SOURCE: Bradbrook, M. C. “The Duchess of Malfi.” In John Webster, Citizen and Dramatist, pp. 142-65. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.

[In the following essay, Bradbrook focuses on the contemporary context of The Duchess of Malfi to interpret the drama, including the original Jacobean production and the source story for the play. She also compares the style and structure of the play to a masque in order to illuminate the drama as it would have been perceived by its original audience.]

In the one predominant perturbation; in the other overruling wisdom; in one the body's fervour and fashion of outward fortitude to all height of heroic action; in the other, the mind's inward constant and unconquered empire, unbroken, unalter'd with any most insolent and tyrannous affliction.¹

[George Chapman, letter dedicatory to his translation of Homer's Odyssey, 1614]

Chapman's comparison of the Iliad and the Odyssey would serve for Webster's two great tragedies; though each might be subtitled ‘A Woman at Bay’, Vittoria's ‘heroic action’ serves her worldly ambition, whilst the courage of the Aragonian princess gives her fortitude to endure the consequences of her bid for feminine happiness and fulfilment.

The similarities in structure (Duke and Cardinal combining in punitive alliance) should not disguise the differences. Since they have been revived, the superiority of The Duchess of Malfi has ensured half-a-dozen revivals for every one of The White Devil. The play was probably acted in the winter of 1613-14, and certainly before 12 December 1614, for on that day William Osler (who first played Antonio) died. In Webster's own day the play was from the first regarded as his masterpiece and seems to have enjoyed a continuous stage success. It was one of the opening plays for the Cockpit in Court in 1635, a command performance for royalty.

The crowds who thronged to Blackfriars, where the play was put on by the King's Men, were recalled nearly twenty years later by the son of old John Heminges, leader of that group. In a macabre mock-elegy for the amputation of a duelling finger, he sets a procession of poets escorting it to the banks of the Styx:

It had been drawn and we in state approach,
But Webster's brother would not lend a coach,
He swore that all were hired to convey
The Malfi duchess sadly on her way.(2)

Webster, if only temporarily, had transferred himself from the company of his old acting friends, to regain the kind of conditions in which he could succeed. The Blackfriars (opened only three or four years earlier) led as the first indoor theatre for an adult company—one which had held together for nearly twenty years, and which cultivated a long tradition in revenge plays. Burbage, creator of Hamlet, was in the cast. Webster made full use of the intimate setting of this hall for another family tragedy—indeed one family more significantly than before, including the Household.

Throngs of coaches crowding to Blackfriars were a common cause of complaint. Visiting dignitaries, even royalty, had been seen there. What could have brought Webster to the attention of the King's Men? Possibly the printed edition of The White Devil, with its generous tribute to the actors and its lament for conditions at the Red Bull. Possibly the disappearance of some of their playwrights—the retirement of Shakespeare and Beaumont.

When Webster published the tragedy, the names of all the actors (with their parts) were prefixed—the first example of such a tribute.³ John Lowin, as Bosola, was recognized as the leading actor; Burbage played Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria, and was later succeeded by Taylor; Henry Condell played the Cardinal of Aragon and Richard Sharpe the Duchess; Nicholas Tooley, Burbage's apprentice, doubled some minor parts.

This team included both high and low in their audiences. They were used to playing at Court, but they also kept their old theatre on Bankside, the Globe, and evidently transferred Webster's play there, although some scenes needed darkness and silence. The prison scenes do not demand a small cell, but occupy the whole stage, which implies the Blackfriars.

Webster's dedication offered this play to a grandson of Lord Hundson, who had been the patron of the troupe in Queen Elizabeth's time. Other playwrights gave him commendatory verses; Middleton, Rowley (leader of Prince Charles's Men and a future collaborator), together with young John Ford, from the Middle Temple, united to affirm that the work sealed Webster's immortality, Ford comparing him with the best poets of Greece or Rome. Middleton described the audience as being overcome by pity; pity is indeed a key word towards the end of the play, but almost always used ironically: ‘Thy pity is nothing of kin to thee’ (IV. i. 135).

The story is much simpler and bolder in relief than that of Vittoria. The historic basis was at once more distant and more tenuous; Webster took it from Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1567), a context that did not enforce any historic stringency. This narrative source is of minimal significance in itself. The litanies of a protracted rite of royal death are built on great public occasions and draw on many literary forms, especially the two contradictory ones of funeral elegy and wedding masque. (The latter is now extinct.)

