SOURCE: Behling, Laura L. “‘S/he Scandles Our Proceedings’: The Anxiety of Alternative Sexualities in The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi.” English Language Notes 33, no. 4 (June 1996): 24-43.

[In this essay, Behling examines how the transgression of gender boundaries is conflated with transgressive sexuality in Webster's plays. The masculinity of his heroines in their political actions, she notes, makes any sexual activity or desire centered on them appear unnatural.]

Historians and literary critics, upon studying the popular and court rhetoric of the Jacobean period conclude that, with the exception of anti-theatrical literature, English Renaissance culture did not display a “morbid fear of homosexuality.”¹ They acknowledge, however, that Renaissance society was intensely concerned with sex and gender roles, representation and desire, and political authority. Moreover, when the rules of Renaissance theater mandated men to play women's stage parts, and medical treatises failed to define two separate and unique sexes, anxiety about transgressing the boundaries of sex and gender suggests that though homosexuality may not have been “morbidly” feared, it was, at the very least, anxiety-provoking in a society seeking its political and sexual identities.

Two Renaissance plays by John Webster, The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1613), both capture this anxiety of alternative sexualities.² In The White Devil, Vittoria defends her adulterous actions with the claim “My modesty / And womanhood I tender; but withall / So intangled in a cursed accusation / That any defense of force like Perseus / Must personate masculine vertue” (IV, ii, 136-40). One year later, in 1613, Webster recreates the anxiety of Vittoria's masculine female self in his uncomfortably ambiguous tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi.

We know, of course, that neither The White Devil nor The Duchess of Malfi ends happily. The bloody violence that begins with the killing of Camillo and Isabella sets up the deaths of Brachiano, Vittoria and Flamineo. Then, the bloodshed continues as the Duchess of Malfi is killed, along with Antonio, her children, and her brother, Ferdinand. At the end, all we have left is what the faithful Delio understatedly observes: “a great ruin” of which there is only an attempt to “make noble use.” Delio establishes the Duchess's young son in the hopes of reordering that which is chaotic. Such an act, however, does not vindicate the Duchess. Rather, we are left with the disconcerting idea of political power authorized matrilineally through a son astrologically-destined to die young, and open-ended ambiguity as to what this ending portends.

The entire play, actually, is problematic, particularly since The Duchess of Malfi follows so closely after The White Devil. With figures of women whose behavior is politically and sexually masculine, incestuous relations, corrupt men of God, cold-blooded murders, and the blurring of reality and fiction, the ambiguities of the Duchess's matrilineal authority seem to be a logically illogical conclusion to two extremely complex and dis-ordered plays. But what causes the most anxious moments in Webster's stagecraft are challenges to sexual authority, and the dis-ordering of traditional sex and gender relations and hence, political power bases.

I.

And although by the first face and view some of these may seem to intreat unlawful love and the foul practises of the same, yet, being thoroughly read and well considered, both old and young may learn how to avoid the ruin, overthrow, inconvenience, and displeasure that lascivious desire and wanton will doth bring to their suitors and pursuers. All which may render good examples, the best to be followed and the worst to be avoided.

William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure³

The appearance of Mary Tudor and later, her half-sister, Elizabeth, on the English throne caused the topic of women's sovereignty to be widely debated in early modern political theory. According to Constance Jordan, “the literature on women's rule features two principal lines of argument: the conservative position holds that woman is created inferior by God and therefore has no authority with regard to any man”; the more liberal position posits “that woman is capable of behaving in a virile manner and therefore of governing men.”⁴ Provisions were made for Mary and Elizabeth I that led to “political androgyny,” thereby transforming the political arena into a special world in which the queen regnant can act only as men have acted previously. Politically, she is a man.”⁵

After the long and barren rule of unmarried Elizabeth I, anxiety of authority and masculine identity was exacerbated. James I's succession to the English throne could not have been more discomfiting, particularly since his accession was not without its own controversy and anxiety. This embodiment of a threatened royal bloodline and the socially and politically confusing reign of James I provide the uneasy background for The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, both of which speak directly about the anxieties of sexual relations, particularly alternative sexualities.

Implicit in this anxiety surrounding expressed sexuality is the particular issue of homosexuality. The court appearance of “favorites” Robert Carr and later George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, could not have been more troubling or troublesome; homosexuality becomes indecent only when it intersects with some other behavior that is dangerous or anti-social.⁶ Not only did some of James's subjects find the public displays distasteful, but many were deeply concerned about the power these favorites exercised in the court. William Drummond sharply criticizes Buckingham for this very reason: “A ganemed / Quhoose hourische breath hath power to lead / His Maiestie such way he list.”⁷ The actual act of sodomy is not as threatening as the disturbance of the social order it causes.⁸

In this male homosocial structure, women's sexuality is simultaneously both present and absent as the center of patrilineal power,⁹ as evident in the paradoxical reproduction of the bloodline. Reproduction and the resulting patriarchal lineage dictates that the bloodline cannot be transgressed and must be transgressed (by the introduction of the woman's bloodline) in order to keep the lineage pure—reproduction is both encouraged and discouraged; women are a necessary evil. When reality infringes upon the seemingly isolated, sealed tenets of precept, anxiety develops and sexual confusion arises. In the textual portrayals of sexual characteristics, Vittoria and the Duchess are powerful sexual women infused with political, hence masculine authority, and Brachiano and Ferdinand are zealously passionate men. In them, the anxiety over alternative sexualities, most specifically homosexuality, in the seventeenth century is expressed.

