against the interests of its owner. And it behaves this way precisely by undermining the contract it should ratify.

Thus, just as Lavinia's hand becomes a type of the disabilities that pervade Rome, so the Duchess's hand exemplifies the concerns that plague voluntary contracts in this play. These are several: the paradox of willingly subjecting one's will to another, with the uncanny alienations that entails; the conflict between self-interest and affectionate duty; and the difficulty of controlling the outcomes of actions performed through a deputy or proxy. Pairing the Duchess's “curious engine” with the dead man's hand, Webster expands on this third problem. He invokes the discourse of witchcraft to explore the nature of the ties that bind intention to act and the ways these ties attenuate in relations of service.

THE HAND OF GLORY

By the time Ferdinand offers to “seal his peace” with the Duchess—or take hands in confirmation of renewed accord—this gesture has been established as a contradictory sign, binding intelligencers as well as lovers, signifying parting as well as agreement. When Ferdinand berates the Duchess for dishonoring herself (and him), his parable of the traveling companions Reputation, Love, and Death, reminds us of the separations as well as conjunctions figured by clasped hands:

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

(3.2.131-36)

When Ferdinand offers a dead man's hand in place of his own, the travesty undoes the social bonds that such rituals are meant to cement. His language maliciously parodies the affectionate obligations symbolized by the marital handclasp:¹⁵

FERD:
I come to seal my peace with you: here's a hand,
Gives her a dead man's hand [with a ring]
DUCH:
I affectionately kiss it.
FERD:
Pray do: and bury the print of it in your heart.
I will leave this ring with you for a love-token;
And the hand, as sure as the ring; and do not doubt
But you shall have the heart too. When you need a friend
Send it to him that owed it: you shall see
Whether he can aid you.
DUCH:
                                                                                                              You are very cold.
I fear you are not well after your travel.
          [Bosola brings up lights]
Ha! Lights! O horrible!
FERD:
                                                                                          Let her have lights enough.
          Exit [Ferdinand]
DUCH:
What witchcraft doth he practise that he hath left
A dead man's hand here?

(4.1.43-55)

Critics tend to interpret this exchange emblematically, as a kind of memento mori or as a symbolic displacement of Ferdinand's incestuous desires. It is surely both. Yet the Duchess's shocked reaction suggests connections to the language of witchcraft elsewhere in the play and directs us to read the prop in that context as well. Folk tales of the Hand of Glory and contemporary common law governing the use of dead bodies register a specific horror in the dead man's hand: the prospect of losing the part of the body that connects intention and effect (the part “infallibly understood to will and intend” in John Bulwer's words) and finding it subject to the designs of someone else. Ferdinand's offer demonstrates, dismayingly, how easily a hand clasp can be converted to an emblem of its own undoing, or a hand can be made to represent the disability of its holder, as perversely destructive as the “curious engine” of the Duchess's hand.

The Hand of Glory or “Main-de-Gloire” has a fairly extended history in early European witchcraft lore and practice.¹⁶ The famous demonologist Francesco Maria Guazzo's description of the charm in his Compendium Maleficarum (1608), includes a recipe for its use and preparation that was well established. Guazzo's primary source is the 1595 Demonolatreiae by Nicholas Remy, a notorious French demonologist and judge of witchcraft trials.¹⁷ Remy in turn describes a practice well codified in folk tradition.

To make such a charm, the witch cuts the hand off an exhumed body and prepares it magically: the severed hand is “pickled with various salts, dried in strong sunlight or an oven until … quite hard.”¹⁸ When employed in witchcraft, the fingers are anointed with devilish oils and either burned or used as a candle-holder (Guazzo, 84-85, 90). As long as the Hand of Glory burns, it causes all those around except the witch to sleep, to be immobilized, or it allows the witch to act invisibly. Later demonologists borrow accounts of this charm, often word for word, from these earlier ones. And by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, folk anecdotes, horror stories, and even contemporary incidents involving the Hand of Glory were in lively circulation, presumably deriving renewed popularity from the 1722 publication of the grimoire Secrets Merveilleux de la Magie Naturelle et Cabalistique de Petit Albert. According to the Dictionary of American Regional English, the colloquial use of the term “hand” for a charm or talisman continues in occasional use in the southern and south-midland United States, where the terms “hand,” “lucky-hand,” and “hand-giver” denote one who casts a spell on another.