Webster developed the inverted religious ritual of the death of Brachiano and added to it complex recall not only of many books and of other literary forms, but of events from life—such great events as the funeral of Prince Henry and the marriage rites of Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine in 1613, such local events as overseeing Robert Dove's charity for the condemned at Newgate. To this he joined an attention to his individual actors, and to the effects which could be achieved in his theatre, which is closer than any other dramatist, except Shakespeare, was prepared to go. He knew what could be asked of a boy who had played Hermione or Queen Katherine. Webster made his theatre into an instrument to play on, but he too had vibrated to performance before fashioning it. His use of plays that were still unpublished (Macbeth, Othello or Antony and Cleopatra) proves his attentiveness. Consequently, he shares with Shakespeare an openness to reinterpretation. This paradoxical result, rising from richness and complexity, allows a great variety of valid interpretation and emphasis. It is the reward of a performer's art. With Shakespeare, Webster attracts new relevances from the experience and cultural concern of modern audiences. For example, the modern view that the Duke of Calabria was incestuously fixated upon his twin sister can satisfactorily compensate for inaccessible Jacobean theological or social moods, just as, in a living organism, one part may take over the function of another. This adjustment is the mark of classic work, always renewable by transformation. Today, unless they have personally faced some extremity of horror and collective wickedness, very few believe in supernatural evil, or personal devils.

In this chapter therefore, first the social, then the psychological, and lastly the contemporary theatrical background are explored to re-establish the missing context—this, not to replace modern reading, but to enrich it.

The Duchess of Malfi is distinguished from The White Devil, which was firmly grounded in recent history, and the distinction produces a different conception of the play—one which was also influenced by the very different playing conditions at Blackfriars.

The story had survived only because it had been recounted by a contemporary, Matheo Bandello, who told it as Antonio's tragedy; this Italian bishop may have been the Delio of the play, as he seems to have known Antonio personally. Tragic ‘shaping’, carried through the French to Painter, had made it legendary in the course of one hundred years, the interval between the murder of Antonio Bologna at Milan in October 1513 and Webster's play. The secret marriage between the young widowed Duchess and the steward of her household, their five years' happiness, their flight, and the vengeance of her brothers were told through long speeches, laments and songs from the two lovers. Painter displayed what historical records fail to supply: the Duchess's imprisonment and death by strangling, together with her faithful maid and two children; he briefly ended with the record of Antonio's assassination later on the orders of the Cardinal.⁴

Into such a legend Webster was free to insert contemporary colour. The Spanish rulers of the Kingdom of Naples could be interpreted in the light of contemporary Spanish honour and Spanish pride. (Indeed, a few years later Lope de Vega was himself to write a play on the story of the Duchess.) There was freedom also to shape it in terms of the noblest theatrical form, the masque, though in an unusual and paradoxical way, turning the form and the occasion upside down. The old tale and the modern instance, eternity and time, were combined in Webster, and still without any dogmatic fixations. His negative capability, or ‘power of being in doubts, mysteries, fears without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’, was strengthened by contrasts of darkness and light, diamond and mist, so that his perspectives in this piece are larger, and yet his style is softened. The sharp contrasts of the central scene in The White Devil have become the nightmares of the Duchess's prison in Act IV. The total effect is still paradoxical—the epigrams of Bosola and the Duchess giving rise to numinous shudders, the abrupt breaks in speech to the stealthy encroachment of menacing forces, stage figures to the implications they carry. In place of the Ambassadors who represent the political aspect of Vittoria's challenge, perspectives of hell open in the Duchess's prison; since the time of Charles Lamb these scenes have been recognized as being ‘not of this world’. Madness was itself thought of as diabolic possession, and the ‘comic’ masque of madmen prefigures the later madness of Ferdinand.