Brachiano and Ferdinand exhibit much of the behavior found so disturbing in the Renaissance. According to Stephen Orgel:

lust effeminates, makes men incapable of manly pursuits. … Women are dangerous to men because sexual passion for women renders men effeminate: this is an age in which sexuality itself is misogynistic, as the love of women threatens the integrity of the perilously achieved male identity. The fear of effeminization is a central element in all discussions of what constitutes a “real man.”¹⁰

Brachiano's “unnatural” passion for Vittoria and Ferdinand's incestuous desire for the Duchess, and in addition, their relationship with cuckoldry, place them squarely in the realm of alternative sexualities and lead them both to the same fate as the women.

The relations between men and women, then, become paradoxical structures in Webster's plays. On the one hand, the power is passed patrilineally, and the sexual authority is grounded, however much it is transgressed, in the male. But the male homosocial bonds are disrupted, and in a peculiar way: they deviate from the male-female-male exchange to a re-configuration of the men and women that make up the competition. The disruption arises either from a male-figured woman or a female-figured man, changing not only the object of desire but the subject who desires. The women's assumption of masculine behavior and the men's submission disrupt the homosocial bonds of male order. And here an intriguing distinction arises between heterosexual and “heterogendered,” and homosexual and “homogendered.” The assumption that heterosexuality implies “heterogenderedness” and homosexual implies “homogenderedness” is too simplistic. Rather, as evidenced in both The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, heterosexual and homosexual relationships may exist between two people of the same gender, or the relationship may occur between two people who act contrary to their sex, that is, they cross genders (i.e. the male acts feminine and vice versa).

The strange case exists, then, with only masculine-gendered figures involved in the sexual-economic exchange. The object of exchange is no longer a woman, but a masculine female. Traditional authorizing structures must necessarily break down, as the “traffic” in women has now become, in a rather explicit reference, a “political economy” of homogenderedness and an inference of homosexuality. This double-layered source of anxiety can be seen at one level as the anxiety of masculine women, political women who defy traditional patriarchal power. But the deeper anxiety lies in the practice of homosexuality, particularly when the object of a man's desire is figured as masculine. Webster's carefully drawn Vittoria and Duchess embody an implicit male homosexuality, and their violent deaths signal Webster's, and perhaps early seventeenth century English society's, verdict on such “unnatural” behavior and alternative sexualities.

II.

If woman do breed man,
She ought to teach him manhood. Fare thee well.
Know, many glorious women that are famed
For masculine virtue have been vicious,
Only a happier silence did betide them.
She hath no faults as who hath the art to hide them.

The White Devil, 5.6.243-48

The White Devil offers a foretaste of the homosocial and homosexual bonds apparent in The Duchess of Malfi. Specifically, Vittoria foreshadows the political masculine authority of the Duchess, and therefore serves as the precursor to the Duchess as the embodiment of homosexual anxiety.¹¹ She is portrayed in “conventional relationships—of wife, adulteress, mistress, and then wife again—but she does not derive her strength, the mettle she displays under duress, from relationships,” Gayle Greene explains. “Rather, her heroism represents the very antithesis of the Renaissance ideal of woman: disobedient, defiant of convention, sexual, subversive, she displays the assertion rather than the subordination of self.”¹²

The economic role of women in relations between men is immediately established in the opening lines of The White Devil, with the reference to Fortune as being a “right whore” (1.1.4). Not only is Fortuna, the Roman goddess of fortune, implicit in this reference, but the economic provisions of material wealth and gain, of commodities, is explicitly denoted. As the conversation continues between Count Lodovico and his friends, Antonelli and Gasparo, the idea of chance takes another turn when Lodovico remarks that Brachiano has the good fortune to “scape / This banishment, ther's Paulo Giordano Orsini, / The Duke of Brachiano, now lives in Rome, / And by close pandarisme seekes to prostitute / The honour of Vittoria Corombona” (1.1.38-42). Two remarkable unions are made in these short lines. The first is that Vittoria, the subject of Brachiano's pandering, is likened to the whore Fortune. Second, the implicit and explicit commodification involved in prostitution, subjects her to the trade of the male culture.