What the charm is used for, and how it is disabled are as much a matter of tradition as its preparation. Demonologists and folklorists alike substantiate their explanations of the charm with “real life” accounts of thieves who were caught using a Hand of Glory during a theft. Typically, the stories concern a relatively recent event in some nearby province. This is the way Guazzo begins his own account of how the Hand of Glory works: “In the Diocese of Liege, relates Caesarius of Heisterbach, in a town which some call Hugo and others Dinant, there came one night to an inn two men” (85). Guazzo describes how the two thieves use the Hand of Glory to witch their victims into a deep sleep, and then recounts their frustration by a perspicacious maidservant, who douses the burning charm. The folklorist Christina Hole offers a more recent anecdote, from The Observer, 16 January 1831; it tells of an attempted robbery on 3 January at Loughcrew, Co. Meath in which thieves using a Hand of Glory were similarly foiled (179). Hole immediately follows this brief reference with a more detailed story from the last decade of the eighteenth century, equally charged with verisimilitude: this account was “originally collected by Charles Wastell from Bella Parkin, the daughter of the maidservant concerned.” Like the other versions of the tale, this one tells of an attempted theft at the “Old Spital Inn, near Stainmore,” foiled by the alert maidservant who witnesses the use of the Hand and puts it out (180).

The burglary plot becomes a standard feature of the Hand of Glory, remarkably consistent in its particular details across several centuries.¹⁹ The motif of theft suggests the problems caused by the mobile and appropriable nature of physical signs of agency. And it emphasizes the tenuousness of property as a vehicle for effective human action. The detachable, instrumental nature of the Hand of Glory is what makes it a powerful tool and what facilitates supernatural activities. Yet its very status as a thing that can be taken up by another and turned to unwonted uses reveals a profound weakness in—and threat to—each person who employs it—for the thief or witch is always foiled.

For Webster, drawing on these traditions, the dead man's hand also suggests the tenuousness of bodily metaphors as evidence for any theory about effectual human action. The specific form these problems take in The Duchess of Malfi is the task of explaining actions performed at a distance, by proxy, or through intermediation, where the evidence that proves the connection between intention and effect is not clear. This is the central problem maleficia or evil acts posed in early seventeenth-century common law. Like the leg that Ferdinand is later discovered to have “digged up” as a sign of his mad witchery, the Hand of Glory falls under the criminal category of “digging up the dead,” a new offense added to James I's 1604 Statute. The 1604 Statute defines the offense as follows:

[Taking] up any dead man, woman, or child out of his, her, or their grave, or any other place where the dead body resteth, or the skin, bone, or any other part of any dead person, to be employed or used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment.

(R. Robbins, 280)

Other revisions in the 1604 Statute emphasized contract with the devil or evil spirits, spelling out the variety of pacts that might be engaged in: “consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed, or reward” (280). Digging up the dead was one of a set of practices that could provide evidence of such covenants; thus the statute specifies it as a felony punishable by death without benefit of clergy and sanctuary if convicted. Recorded use of dead bodies for witchcraft in England appears sporadic; in his analysis of the Essex Assizes between 1560 to 1680, for example, Alan Macfarlane cites only one indictment for the use of dead bodies.²⁰ Russell Hope Robbins, on the other hand, records the use of the Hand of Glory as evidence in continental witchcraft prosecutions, citing a case Guazzo borrows from Remy that took place in Guermingen in 1588 (241). Webster's use of the charm with minimal glossing (“What witchcraft doth he practise”) suggests that such practices were known widely by reputation, if not by trial. One larger English context for the new provisions in the 1604 legislation was of course James I's increasing persecution of Recusants. The statute might well have been used to demonize Catholic worship of relics by assimilating them to occult practice. Certainly, Bosola's threat that the Duchess's own hand and person will become a site of pilgrimage resonates with the horrifying rather than redeeming potential of such reverence. The Hand of Glory itself conjures the worst potential of contemporary relics. With its elaborate preparation and diabolical use, it evokes the manufacture of false relics and the corrupted interests they serve. It also realizes a profound dissolution of body and person, for this talisman perverts the actual synecdoche, pars pro toto, inherent in a true relic, as the body part that should incorporate the whole person is converted to another person's instrument.²¹