There is no single ‘source’. Bandello's narrative records his extreme shock, which he dealt with by blaming everybody—Antonio for his presumption, the Duchess for her lust, the brothers for their cruelty; his position is self-contradictory. For Webster's generation, the end of Penelope Rich and Charles Blount's love affair, or the story of Antonio Pérez and the Princess of Eboli, offered possible endorsement. The modern reader is at least better equipped by this analogue from Webster's day, to gain insight into the price for private security amid Court splendour, and also into the psychology of the spy. For Webster's chief method of shaping the story was to create the single character of Bosola out of the Duchess's household servants, her prison tormentors, and the named assassin of Antonio in Milan, a Lombard captain. Bosola's insecurity, his bitter jesting and self-mockery, his constant, unremitting demands for ‘reward’, which is always denied him, and finally his love of disguises as a mode of psychological relief can all be found in Pérez. Better than any other writer of his time, Webster has realized the dark side of political power, the cruel grip of intelligence networks, the shocks of betrayal. In production, Bosola often dominates the play, so that the lives of the Aragonian princelings serve but as background to his self-destruction. This spy, who repents and institutes a counter-vengeance for the murder which he himself had executed on command, reaffirms the tragic fate of the servant. The great lady who ends her days in darkness, close prisoner in her own palace, shares the pride of Penelope Rich and Ana de Mendoza, Princess of Eboli.

Every Jacobean would know that madness was hereditary in the royal blood, which it was the Duchess's crime to have contaminated by a base marriage; they would also know the story of Philip II's heir, Don Carlos, strangled in prison.

The last element of public feeling which Webster incorporated into his play may not have been recognized by his contemporaries. His own mourning for England's heir, Henry, Prince of Wales, who had died in November 1612, had been set down within a few weeks in A Monumental Column, his elegy. Here many of the images, later closely united in The Duchess of Malfi, lie about as disjecta membra. It is not in itself a memorable achievement, but points to one of the sources of the tragedy; this widespread national grief provided some powerful emotional drives which went into the tragedy and were transformed.

It is possible to sustain a reading of the play in terms of contemporary views of social duty or social structure; it is also perfectly possible to read it as a character study of the four leading figures, with religious overtones, or as a subtle variation upon the perspectives of the masque. The story is ‘open’ not so much to the moral alternatives which are powerful in The White Devil as to differences of genre, of interpretative approach, or of emphasis, of light and shade. It has proved attractive in this way to modern poets, who have adapted it in a thoroughly Websterian fashion.

In accordance with the practice of the private theatre, Webster divides the play into five acts, centring on the Court, the bedchamber, the world, the prison and the grave. But these locations are not closely defined. In the prison scene, the waxwork show of mortification, the masque of madmen and the ritual of execution are in themselves theatrical; they belong with the hell-castle of Macbeth, with its porter and its alarm bell, with the shows in the witches' cave. These in turn reflect the ‘great doom's image’ of medieval drama—Heaven and Hell. The King's Men at this time were increasing this element in their productions—with new effects in Macbeth, and with Shakespeare's final plays. Their own experience of the Court masque (where they had enacted the witches for the antimasque of The Masque of Queens) must have affected their general style.⁵ It was a secular ritual, using religious terms, but without ever introducing religious material.

The legendary, the contemporary, the dramatically ritualistic are laminated, and this inlay increases the dramatic life of the work. What now has to be substituted for Webster's contemporary lamination is something of our own day: both T. S. Eliot and Allen Tate, in their lyrics, added this perspective to the original poetry. Eliot chooses the bedchamber scene, where the Duchess is surprised, partly through Antonio's jest of leaving her, and sees in her mirror not the face of her husband but that of her brother, holding out a poniard. This is adapted so that the two figures become two aspects of one man, who both loves and hates at once. The effect is not pity but terror:

‘You have cause to love me, I did enter you in my heart
Before ever you vouchsafed to call for the keys’
With her back turned, her arms were bare,
Fixed for a question, her hands behind her hair
And the firelight shining where the muscle drew. …
There I suppose they found her
As she turned
To interrogate the silence fixed behind her.(6)

Allen Tate contrasts the tale of the Duchess with the sterility of a modern reading:

The stage is about to be swept bare of corpses.
You have no more chance than an infusorian
Lodged in a hollow molar of an eohippus. …
Now consideration of the void coming after,
Not changed by the ‘strict gesture’ of your death,
Splits the straight line of pessimism
Into two infinities. …
And the katharsis fades in the warm water of a yawn.(7)

If the cynicism of Bosola and Flamineo is to jest about moral values they cannot afford, Tate's persona in this poem fits into the play well enough. Its own comedy starts in the opening scene at Court; then, in Act II, Bosola uses the tone of the Malcontent in his mockery of women's painting; Ferdinand's actions begin with the manic grandeur of forbidding his courtiers to laugh except when he laughs. Later, as he silently confers with his brother, and someone comments, ‘The Lord Ferdinand laughs’, it seems

                                        like a deadly cannon
That lightens ere it smokes.