We learn that Camillo, Vittoria's husband, and Brachiano, her lover, are the players of the culture in which Vittoria is exchanged. Curiously, the terms of the relationship are not sexually equal. Camillo is not only a “jealous husband” but he is “so unable to please a woman that like a dutch doublet all his backe is shrunke into his breeches” (1.2.31-2). Complete impotence is suggested when Flamineo questions Camillo about his sexual relations with his wife. Camillo assures Flamineo that “my voyage lyes / More northerlie, in a farre colder clime, / I do not well remember I protest / When I last lay with her” (1.2.50-53). Not only does this confession signal that he no longer does or can have intercourse with his wife, but there also is the suggestion that he is a cuckold, a fact we find out later.

Maus notes that anxiety about sexual betrayal runs throughout the drama of the English Renaissance, and may reflect “in a particularly telling way the instabilities and tensions of a patriarchal social order.”¹³ The repeated and stark references to impotence and cuckoldry, in particular, are highly significant. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes in Between Men that to “cuckold” is by definition a sexual act, performed on a man by another man.¹⁴ Though cuckoldry is not a true homosexual act, the male bonding behavior reasserts the societal bonds of masculinity, as transferred through the objectified woman.¹⁵ The threat of cuckoldry infuses the homosocial culture with sexuality and establishes a masculine homosexual culture developing from a masculine homosocial culture.

As the play proceeds, Vittoria's impotent husband, Camillo, is murdered so that she may be free to marry the Duke, Brachiano. However, the punishment for the murders of Camillo and Brachiano's wife, Isabella, falls squarely on Vittoria, who is tried for both murder and adultery. Her more serious offenses, however, are her deliberate and masculine sexual disruption of her own patrilineal possessor [the murder of her husband] and her adulteration of Brachiano's bloodline. This rupture of the bloodline and its cause—that is, Vittoria's choice of a sexual relationship over a sterile marriage or widowhood—is the anxiety-provoking disturbance that requires the trial and her violent and necessary death. “Webster purposely problematized the questions of Vittoria's guilt and forces us to judge her in relation to the other characters,” Laura Bromley suggests. “What it means to be a woman is a central issue in the play, highlighted by the extreme examples of Isabella and Zamele, the fulminations of Flamineo on the subject, the subtler assertions of Brachiano, Francisco, and Monticelso, and the counter assertions of Vittoria.”¹⁶

I would like to suggest that the central issue in The White Devil is something more than initially “what it means to be a woman,” or as Woodbridge suggests, the exploration of “female sexuality.”¹⁷ The differences in women lie not in their sex, but in their gradations of gender, as expressed through sexuality. Vittoria, in particular, “combines masculine traits and feminine in a way which blatantly violates the distinctions demanded between the sexes.”¹⁸ The issue, then, is to extend Bromley's question and ask: what does it mean to be a woman who is gendered as masculine, and to further specify, how does this gendered masculine female threaten the patriarchal culture?¹⁹

Vittoria obviously and most aggressively transgresses society's preestablished feminine boundaries in her active sexuality. Her behavior, refusing to be subordinate or passive, mimics that of the masculine order. She has, in effect, played the masculine role in sexual relations—and for her courageous actions, receives the attention of her brother Flamineo. “What a damn'd impostume is a woman's will / Can nothing breake it?” Then, in an important, if not comical aside to Brachiano, Flamineo makes a comparison: “Women are caught as you take Tortoises, / She must bee turn'd on her backe” (4.2.152-54). This comparison had existed since classical times, but Vincenzo Cartari's Imagini (1571) emphasizes the danger of sexual intercourse for the female tortoise and applies the tale to the dangers that face women in their sexual relationships with men.

And in reading about the nature of that animal in Pliny (and in Elianus as well) I find that the ancient sculptors gave a lovely and holy admonition to women, by placing the tortoise beneath the feet of Venus. For the tortoise knows the danger that she faces when she joins herself with the male; she must turn herself upside down with her belly on top and the male, after completing the sex act, goes his own way and leaves her there. She cannot turn herself upright by herself, and is left a prey for other animals, the eagle in particular. That is why, with a consummate degree of continence, she abstains from the sex act, and fleeing from the male, puts her health before lustful pleasure. But she is later constrained to consent to it all the same, after being affected by a herb, which fires her up completely to lust, so that she doesn't fear a thing after that. In the same way, women also have to think about the danger they put themselves into when they lose their chastity; thus they ought to flee libidinous appetites, unless they are forced into those by the debt of matrimony, to insure the succession of offspring.²⁰

Flamineo's crude comparison becomes strikingly apt as the play comes to its bloody conclusion. Vittoria would have served herself better (at least according to Cartari's formulation) had she suppressed her sexual appetites much as the tortoise flees from a lusty male. Instead, Vittoria initiates, or at least willingly participates in her sexual relationship with Brachiano, and comes to the predicted fate female tortoises face when turned on their backs. “Know many glorious women that are fam'd / For masculine vertue, have bin vitious” (5.6.243-44), Flamineo explains as he characterizes Vittoria's fatal flaw. It is not, we are told, that Vittoria “displayed manly virtues, but that she insisted on them, demanded their recognition. Whatever her vices, had she been silent—self-effacing rather than self-asserting—she might have escaped,” Bromley concludes.²¹