What is most important to this brief account of the tradition of the Hand of Glory is less its actual employment—recipes in grimoires and demonologies are certainly of questionable provenance—than its legal status as the sign and tool of maleficia, or evil acts. According to the 1604 Statute's rules about exhumation and the felonious use of corpses, a person who used a Hand of Glory would by definition be a witch. Furthermore, as a “known practice of witchcraft,” possession of the charm would constitute the “just and sufficient proof” required for conviction in William Perkins's 1608 guide to justices (R. Robbins, 174). Like the use of wax figures and the employment of familiars, the charm offered a particularly powerful kind of evidence for the presumption of maleficia—in contrast with the more dubiously grounded presumptions of contract with the devil. Witchcraft trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often linked malevolent motive and injurious effect in the absence of the kind of direct evidence of causality that other kinds of criminal action required. This was a fact much noted and worried over by contemporary jurists and often the source of skepticism. In a detailed discussion of this problem, Alan Macfarlane cites Gifford's Dialogue as an influential critical account of the difficulty of proving such causal links. He argues, “It was only possible to testify to motives and effects, not to witness the actual act of witchcraft or the invisible way in which this force operated” (Macfarlane, 16).²² Michael Dalton's Countrey Justice (1618) is often quoted by modern scholars to illustrate jurisprudential concerns about the attenuation, over time and space, of links between evil effects and the person of the witch who intended them. Dalton's manual bases his guidelines on the Discovery of Witches, containing the 1612 arraignments of witches at the Lancaster Assize. He cautions, “Now against these Witches the Justices of peace may not alwaies expect direct evidence, seeing that all their workes are the workes of darknesse, and no witnesses present with them to accuse them.”²³ Comparing witchcraft to poisoning, Dalton concludes that “halfe proofes are to be allowed, and are good causes of suspition” (Dalton, 268).

Trials thus provided a stage on which to adjudicate the differences between evil intentions and their effects, and “natural” or accidental events that occurred by unhappy coincidence. As both explanation and evidence of the peculiar power practiced by witches, the charm provides a missing link that distinguishes these two kinds of events. It is significant that recipes for the Hand of Glory often stipulate that the hand come from the body of a felon, forging an a priori association with criminal action. In this way a clear distinction can be kept between acts of God and felonious ones. The difficulty of maintaining such distinctions is a problem that recurs throughout contemporary debates about the existence of witchcraft and is characteristically couched in the language of manual action. Thomas Ady's work, for example, is full of passages contesting “whose hand is in” an action—God's or witches': “Seldom hath a man the hand of God against him in his estate, or health of body, or any way, but presently he cryeth out of some poor innocent Neighbour, that he, or she hath bewitched him.” “And therefore men should look into the Scriptures, and search what sins bring afflictions from Gods hand, and not say presently, what old man or woman was last at my door, that I may hang him or her for a Witch.”²⁴ Much earlier, Reginald Scot argued a similarly skeptical line: “Fewe or none can (nowadaies) with patience indure the hand and correction of God. For if any adversities, greefe, sicknesse, losse of children, corne, catell, or libertie happen unto them; by & by they exclaim uppon witches.”²⁵

Amputated from the body whose intentions it should be serving yet generating powerful effects for the one who wields it, the dead man's hand exemplifies the vexed status of testimonial and material evidence in witchcraft prosecutions. It signifies both a compelling forensic connection between intention and act and the urgent need to forge that connection against accepted legal convention. As trial evidence, the Hand of Glory mediates between the person of the witch and distant maleficia. And by supplying such evidence, the charm brings the witch under control, for it peculiarly confirms both her temporary power and her ultimate helplessness, as the repeated formula of foiled sorcery confirms. In these contradictory roles, the Hand of Glory remains a “curious engine,” working invisibly and inexorably, with an agency attenuated from the body of the acting subject and often against the interests of its possessor.