[III. iii. 54-5]

The Duchess's mirth consists of simple, rather childish bawdy jokes with her maid and her husband, but Ferdinand's entry transfers it into the bitter wit with which she enacts her play of banishing Antonio. She neither employs nor suspects any espionage; her wit serves chiefly to control her own pain and resentment and acts upon herself (as Bosola's also acts upon himself).

Historically, the removal of Antonio Bologna and his Duchess from this world was neatly and expertly carried out; there was no scandal and little comment. It was a family affair; the Duchess simply vanished and was never seen again, her secret marriage matched by her secret death. In this play, uniquely among Webster's works, there is no trial; tyranny is condemned by Ferdinand's self-accusation:

By what authority didst thou execute
This bloody sentence?
BOSOLA:
By yours—
FERDINAND:
                                        Mine? Was I her judge?
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 judgment registered
Unless in hell … ?

[IV. ii. 298-304]

The only form of sentence we have witnessed was that of her banishment from Ancona, carried out in dumb show, at the shrine of Our Lady of Loretto. This was evidently staged in great splendour, for an Italian visitor to London commented upon it in 1618. During the ceremony the Cardinal violently took her wedding-ring from the Duchess's finger, which constituted an ecclesiastical act of nullity of the contract; punishment by the secular arm (banishment) followed this ecclesiastical judgment. From the comments of the two onlookers one learns also that the Pope has seized the duchy (‘But by what justice?’ ‘Sure, I think by none / Only her brother's instigation’).

In the case of Antonio Pérez and the Princess of Eboli the arbitrary nature of Spanish judicial procedure, with the unscrupulous use of ecclesiastical charges in default of secular evidence, was the whole point of the Relaciones being published in England. It showed to the English (including the English Catholics) the superiority of English justice. There is no form of justice in the family acts of vengeance against the Duchess, who repeatedly calls it tyranny.

If the drama were viewed simply as a family history, as it might have been by one of Webster's young friends from the Inns of Court, it would have been considered that the Aragonian brethren were lacking in a proper sense of duty in counselling the young Duchess to live unmarried, and then going off and leaving her. It was their duty to look round the world at large, find a suitable husband and present him to her. The absolute authority of the head of the family over all members was not disputed, and the natural subjection of sister to brother appears in a number of English plays.⁸ But imposing on the Duchess the heroic rôle of Virtuous Widow—a rôle which the individual could certainly choose, which was seemly for older women, which could confer extraordinary power on a Catherine de Medici—was tyrannical. Later, indeed, Ferdinand pretends he is planning a marriage with Malateste, and the Cardinal also claims to have a plan for her remarriage. Antonio, as her faithful servant, counsels marriage to her before she makes her declaration of love to him. (In all stage comedy, the remarriage of widows is a central assumption.)

Yet, whatever the value of ‘a contract in a chamber’, the Duchess, by failing to publish her marriage, destroys her own good fame. Antonio is aware that ‘the common rabble do directly say she is a strumpet’. To her brother she claims that ‘my reputation is safe’, but he declares that once it is lost it is irrecoverable (III. ii. 116-35). He explains, as if to a child, that love is found only among shepherds or dowerless orphans. Marriage as a social contract, an affair of the larger family, means that if Antonio was her husband he was not her ‘lord and husband’; he jests at himself as a lord of Misrule, reigning only at night. He simply does not belong with the great ones; his rôle in the marriage is passive, indeed feminine; the Duchess, acting as the masculine half in the partnership, proposes the contract, directs their action, plans their flight, faces her brothers. At the end, Antonio hopes only to ask pardon of his new kinsmen. As a member of the Household, he should have respected its degrees; since he is an upper servant, his life is held as cheap as Bosola's by the brothers.

Imprisonment was the usual penalty for clandestine marriages between a great lady and a servant. The most eminent example is John Donne, secretary to the Lord Keeper, who, after he had married the Keeper's niece, Anne More, in December 1601, was two months later committed to the Fleet Prison for conspiracy to violate the civil and common law. The cleric who performed the ceremony was also jailed, as was even the man who had ‘given’ the bride—a gift he was certainly in no position to bestow. Years of poverty followed. The case of Lady Arbella Stuart is more frequently mentioned in the context of this play; in that instance it was her nearness to the throne which caused her imprisonment.