More than her refusal to play the feminine role is Vittoria's usurpation of the masculine role, particularly in sexual relationships.²² Her assumption of masculine sexual behavior—in a patriarchal culture that was having its masculine identity and lineage severely tested and attacked—was too much to bear, even in fictional space. That Vittoria's greatest sinne lay in my blood” (5.6.240) is appropriate when her place in the erotic exchange is established. “Blood” is the guarantee of the patriarchy, the transmission and continuation of the bloodline, and ultimately the transmission of power. That blood was her greatest sin suggests that her fault lay in the usurpation of the masculine identity, and hence the power to continue or rupture bloodlines. The sin is that Vittoria had blood, in the metaphorical masculine authority and identification of blood, hence masculine identity.

Vittoria's last words seem rather ironic in this reading where homosexuality is at issue. Just before she dies, she lamentedly advises: “O happy they that never saw the Court, / Nor ever knew great Men but my report” (5.6.261-62). The ambiguous pronoun “they” invites the confusion between who, or which sex, it signals: men or women, or perhaps both. When this ambiguity is considered with the alternative, and Biblical, meaning of “know,” the lament becomes curiously suggestive. Regardless of whether Vittoria is figured as masculine or feminine, her vague comment suggests that neither women nor men should “know” the great men of court as she did, only learn of them through her actions. This appears to be a caution against both heterosexuality and homosexuality, based on the possibility for political disaster.

When sexual relations infringe upon and subsume traditional male homosocial bonds, it is clear that destruction of the confusion itself and the source of confusion must occur in order to reestablish the proper gender roles and sexual relationships. Vittoria's inability to flee from her sexual desires and restrict them to a proper feminine role of matrimony, mandates her death. Not only has she transgressed her sex, but she has actively confused male homosociality and introduced the threat of homosexuality into the Court's culture.

III.

Wish me good speed,
For I am going into a wilderness
Where I shall find nor path nor friendly clue
To be my guide.

Duchess of Malfi, 1.2.264-67

The “wilderness” of sexual depravity is taken with utmost seriousness in The Duchess of Malfi. The main action of the play, Boklund succinctly states, “is based on the consequences of a deliberate flouting of the laws guarding sexual decorum.”²³ By the end of Webster's 1613 play, the Duchess and the Duke have been murdered, indicating that some great anxiety existed in the play around their characters. Jankowski suggests that it is the “double position of wife and ruler” that makes the Duchess “an uneasy and threatening figure”; she was both her body natural and her body politic. “Webster's Duchess of Malfi establishes a system of rules in which she fails to consider her body's potential, either as a means to power or as a means by which she can lose power.”²⁴ There is, however, more to the anxiety the Duchess causes than this. By seeing her as the embodiment of the body natural and the body politic, Jankowski avers that she still remains two separate spheres. More intriguing, though, is the intersection of the Duchess's two bodies, when her female body natural takes on the male body politic—“that is, the monarch has a second, and wholly functional body politic.”²⁵ When this conflation occurs, she then becomes much like Vittoria, a masculine gendered female in a male homosocial society. But what is the impact when the sexual exchange is figured as relations between all masculine characters? The answer, to use the Duchess's own terminology, is a “wilderness” of gender and sexual exchange, the likes of which have not been trespassed.

The presence of this wilderness makes us immediately suspicious of the play's society, and hence, traditional expectations. Antonio begins Act I by describing the French court as a “blessed government” that he admires. This ideal court is built on homosocial political bonds between men and is governed by a “most provident council; who dare freely / Inform him the corruption of the times” (1.1.17-18). The Amalfian court to which Antonio returns, however, is in disorder, even before the Duchess marries her steward.

The ruling family, Ferdinand and his brother, the Cardinal, “are like plum trees that grew crooked over standing pools; they are rich and o'erladen with fruit, but none but crows, pies, and caterpillars feed on them” (1.1.48-50). Ferdinand is sexually obsessive and incestuous; the Cardinal has broken his vow of chastity and carries on with Julia.²⁶ This overt display of sexual passion makes them effeminate. Sexual energy and aggressiveness pervade the court, as well as sycophancy on the part of servants like Bosola. And patriarchal lineage, we see, is the rule of succession that offers “places in the court … like beds in the hospital, where this man's head lies at that man's foot, and so lower and lower” (1.1.63-65).

The sexual games that transpire between the men of court suggest that their common masculine potency is more important than their rank, an important leveling of social authority that occurs early in the play. As Ferdinand enters the Court for the first time he asks his servants, with certainly a wink in his eye, “Who took the ring oftenest” (1.2.6) drawing reference to sexual intercourse and the act of penetration. When Antonio is declared the winner, Ferdinand commands to “give him the jewel,” one of the countless references to jewels, signifying the female genitalia.²⁷ The game between men is set up as a sexual quiting to prove masculinity, not a social struggle or competition to prove social rank. This leveling of the masculine figures rejects the hierarchy of social standing, making the erotic exchange depend solely on sexuality. As a masculine female ruler, the Duchess may move into this erotic competition far deeper than in her capacity as a woman.