Evoking this forensic history, Webster stages a punning byplay on the etymology of the term “Hand of Glory,” drawing on the continental origins of the name. The phrase “Hand of Glory” translates the French main de gloire, a “deformation by ‘popular etymology’ of the Old French mandegloire”: from mandegore, mandragore, or mandrake.²⁶ Like the dead man's hand, the mandrake plant is associated with felonious acts, supposed by popular tradition to grow under the gallows. In Webster's play, it serves as Ferdinand's explanation of his madness: he has grown mad from digging one up, he says to his brother. “What's the Prodigy?” the cardinal asks. “Read there, a sister damn'ed; she's loose i'th'hilts, / Grown a notorious strumpet” (2.5.1-4). For Ferdinand, as many critics have noted, his sister's sexual willfulness profoundly threatens his own person, much as the loosely fastened wife of Gataker's exemplum threatens her husband—hence, the frequent scholarly diagnosis of incestuous obsession. But the play overlays this erotic subtext with other causes for his madness, leading us through the language of madness back to the relationship between Ferdinand and Bosola.

OCCULT CONTRACTS

For Webster, the failure of the body to ratify states like intention and consent is epitomized in the dead man's hand: where the part that symbolizes effectual action becomes the grotesque instrument of another's design. As “Main de Gloire,” the dead man's hand suggests that the condition for madness is precisely the recognition of will and consent as a property held by another. This is a recognition that both Bosola and Ferdinand come to, in different ways, in the scene in which Bosola claims his reward for killing the Duchess. When Bosola challenges Ferdinand for his reward, Ferdinand denies his role as a principal to the act. His denial is premised on his own madness, the lack of legitimate judicial process, and as a consequence of both, the independent moral authority Bosola has acted with. Bosola contests these claims, reverting over and over to their traditional roles as lord and retainer, which make him an extension of Ferdinand. In this, he reprises the nostalgic imagery with which the play began, with its aphoristic descriptions of the ideal prince as a tree or fountain, from which the character and actions of the court naturally spring.²⁷ The relationship between Bosola and Ferdinand profoundly undermines these organic models and looks forward, warily, to voluntary and consensual forms of agency. Thus, Webster anatomizes in single relationships the principle of willful subjection to authority that much later writers, like Hobbes and Locke, were to take up in terms of collective consent in a commonwealth.

Just after the Duchess's executioners leave the stage, Ferdinand enters and Bosola confronts him with her body. Ferdinand immediately begins to repent, and as he does so, to imagine Bosola as the agent of justice who might have saved her: the faithful servant of so many conduct manuals, who proves his merit by selective, moral disobedience:²⁸

                                                                                          Let me see her face again.
Why didst not thou pity her? What an excellent
Honest man might'st thou have been
If thou hadst borne her to some sanctuary!
Or, bold in a good cause, opposed thyself
With thy advancèd sword above thy head,
Between her innocence and my revenge!
I bade thee, when I was distracted of my wits,
Go kill my dearest friend, and thou hast done't.

(4.2.264-72)

This is not a specious denial. Ferdinand is mad precisely in the sense that his divided intentions are performed by another and come into conflict when they are executed. In this way, he can imagine Bosola as a rescuer who acts out his internal oppositions. The servant's role imagined here is both more complex and more perverse than traditions of moral disobedience dictate. Bosola acts one part of Ferdinand's intentions, while another reacts to its murderous effects, as if Ferdinand were the audience to a scene he directs:

For thee (as we observe in tragedies
That a good actor many times is cursed
For playing a villain's part), I hate thee for't:
And for my sake say thou hast done much ill well.

(4.2.280-83)

Bosola responds by insisting on his role as Ferdinand's servant, implicitly reprising his trademark complaint against ungrateful masters: “Let me quicken your memory; for I perceive / You are falling into ingratitude. I challenge / The reward due to my service” (4.2.284-86). Ferdinand counters by asserting more explicitly that Bosola acted without authority, and when Bosola insists he acted on Ferdinand's authority, Ferdinand objects that it was not legitimate:

Did any ceremonial form of law
Doom her to not-being? Did a complete jury
Deliver her conviction up i'th' court?
Where shalt thou find this judgement registered
Unless in hell?