One of the works that Webster was certainly reading at this time, for there are many ‘bondings’ in this play, was Montaigne's essay ‘Upon some Verses of Virgil’ (Book 3, Chapter 5), which treats of love and marriage. Montaigne assumes, without requiring any examination, the double standard by which men would face almost any crime in their family rather than the infidelity of their wives. The particular passion of the Italians, love (‘Luxury is like a wild beast, first made fierce with tying and then let loose’), is stronger in women than in men. Marriage is another thing: ‘Wedlock hath for his share honour, justice, profit and constancy; a plain but more general delight, Love melts in only pleasure; and truly it hath it more ticklish; more lively, more quaint and more sharp … a pleasure inflamed by difficulty; there must be a kind of tingling, stinging and smarting. It is no longer love, be it once without arrows and without fire.’ Webster laminates Montaigne's cool and occasionally alarming survey of the relation between the sexes with the glowing ardour of Sidney's Arcadia: the perfection of its two heroines in prison, their sufferings for love. In Sidney he found the device of the wax figures used as torture for his Duchess. Florio's translation of Montaigne had been dedicated to, among others, Penelope Rich; the collision between Sidney's burnished examples of Virtue and the sardonic enigmas of Montaigne must have been strengthened by bitter contrasts in the life of a woman who linked these two works.

Penelope's last battle was for the right to call herself Countess of Devonshire; the Duchess of Malfi is never given a personal name. She is always addressed by her title. Her private person is suppressed in her public rôle; we never meet Giovanna d'Aragona. Yet it is the struggle between these two elements which her maid laments in the concluding words of Act I:

Whether the spirit of greatness or of woman
Reign most in her, I know not, but it shows
A fearful madness; I owe her much of pity.

[I. i. 504-6]

Webster was later to use another antithesis, in comparing ‘The Character of a Virtuous Widow’—who never remarried—with ‘An Ordinary Widow’, who remarried again and again: noble and comic, sacred and risible. In this play however he showed the one character in two different rôles, overt and covert. Her public rôle as Duchess gives her no power within the family; she makes her domestic choice with a sense that she is acting like soldiers who

                                                            in some great battles
By apprehending danger have achieved
Almost impossible actions.

[I. i. 344-6]

And to Antonio she suggests that ‘love mixed with fear is sweetest’ (III. ii. 66).

The Duchess of Malfi's life was cleft in two by her secret marriage; her integrity was restored ultimately by the price she was prepared to pay for it. She changes and grows, as few other characters do; and ultimately the language she uses is that of religious experience—there is nothing doctrinal about it. For she is denied the consolation of the Church (which Spaniards were always most punctilious in allowing to the victim); she has to improvise her own ceremonies. The Cardinal and Ferdinand use the ceremonies of Church and State to release their own perversions.

Tragic awakening begins for the Duchess with a pathetic variation on her brother's warning that happiness dwells only with unambitious shepherds or dowerless orphans:

                    The birds that live i' the' field
On the wild benefit of nature, live
Happier than we; for they may choose their mates
And carol their sweet pleasures to the spring.

[III. v. 18-21]

This is pastoral happiness that Webster drew elsewhere in his ‘Character of a fair and happy Milkmaid’.

At parting with Antonio, she hopes that they will not part thus ‘i' th' Eternal Church’ and sees the heavy hand of Heaven in her affliction:

I have seen my little boy oft scourge his top
And compared myself to 't; nought made me e'er
Go right but Heaven's scourge-stick.

[III. v. 81-3]

This is not a sustained attitude, for human pride and even religious cursing at other points contradict it. Her ‘diamond’ quality combats with her fragility: she is no stoic; conflicting passions succeed her initial stunned, somnambulistic calm.

The Hell, or Purgatory, which the Duchess undergoes in prison is defined by its remoteness or detachment. Her first words after Antonio has left her are ‘My laurel is all withered’ (III. v. 93).⁹ The laurel which protected the Roman Emperors from thunder was also their emblem of good fame. In being removed to her own palace, she enters a realm darker and grander to which she provides her own choric comment:

                                                            I have heard
That Charon's boat serves to convey all o'er
The dismal lake but brings none back again.