The Duchess's identification as a political figure invokes a masculine authority that is understood to be of greater importance than her feminine character. Her political position is, like Elizabeth's, figured as masculine. With the Duchess's portrayal as a political equal, therefore masculine, her place in the homosocial relationship between Ferdinand and Antonio, and Ferdinand and the male homosocial society in general, becomes as dangerous as the position of her predecessor, Vittoria. Christy Desmet writes:

In The Duchess of Malfi, potential paradoxes—the female ruler, the widowed bride, and the princely mother—dissolve into incoherence. The Duchess, in the end, has not many identities but none. … Ferdinand destroys the sister whose marriage threatens the integrity of his identity as an aristocrat … yet reducing the Duchess to the occasion for her brother's fantasies and her husband's ambition does not falsify her character, since reading the play from the perspective of the controversy over women underscores the fact that a patriarchal culture seeks to define the female ruler out of existence.²⁸

Desmet's recognition of “potential paradoxes”—the “female ruler” in the Renaissance—is central to understanding that ruler's implicit homosexuality. What I would like to argue is that the “female” part of the equation is not what causes anxiety. Rather, the possibility of another ruler, necessarily masculine by virtue of the authority conferred by the title, is forced into the already-established relations of masculine power. In other words, the society is not seeking to eliminate a female ruler, but any ruler who is threatens the order, regardless of biological sex. The danger is posed by anyone, whether male or female, who is gendered masculine by virtue of her/his power and who threatens the patriarchy through sexuality and an unnatural disruption of the bloodline.

Initially, the sexuality of the Duchess is ambiguous. Physically, she is female, described with constant jewel imagery. Attention is focused on her genitals specifically, her sexuality in general. She is figured as a “lusty widow” with a knowledge of sex and “what man is,” knowledge that is threatening to her brothers. For her, sexual experience is valuable: “Diamonds are of most value,” the Duchess remarks, “that have passed through most jewelers' hands” (1.2.207). As Greene states, “what is on trial is not the Duchess's chastity. In fact, she is guilty of what her brothers' fulsome imaginations accuse her: sexuality, breeding.”²⁹ But the phallic sword imagery associated with the Duchess complicates this definition. Ferdinand says to the Cardinal (2.5): “Read there—a sister damn'd; she's loose i' th' hilts; / Grown a notorious strumpet.” “Loose i' th' hilts” is unchaste or promiscuous—but the metaphor used to name such sexual promiscuity, “hilt,” alludes to the handle of a sword or dagger. That the Duchess is figured as having both this phallic sword and the characteristics of a “strumpet,” a term used to describe women, further complicates her sexual identity.

Ferdinand's behavior toward his sister is disturbing, not only because of his desire to use the Duchess as a marriage pawn in state affairs, but also for his ambiguous feelings for her. He wants to violate his sister by having her “darkest actions, nay, your privatest thoughts, / … come to light” (1.2.222-23). The double meaning of “private” as both secret and as the private parts or the genitals is certainly infused in Ferdinand's ominous prediction. His desire to delve into her sexual behavior reaches a fever pitch when he exposes “his father's poinard” to her (something that has been passed patrilineally from father to son, male to male politically and sexually) and notes, in the same piece of dialogue, that “women like that part which, like the lamprey, / Hath never a bone in ‘t” (1.2.242-43). Ferdinand's blatant interest in sex, while maybe indicative of the male libido, emphasizes this passion, precisely the characteristic that Renaissance scholars feared would make men effeminate.

This desire, then, in addition to being incestuous, figures him as an effeminized male, the same term used to describe homosexual men. Ferdinand's extreme interest in his sister's sexuality has less to do with political ambitions than with fear that he is losing (or already has lost) his own masculine identity. In other words, Ferdinand's fear is to be cuckolded. “The fear of losing control of women's chastity, a very valuable possession that guaranteed the legitimacy of one's heirs, and especially valuable for fathers as a piece of disposable property,” Orgel states, “is a logical consequence of a patriarchal structure.”³⁰

Ferdinand's role as Duke, therefore as a patriarch to the state, further accentuates his own insecurity about impotence and demonstrates his lack of control over his affections. That this impotence—politically, economically, and sexually—should occur at the hand of another man, is even more threatening to his masculine and virile identity. He is, of course, cuckolded by Antonio, both sexually and also economically, since Antonio robs him of the Duchess, the Duke's method of securing economic or political bounty. But the Duke also is threatened by the Duchess, who he feels is capable of castrating his power, or subsuming his power, by re-establishing the bloodline. Though perhaps paranoid, the Duke would certainly have perceived that the Duchess was capable of disrupting his authority: her political identity would necessarily have to be perceived by him and the Cardinal as genuinely masculine.