(4.2.292-96)

Throughout the rest of this scene, the counterpoint between two notions of service continues: Ferdinand's analysis depends on a service relationship that invests the agent with independent volition and is based on voluntary agreement; Bosola defines obligations according to traditional duties of place and degree. Bosola refuses to leave and again insists on his reward, couching it in terms that emphasize a lord's duties toward his retainers: “I will first receive my pension” [my emphasis] (4.2.304). Much more than “reward,” the word “pension” connotes regular and periodic payment for allegiance, as well as service, over a long period. Again, Ferdinand disputes such claims by characterizing Bosola as an independently evil actor: “You are a villain.” “When your ingratitude / Is judge, I am so” (4.2.305-6), Bosola retorts, calling attention to Ferdinand's sophistic analysis. His master continues nonetheless in the same vein, insisting on Bosola's independent capacity to choose the authority by which he acts, despite his evident failure to have done so: “O horror! / That not the fear of him which binds the devils / Can prescribe man obedience” (4.2.306-8).

Webster closes the scene with a remarkable turn of character, as Bosola—disabused of a fantasy of true service that he had perversely always seemed to acknowledge as illusory—repents. “I stand like one / That long hath ta'en a sweet and golden dream: / I am angry with myself, now that I wake” (4.2.315-17). When Bosola comes to himself, as it were, he comes to accept Ferdinand's redefinition of their relationship: to accept the notion that he might be bound to act as a morally independent agent—and not be bound by duty and loyal affection to his lord:

I served your tyranny, and rather strove
To satisfy yourself, than all the world;
And though I loathed the evil, yet I loved
You that did counsel it, and rather sought
To appear a true servant than an honest man.

(4.2.321-25)

Bosola accepts Ferdinand's mad excuses—“He's much distracted”—and fully internalizes his own moral authority in a newly recognized conscience:

What would I do, were this to do again?
I would not change my peace of conscience
For all the wealth of Europe. She stirs; here's life.
Return, fair soul, from darkness, and lead mine
Out of this sensible hell. She's warm, she breathes.

(4.2.331-35)

The Duchess's revival, however brief, underscores the dramatic significance of this moment of conversion, but the complicated dependency of Bosola's and Ferdinand's intentions elsewhere in the play is suspended rather than resolved here. For Ferdinand has certainly ordered the Duchess's death, and, mad as he is, the play confirms the need for revenge against him. When Bosola proceeds to carry this out, he describes himself in language that seems scripted by Ferdinand's repentant thoughts—as if the roles of moral agent and submissive instrument cannot so clearly be distinguished as his epiphany implied: “The weakest arm is strong enough, that strikes / With the sword of justice” (5.2.339-40). Bosola's service is always preposterous, as Patricia Parker uses the word, coming before explicit command. Thus, when he first meets with Ferdinand to seek service he asks, “Whose throat must I cut?” And Ferdinand answers, “Your inclination to shed blood rides post / Before my occasion to use you” (1.1.240-42).

As a malcontent, Bosola is very far from finding common cause with others, to create a body of men that—as Mark Curtis describes his actual contemporaries—might nourish the beginnings of active parliamentarian discourse.²⁹ But Webster's interests are more analytical than polemical in this play. He uses the fraught compact between Bosola and Ferdinand to dramatize radical and frightening consequences of voluntary contract, bringing internal states as well as deeds under its sway. When Bosola echoes Ferdinand—as when the heroic Duchess is reduced to the character of Echo in the last act—he comes close to defining intention as an imaginary and social condition: called into being by, expressed by, and even supplied by another.

But Webster finds such mediation occult, illicit, and profoundly self-alienating. It is the state that intelligencers in particular embody, as Bosola's opening line—“I do haunt you still”—promises. When Ferdinand engages Bosola in the first act, they define Bosola's role by comparison to a witch's familiar:

BOS:
It seems you would create me
One of your familiars.
FERD:
                                                                                          Familiar! what's that?
BOS:
Why, a very quaint invisible devil, in flesh:
An intelligencer.
FERD:
                                                                      Such a kind of thriving thing
I would wish thee, and ere long, thou may'st arrive
At a higher place by't.