[III. v. 107-9]

These Roman comments transcend her own rôle; they give a godlike view.

The silence of the prison scenes is preceded by Bosola's account of her own deep and silent grief. The scene may well be her own bedchamber, where she jested with Antonio, the arms of the Duchy of Malfi still blazoned on the tester. The ‘shows’ of Antonio and the children, following the ‘love token’ of the dead man's hand, bring her to feel that living itself is hell. She invites the ritual punishment for an ill-matched marriage:

If they would bind me to that lifeless trunk
And let me freeze to death.

[IV. i. 68-9]¹⁰

A deep sense of unreality has come upon her; a world ‘not just confused but unfathomable’ is created by superimposing two images in a new ‘art’; the magic ring and the dead man's hand are ‘witchcraft’; the ‘show’ is the preparatory stage of her tombmaking. Bosola tries to convert this to penance, rites for the dying. The madmen with their mocking jests (as if from some great court antimasque),¹¹ ‘Woe to the caroche that brought home my wife from the masque at three o'clock in the morning; it had a large feather bed in it’ (IV. ii. 104-6), go on to babble of the Last Judgment. Their comments on sex and violence serve both as prelude to the ‘masque’ of the Duchess's execution and also as a foretaste of the supernatural evil to be let loose at the end, when Ferdinand thinks he is transformed to a wolf and when, in storm, ‘the Devil rocks his own child’. For a tempest marks the final holocaust.

With the inverted three actions of a true masque—the entry of the executioners, their invitation to the Duchess to join them, and their presentation of the gifts that bring ‘Last benefit, last sorrow’—the Duchess finds that the coffin has indeed replaced the nuptial bed; she has ‘welcomed’ ruin before, but her new perception goes deeper:

I perceive death, now I am well awake,
Best gift is, they can give or I can take.

[IV. ii. 224-5]

Bosola has stripped her title; if she declared, ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’—perhaps glancing at the scutcheon above her bed, or pointing to it—the audience might remember that the arms of those condemned to die are taken down. When this happened to Mary, Queen of Scots, she replaced her royal arms by a crucifix. Bosola's last disguise also brings him out of history into Webster's world, the parish charity for the poor prisoners of Newgate:

                                                                                          I am the common bellman
That usually is sent to condemned persons
The night before they suffer.

[IV. ii. 173-4]

The ritual has brought her too out of the dream country of the Revels; it is as Giovanna Bologna that she gives instructions for the care of her children and sends a last message to her brothers—‘Go, tell my brothers, when I am laid out, / They then may feed in quiet’ (IV. ii. 236-7)—as she kneels to ‘enter heaven’. There is almost a suggestion of cannibalism latent in the image, which catches up an earlier one.¹² When the gruesome comedy of the waiting-maid's death is ended, Bosola sees where he is—‘a perspective that shows us hell’—and he names the deed as ‘murder’.

‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’ had asserted the ‘Mind's empire’ against Ferdinand's ‘tyrannous affliction’; Bosola replies, ‘That makes thy sleep so broken.’ Had she said, ‘I am Giovanna Bologna still,’ she would have more truthfully disclosed the way in which her marriage had severed her public rôle from her private person. She had ‘awakened’ Antonio with the words ‘[I] only do appear to you a young widow / That claims you for her husband’ (I. i. 456-7) and ‘put off all vain ceremony’—though later she had improvised one.

For those who would see the Duchess as love's martyr, the moment of her death is crucial. Critical judgment has placed her at every point on the scale that separates Fair Rosamond or Jane Shore from the Virgin Martyr (a play on St Dorothea had just been acted at the Red Bull). The Duchess's death converts Bosola, the expected miracle. The sight of her face also ‘awakens’ Ferdinand to what he has done: ‘Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young’ (IV. ii. 264). In the darkness of the prison this suggests a halo of glory; sex, violence and religion are fused in nine short words.

Antonio's first portrait of her to his friend had enskied and sainted her; yet when she finally appears to him ‘a face folded in sorrow’ in the graveyard, she seems only a mournful, hovering ghost, still the wife of Antonio, still earthbound.