In a curious moment Ferdinand reacts to his sister's pregnancy with a strange comparison: “Methinks I see her laughing— / Excellent hyena!—talk to me somewhat quickly, / Or my imagination will carry me / To see her, in the shameful act of sin” (2.5.38-41). His reference to the hyena is as telling as the tortoise-Vittoria connection in The White Devil. According to lore, the laughing hyena was considered to be hermaphroditic, due to the particular appearance of the genitals. This idea, though originally discredited by Aristotle, appears in medieval bestiaries and in Renaissance works of natural history, such as Edward Topsell's popular History of Four-Footed Beasts (1607). Lois Bueler comments: “The sexual ambivalence, changeability, and parthenogenic capacity of the hyena presumably account for the two characteristics chiefly ascribed to the animal: its capacity for dissimulation and trickery, and its magical powers.”³¹

Ferdinand's connection between the pregnant Duchess, a seemingly magical condition since she is assumed unmarried, and a hyena, capable in myth of being both male and female, implies at least two conclusions: first, Ferdinand's imaginative, even fantastical account of his sister's pregnancy signals a further decline into effeminacy. MacLean writes that “imagination is thought to be stronger in the woman because cold and moist objects are subject to metamorphosis … [a form of which] is found in mental changeability … such as inventiveness.”³² Secondly, the Duchess seems to have impregnated herself (since her husband is publicly unknown), an act that would require both female and male sex organs. But Ferdinand's curiosity is surpassed by his fear. The Duchess's rather intangible political authority assumes the much more physical characteristics of masculinity, leaving little doubt that she has joined (or hyena-like, been magically transformed into) the ranks of maleness.

Furthermore, the rules of the game have changed. Earlier, Ferdinand and his male subjects could joke about sexual conquest because there was an objectified woman at the center of the verbal and physical contest. The same behavior in this scene with Ferdinand now is sheer paranoia due to the recognition that the objectified feminine in the traditional exchange has been replaced by a masculine-figured Duchess. The paranoia on the part of Ferdinand and the Cardinal is caused by the possibility of male homosexuality, and the fear that they have been cuckolded.

There is, however, another reading to this reformulation of the traditional male competition that leads to the same conclusion. If the formulation remains as two males sexually competing for the object of their affection, a woman; and if the object of their affection is masculinized, then the male desires a masculine object. This reading, of course, assumes that a masculine figure can be an object, and not as suggested above, only a subject. But the stress Ferdinand places on ocular proof when dealing with the Duchess upholds this schema of a male gaze directed toward another male figure. Maus concurs in a general reading of English dramatists who “differ from their contemporaries … in the extraordinary emphasis they place on the jealous husband's desire for a specifically visual corroboration of his suspicions.”³³ In other words, a male figure desires another male figure thus creating a homosexual attraction. Ferdinand's desire for the Duchess, then, is a homosexual desire, since the Duchess has been suggested to be both politically and physically male.

Throughout the play, the Duchess assumes this masculine role, whether it be purposefully seized because “I account this world a tedious theater, / For I do my part in ‘t ‘gainst my will” (2.1.82-83) or whether we believe her when she says “Why might not I marry? / I have not gone about in this to create / Any new world or custom” (3.2.107-08). Her intent is not nearly so important as the disruption she causes in the Court's order of male identity. Jankowski offers some insight on the severity of the Duchess's isolation: “The nature of Renaissance dynastic marriage seemed almost totally to objectify the woman. She became an object of commerce who—passed from father to husband—sealed a bargain of greater or lesser economic significance. As her body was seen as an object of trade to be owned by either father or husband, the products of her body her children were also seen as objects of commerce to be used to solidify further trade agreements between her [husband's] and other families.”³⁴ When the Duchess becomes a subjective authority, she then becomes just like the two masculine traders who have traditionally benefited from her commodification. As Greene succinctly states: “As [the Duchess] is tortured and killed she displays a heroism and nobility associated imagistically with the light of diamonds. Her magnificent assertions—‘For know, / Whether I am doomed to live, or die, / I can do both like a prince’ (3.2.70-71); and ‘I am the Duchess of Malfi still’ (4.2.142)—imply a masculine strength like Vittoria's and a conception of selfhood which is autonomous rather than relational.”³⁵

Her death, then, is inevitable, since she has defied the Renaissance ideal of the feminine and disrupted the patriarchal traffic of women by becoming both a subject and the object of the male gaze by appearing as the source of male homosexual anxiety. Ferdinand offers the Duchess a poinard to kill herself. Early in the play, after warning the Duchess not to marry, Ferdinand gives her advice: “You are my sister— / This was my father's poinard: do you see?” The repetition of “poinard” and the symbolic gesture of offering or transferring the patrilineal phallus to the Duchess completes her masculine sexuality. But Ferdinand's offer of the poinard further emasculates him. Though the “poinard” would be used to kill the threat of sexual disruption, the sacrifice of a male's own masculinity would be an act of self-castration. Furthermore, Ferdinand's offer of the phallus to the already-figured masculine Duchess suggests a hint of homosexuality. That the homosexual offer is inseparable from death—should the Duchess accept Ferdinand's “poinard” not only will she commit incest, but it will be same-sex sexuality—suggests an indictment of the forbidden act. There is no choice but for both Ferdinand and the Duchess to die since they have both transgressed the acceptable sexual order. Ferdinand suggests this discomfiting idea to the Cardinal as they plot the Duchess's death, yet both are made uncomfortable by a sense of guilt: “I could kill her now, / In you, or in myself, for I do think / It is some sin in us, heaven doth revenge / By her” (2.5.63-65).