(1.1.249-54)

Like the Hand of Glory, familiars explain the witch's capacity to act at a distance, in her own absence. Often, as Ferdinand suggests, they were held to be the Devil's agents: low-ranking demons who serve the witch in turn for her own service to the Devil, or sometimes, as Guazzo tells us, the Devil in disguise. In either case, they provide sure proof of a contract with the Devil: both Perkins and Dalton find the presence of a familiar compelling evidence for conviction; R. Robbins summarizes their utility in trials by nothing that “as cats and mice were everywhere, it was never difficult to discover and prove a witch” (175). By invoking familiars, Webster suggests the similarly dangerous conditions of agency embodied in the intelligencer: a proxy, representative, or extension of the self who is at once proper and alien. For Webster the threat represented by such substitutes—wife, intelligencer, familiar—is the tenuous hold contract has over them. Of themselves, and not exclusively by dependence or authority, such agents thrive in the world.

If the compact between Bosola and Ferdinand dramatizes the dynamic and uncertain relation between servants and masters bound by contract, the Duchess herself embodies the problem of what it means voluntarily to alienate portions of the self this way. Wooing Antonio, she speaks in her double roles as sovereign and subordinate: one who has a property in herself, as demonstrated by the fact that she may consent to give it away. The language of revenue, expense, and bequest that marks the wooing scene makes this propriety clear. And related terms frame the debate between the Duchess and her brothers, when they challenge it. Facing them off, she brings a remarkably modern interpretation to her economic metaphors: “Diamonds are of most value, / They say, that have passed through most jewellers' hands” (1.1.290-91). Ferdinand retorts in typically nasty, reactionary mode: “Whores, by that rule, are precious”: such exchange will profoundly change your status and character. But the market metaphor—supporting a self-determined, self-possessed individual, and sustaining her right selectively to alienate those parts of herself that she chooses—lingers.

English revenge tragedy characteristically literalizes such fictional conversions of the self into property, turning hands and fingers into stage props. These grotesqueries raise uncomfortable questions about the difference between alienable qualities of person—like labor or service—and ostensibly inalienable ones—internal states like virtuous or evil character, purpose, a sense of self. The market logic that begins to surface in the Duchess's self-description emerges with these questions and tends to overshadow them. By the time John Locke makes consensual contract the foundation of political and civil society, the contradictions embodied in the Duchess's ability to give herself away in marriage are naturalized in the notion of a liberal self, whose essential status cannot be changed by contract or exchange. To consent to make oneself a servant to another, Locke says, “by selling him, for a certain time” only the service one undertakes to do, in exchange for wages, “gives the master but a temporary power over [the servant] and no greater than what is contained in the contract between them.”³⁰ Locke's confidence derives in part from the corresponding role labor plays for him in ratifying property rights: what Jean-Christophe Agnew has called the “redeeming discipline of labor.”³¹ By the late eighteenth century, the grotesque autonomy epitomized by Gataker's prosthetic limbs animates a new genre, which puts such ideals to the test. Writers like Keats, Maupassant, Le Fanu, and Jacobs disrupt the narrow and secure lines of property that define contracts for service in liberal economic theory, and they call into question the redeeming nature of the tasks that ratify such contracts. Their tales of lively, inimical, severed hands address the uncanny dependencies and alienations of domestic service and industrial labor.

Notes

1. Stallybrass, “Reading the Body,” 137, citing Bakhtin, 320.

2. See McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists; Jankowski.

3. Bakhtin, 26.

4. “Hermaphrodite or ambidexter would be good names for such men of double estate,” “The Lollard Conclusions, 1394,” in E. Peters, 279.

5. Maine, 165.

6. See Rider; Cockeram.

7. Constance Jordan pioneered this field; see especially Renaissance Feminism and more recently, Shakespeare's Monarchies. Literary scholars have most often addressed early modern contractualism in terms of the genre of romance. For an excellent summary of the use of marital consent as a model for political contract, in this generic context, see Victoria Kahn's recent “Margaret Cavendish and the Romance of Contract.” On royalist romance see Annabel Patterson, “Paradise Regained,” and Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing. On emergent vocabularies for contract in medieval literature see Fowler, “Civil Death and the Maiden.” With the exception of the last, most literary studies of contractualism focus on the mid-seventeenth century on. I hope to contribute to this work by expanding both its generic and historical field of view.