Giovanna Bologna is buried obscurely in the ruins of an ancient monastery; it is as ‘my wife’ that Antonio recognizes the voice of the Echo. The scene is highly ritualized (perhaps, as in the echo scenes in Monteverdi, Echo was sung), but this truly obscure being has been heard once before—crying out in the pains of childbirth. The unknown self within the Duchess should perhaps be heard as another voice, lacking security, a voice as homeless as the birds that once she envied for their freedom. This voice offers no comfort. He will ‘never see her more’.

Theological security, ‘which some call the suburbs of hell’, had betrayed the Duchess. It is ‘mortal's chiefest enemy’. The conviction that the future is assured, springing from the self, its good deeds or its good intentions, is the vice of the Pharisee, but also rises from that combination of Pride with Generosity that defeats Prudence. Security means an unexamined assumption of safety, privilege and stability; it makes denial or responsibility easy, being basically both self-centred and inattentive.

Antonio knows that faithful counsellors should warn the Prince of ‘what he ought to foresee’ (I. i. 22), but when the Duchess gives him her wedding-ring, ‘to help your eyesight’, he sees ‘a saucy and ambitious devil dancing within the circle’, which the Duchess removes by putting the ring on his finger. She senses his ‘trembling’. They embrace. Her words are stately or fantastic, but her blushes grow deeper, she asks him to lead her to the bride-bed. For a foil to the Duchess, Webster invented Julia, the Cardinal's mistress, who takes a man if she feels the impulse. In a parody of the Duchess's wooing she seizes Bosola by entering with a pair of pistols and asking him what love potion he has put in her drink. Her end is another macabre jest; the Cardinal poisons her by giving her his Bible to kiss.

Had the Duchess been wanton, she would have tried her arts upon her jailers; and, indeed, the nature of Bosola's devotion is very like love when, after he thinks she is killed, he finds her still living:

                                                  She's warm, she breathes.
Upon thy pale lips I will melt my heart
To store them with fresh colour.

[IV. ii. 341-3]

Antonio and Bosola stand almost at the same distance from Aragonian royalty; Ferdinand had thought of using Antonio as his spy, and to him there could not be very much to distinguish between the head of the household servants and ‘some strong-thighed barge-man’ or one of the porters who carried coals up to the Duchess's lodging. From his ducal height, he twice snubs Bosola for attempting to find any explanation of the spying he is set to do, offers his sister his hand to kiss, and even, in madness, deals ruthlessly with the familiarity of the doctor. The Cardinal, whom Antonio at the opening painted as a religious hypocrite, prepares to eliminate Bosola because he will not risk blackmail from one who knows him as a ‘fellow murderer’. The hollowness of the Cardinal's priestly rôle is the latest revelation of the play. In the last scene the Cardinal and the Duke are both in prison; the Cardinal has made his own prison for himself, by locking the doors and ordering his Court not to pay any attention to cries for help. The ‘accidental judgments, casual slaughters’ that finally leave the stage corpse-strewn are in violent contrast to the ritual of the Duchess's ‘last presence chamber’, but they are taking place in a prison, and perhaps some lighting or ‘blocking’, or the Cardinal's scutcheon, might relate the two scenes.

The Cardinal knows already that he is in Hell; looking in his fish-ponds for his own image, he has seen ‘a thing arm'd with a rake’ that seems to strike at him. (It is an echo of the scene where the Duchess sees the face of Ferdinand instead of Antonio's.) The garment of those condemned by the Inquisition was painted all over with devils, to show their state within; so the devil that threatens, as it seems from outside, is really already in possession, and pulling him down. This devil takes away the Cardinal's power to pray; he is in a theological state of despair.

The Cardinal ‘ends in a little point, a kind of nothing’. Bosola sees his killing as an act of justice, and, in his last words, the Cardinal echoes his sister in appealing to her executioner (now his) for ‘Mercy’. Yet he acknowledges the sentence:

                                                                      O Justice!
I suffer now for what hath former bin—
Sorrow is held the eldest child of sin.

[V. v. 53-5]

In a mockery of L'uomo universale, the Renaissance man, he has played many rôles—shed his Cardinal's robes for the sword and armour of the soldier; endured with some boredom the attentions of a mistress for fashion's sake. His cool manipulation of finance—it is the Pope who gets the dukedom of Malfi, not Ferdinand—ruins the Duchess and the experienced Antonio.

Ferdinand has but one overt rôle—the secular head of the family, the soldier—and he plays it with gusto, ostentatiously. His moments of silence, of playing ‘the politic dormouse’, and his outbursts of manic rage, build up to the madness that is demonic and fatal. Burbage, who had created the rôles of Hamlet and Lear, was playing this part.