At the conclusion of the play Delio thinks he is re-establishing order when he appoints the Duchess's young son to the throne after the bloodshed. Critics have noticed the ambiguity this leaves in place, an ambiguity further complicated by his astrologically-destined early death. Order is not restored because power transmission has been matriarchal. But there is a further complication. Perhaps the ending is to be the final sign in affirming the Duchess as masculine. That is, her offspring becomes the authority in a world where authority is derived patrilineally—so her authority assumes the guise of patriarchy.³⁶ Not only has the Duchess been the recipient of a thoroughly unnatural kind of lust—incest turned into homosexuality—she also retains her maleness until the end, passing her masculinely-figured body politic onto a son, just as a traditional and patriarchal lineage would occur. In her death, not only is she the twin of (a male) Ferdinand, but she releases all of her remaining womanhood: “I would fain put off my last woman's fault, / I'd not be tedious to you” (1.1.215).

The tragedy of The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi is that the social patrilineal order is disrupted, and masculine women and feminine men rule the courts. The complexities of gender and sexuality, objects and subjects of desire, and their necessary relationship with political authority, ravage The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. In The White Devil, male homosocial order is permitted to return after it has been transgressed. But the Amalfian court holds no such promise. Despite the deaths of the Duchess and Ferdinand, the responsibility to continue the government is given to her son, a physical embodiment of the alternative sexualities that ruled not only that play, but permeated Webster's previous stagecraft and the Jacobean era.

Notes

1. Stephen Orgel, “Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?” The South Atlantic Quarterly 88.1 (Winter, 1989): 18.

2. John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, The Norton Anthology of English Literature 1, 5th edition (New York: Norton, 1986) and The White Devil, ed. F. L. Lucas, The Complete Works of John Webster. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927). All further references to The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil will be cited parenthetically in the text.

3. Painter's Palace of Pleasure is generally recognized to be one of the sources for The Duchess of Malfi, along with the sensational French and Italian sources.

4. For a thorough discussion of the key writers and their arguments about the sovereignty of women during the sixteenth century, see Constance Jordan's “Woman's Rule in British Political Thought,” Renaissance Quarterly 40.3 (Autumn, 1987): 421-51, particularly 426ff.

5. Constance Jordan, “Representing Political Androgyny,” The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Couterbalancing the Canon eds. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky, (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1990) 157-58.

6. James's letters to Carr are particularly indicative of the feelings he had toward his favorites: written “from the infinite grief of a deeply wounded heart,” James urges Carr to seek his favors through “my mere love, and not … by fear … I told you twice or thrice that ye might lead me by the heart and not by the nose … God is my judge my love hath been infinite towards you; and the only strength of my affection towards you hath made me bear with these things in you and bridle my passions to the uttermost of my ability. Let me be met then with your entire heart, but softened with humility.” Letter 159 as found in G. P. V. Akrigg, Letters of James VI and I (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984).

7. William Drummond, The Poetical Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden. ed. L. E. Kastner, (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1913) 57.

8. Alan Bray, in Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: The Gay Men's Press, 1982), makes a further distinction that “sodomy is not so much a set of forbidden acts as the performance—by those who threatened social stability—heretics, spies, traitors, Catholics.” This list of “threats” may have particular resonance for the treatment of the Cardinal in The Duchess of Malfi. Webster's story of the Duchess of Amalfi's marriage remains true to the Italian setting, thereby introducing into English drama the “disturbance” or “threat” of Catholicism, much as Catholicism was a perceived threat to English society.

9. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers similar explanations in her enormously influential study of nineteenth-century British literature and the homosocial relationships that operate between men in those novels. She posits that social power is passed from man to man. Women function as necessary objects of exchange between men, but have no real power by themselves. The real bond, consequently, is between the two men who “trade” the woman as a commodity: “[M]ale-male love, like the love of the Greeks, is set firmly within a structure of institutionalized social relations that are carried out via women: marriage, name, family, loyalty to progenitors and to posterity.” Furthermore, the threat of homosexuality constantly exists in this male homosocial order because of the anxiety produced between male bonding and male desire. The result of this “double bind,” according to Sedgwick, is “first, the acute manipulability through the fear of one's own ‘homosexuality,’ … and second, a reservoir of potential for violence caused by the self-ignorance that this regime constitutively enforces.” For Sedgwick's formulations, see Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Cornell UP, 1985), particularly 35ff and “The Beast in the Closet,” Sex, Politics and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (The English Language Institute, 1987): 148-86, particularly 152.