8. There are important exceptions. A. R. Braunmuller describes such developments in the law of agency in “Second Means. “In “Faithful Servants,” Richard Strier maps out the theory of courtly service promulgated in conduct manuals like Castiglione's The Courtier. Jonathan Dollimore's reading of social displacement in Webster's The White Devil calls attention to the surplus of dispossessed, university-educated men in this period; writers from Bacon to Hobbes pointed to this surplus and consequent discontentment as an important cause of sedition and rebellion. See “The White Devil,” in Radical Tragedy, 231-46, esp. 242. Earlier scholarship usually addressed these issues in terms of the character of the Malcontent; I hope to shift attention from character type to the structural analysis of service relations that preoccupies these plays. Lawrence Danson's recent discussion of Webster's own concerns about rising professionalism (presented at the 1997 Shakespeare Association of America seminar “Early Modern Drama and the Question of Agency”) suggests the new directions this kind of study might take. Danson reads Bosola's divided role as an agent for himself and an agent for others as a reflection of Webster's intense concern with the changing nature of patronage and professional service in this period.

9. John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, 4.1.53-55. Hereafter cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line number of the Oxford World Classics edition.

10. Wayne, 115.

11. Webster, The White Devil, 2.1. 216-17. Hereafter cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line numbers of the New Mermaid edition.

12. Bulwer, 50.

13. Gataker, 9.

14. This is slightly earlier than the OED places the emergence of this sense of the word, in the 1630s.

15. For a detailed analysis of the marital traditions Webster draws on in this scene, including the anatomical logic symbolized by handfasting, see Randall.

16. The critical note in Brennan's edition glosses the dead man's hand briefly: “A dead man's hand was a powerful charm used in the cure of madness.” Brennan's source is M. C. Bradbrook's brief citation of the scene “Two Notes upon Webster.” Bradbrook invokes a mixed tradition of folk cures and occult practices to explain the prop, including the Hand of Glory. She notes that dead hands and fingers, often severed, were used in a number of early modern European folk cures, and their use persisted at least into the nineteenth century. Her source, in turn, is George Lyman Kittredge's seminal Witchcraft in Old and New England, whose robust bibliography of medicinal and malevolent uses of dead hands is where most editors of the play arrive.

17. Remy seems to have been comparable in reputation to Jean Bodin; his Demonolatreiae (1595), which covered trial accounts between 1581 and 1591, was frequently republished and borrowed from. See R. Robbins; Macfarlane.

18. See E. Radford and M. Radford, The Encyclopedia of Superstitions, edited and revised by Christina Hole, 179.

19. It is also reflected in several sources and analogues. Lucas cites Herodotus's Tale of Rhampsinitus (2.121), which involves two related plots, one of theft from the king's coffers, one of a trick with a severed hand that leads to the marriage of the trickster and the king's haughty daughter. See related examples in Kittredge; Porter; and S. Thompson.

20. Macfarlane, 25.

21. Here, and throughout this book, I am indebted to Caroline Walker Bynum's rich account of late medieval relics and the complex synecdoches they realize. See Fragmentation and Redemption, especially chapter 7.

22. Macfarlane also quotes Francis Hutchinson's assertion in his Historical Essay (1718) that it was “lawful to give in Evidence Matters that are no ways relating to that Fact, and done many Years before” (16). A number of scholars including Macfarlane (16) and Newman (54) quote Dalton, The Countrey Justice (1619), on this principle (see Note 23, following).

23. Dalton, 251, quoted in R. Robbins, 175. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

24. Ady, 114, 130.

25. Scot, 192.

26. OED, sb. 1.

27. See the opening set pieces by Antonio and Bosola, 1.1.11, 1.1.47.

28. See Strier for the theory of faithful disobedience in conduct literature and contemporary political theory.

29. See Curtis.

30. Locke, chapter 7, sec. 85.

31. Agnew describes the “arrival of a new labor standard of value” in Worlds Apart, 143.

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