10. Orgel 18.

11. Even before Vittoria is recognized as a disruption in the patriarchal order, Webster attempts to solidify the patriarchal transmission of authority, through the authorizing of his text. In the Prologue addressed to the reader, Webster humbles his own talents merely including his play in the company “of other mens worthy Labours, especially of that full and haightned stile of Maister Chapman: The labor'd and understanding workes of Maister Johnson: The no lesse worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Maister Beamont & Maister Fletcher: And lastly (without wrong last to named) the right happy and copious industry of M. Shake-speare, M. Decker, & M. Heywood, wishing that I may read by their light.” Tracing his lineage and his brotherhood to other great male writers, Webster authorizes himself and his play with a male-to-male bond of language, much the same way Spenser in The Faerie Queene called upon the English literary “father,” Chaucer, to bless the latest productive work of the patrilineage. Before the action of the play has even begun, Vittoria, the self-authorizing woman, is set in opposition to the pre-established, traditional order of society.

12. Gayle Greene, “Women on Trial in Shakespeare and Webster: ‘The Mettle of [their] Sex,’” Topics: A Journal of Liberal Arts 36 (1982): 15.

13. Katherine Maus, “Horns of a Dilemma: Jealousy, Gender, and Spectatorship in English Renaissance Drama,” ELH 54 (Fall, 1987): 561.

14. Sedgwick, Between Men 49.

15. Sedgwick further explains (in Between Men) that the bond of cuckoldry differs from at least some social conformations of homosexuality because it is necessarily hierarchical in structure, with an “active” participant who is clearly in ascendancy over the “passive” one. What I would like to glean from Sedgwick's argument is the necessarily sexual aspect of cuckoldry, and the direction of that sexual activity from man to man. This is, I think, where The White Devil serves as a prototype of homosexual relationships between men, acknowledging a year earlier that which is to be fully expressed in The Duchess of Malfi.

16. Laura Bromley, “The Rhetoric of Feminine Identity in The White Devil,” eds. Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama. (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow, 1991) 51.

17. Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620. (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1984) 259.

18. D. C. Gunby, Webster: The White Devil (London: Edward Arnold, 1971) 14.

19. Constance Jordan notes that “the difference and relation between sex and gender had already been represented allusively in the philosophical literature of antiquity and in Renaissance epic (Sidney's Arcadia, specifically). The virile woman tended to reaffirm patriarchal values and it was not until the feminists began to consider the values of feminine qualities in a positive light that the worth of woman was introduced.” See Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1990) particularly 134-247.

20. John Mulryan, “The Tortoise and the Lady in Vincenzo Cartari's Imagini and John Webster's The White Devil,” Notes and Queries 38.1 (March, 1991): 78-9.

21. Bromley 68.

22. Vittoria masterfully assumes the self-authorizing act of language, particularly in her trial. Greene writes: “In an age when women were counseled against learning rhetoric by educators as sympathetic as Bruni and Vives (rhetoric was a means of power in the public sphere,) Vittoria triumphs over her judges … by her command of language” (36).

23. Gunner Boklund, The Duchess of Malfi: Sources, Themes, Characters Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962) 78.

24. Theodora A. Jankowski, “Defining/Confining the Duchess: Negotiating the Female Body in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi,” Studies in Philology 87.2 (Spring, 1990): 222.

25. Constance Jordan, “Women's Rule in British Political Thought,” Renaissance Quarterly XL.3 (Autumn, 1987): 428.

26. The Cardinal is an intriguing character sexually. By virtue of his costume, the Cardinal (like all men in a similar position) remains in the asexual child-like realm of “unbreeched.” Up until the age of about seven, boys and girls were dressed in the same type of clothes, long gowns. The “unbreeching” of boys was a significant milestone in their lives and commanded a festive ceremony. Girls, of course, did not have such a ceremony and remained be-gowned. The Cardinals' clothing, and its similarity with women's dress, then is another indication of his ambiguous sexuality.

27. It is significant that Ferdinand and Antonio play the verbal game. The woman who functions as the object of the masculine jest (who provides the “ring”) is the same woman who functions as the object in their lives—the Duchess. This competition also further accentuates Ferdinand's sexual desire for her sister.

28. Christy Desmet, “Neither Maid, Widow, nor Wife: Rhetoric of the Woman Controversy in Measure for Measure and The Duchess of Malfi.” eds. Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker, In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama (Metuchan, New Jersey: Scarecrow, 1991) 85-6 (italics added).

29. Greene 36.

30. Orgel 18.

31. Lois E. Bueler, “Webster's Excellent Hyena,” Philological Quarterly 59.1 (Winter, 1980): 108.

32. Ian MacLean, The Renaissance Notion of Women (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980) 42.

33. Maus 546.

34. Jankowski 228.

35. Greene 17.

36. Coincidentally, the establishment of the Duchess's son on the bloody throne is strangely similar to James's own accession to the English throne, through his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, when no direct heirs existed.