For a Jacobean, the madness of the Spanish royal house and the Spanish code of honour would have sufficed to explain all this; to a modern audience, the idea that Ferdinand's driving impulse is an incestuous fixation on his twin sister opens up a meaning more readily available today. It explains the ceremonial forms his persecution takes; ritual is an effective way of disguising and controlling repressed desires. He sees himself as a physician administering purges, even whilst he also sees the Duchess's behaviour as Heaven's punishment for some sin in himself or his brother—a punishment through their common flesh:

                                                                      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.

[II. v. 63-6]

(The pious Marcello had the same idea; see page 129.) The Cardinal replies, ‘Are you stark mad?’ His attempts at control in the scene where he meets her, coupled with his utter refusal to listen to what she has to say, or to see Antonio, are part of the protective design by which Ferdinand seals off the interior chaos that eventually engulfs him.¹³ The ritual execution of the Duchess restores him to a sense of what he has done to ‘my dearest friend’—before this last insight finally destroys his mental balance. Such an explanation of Ferdinand has been found so serviceable on the modern stage as now to be almost orthodox.

Incest was not a subject about which Jacobean dramatists felt any squeamishness. Tourneur brings it, as a threat, into The Atheist's Tragedy, and Webster allows the noble lover to subscribe to it in The Devil's Law Case. Acting as bawd to one's own kin might be considered ‘a kind of incest’, and, in basing a tragedy upon fraternal incest, Webster's young friend John Ford some dozen years later was to copy themes from this very play.¹⁴ The hero and heroine in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore join themselves together in a private ceremony which invokes the very tie that should prevent it:

Sister}                                                  On my knees
Brother                    even by our mother's dust, I charge you
Do not betray me to your mirth or hate;
Love me, or kill me                    {sister.
                                                                                          brother.

[I. ii. 249-55]

They are two innocents in a wicked world, and their union has the isolating effect of an addiction, like the homosexuality of Edward II in Marlowe's play. Society is uniformly disgusting, and these people have isolated themselves from it, each with one who appears the mirror of his or her self. The fraternal relation serves Ford, as it served Webster, in more than one play; its stable, immutable quality (which made one French heroine prefer her brother to her husband on the grounds that the second could be replaced, but not the first) is reflected even in the final scene, for, after entering with Annabella's heart upon his dagger, in a parody of the devotional worship of the Sacred Heart, Giovanni dies with a prayer that restores a chaste remoteness, as if he were looking into a mirror:

Where 'er I go, let me enjoy this grace,
Freely to view my Annabella's face.

vi. 107-8

‘Viewing’ undoes Ferdinand.

There is much in the strangling of the Duchess to recall the strangling of Desdemona, not least her momentary revival after she is supposed dead. But the remorse of Ferdinand is shared by Bosola; it is he who sees the great gulf between the ‘sacred innocence that sweetly sleeps on turtle's feathers’ and his inner hell. Ferdinand feels his life bound up with hers; they were twins. Those who are interested to work out such matters for performance might imagine that the twins were united in enmity against their elder brother, the Cardinal; that the hidden animosity between the two men is shewn by the Cardinal's effortless use of Ferdinand as his pawn. He even usurps Ferdinand's part as a soldier, for there is nothing priestly about him except his vestments—themselves of course a sign of diabolic intrusion to the more Puritanically minded members of the English Church.

Ferdinand shares with Bosola, his spy, a capacity for pain; the pain hidden behind an outward façade is the thread of life that runs through scenes of external violence.¹⁵ Pain so great that it ‘makes us no pain to feel’ became in Ford ‘the silent griefs that cut the heart strings’; in Ferdinand it emerges in images—sometimes poignant, sometimes bizarre:

                                                  Thou are undone:
And thou hast ta'en that massy sheet of lead
That hid thy husband's bones and folded it
About my heart.

[III. ii. 111-14]

Or ‘The pain's nothing; pain many times is taken away with apprehension of greater, as the toothache with the sight of the barber that comes to pull it out’ (V. v. 59-61). His last words imply that he is one flesh with Giovanna—and one dust:

My sister O my sister! there's the cause on 't.
Whether we fall by ambition, blood or lust,
Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.

[V. v. 71-3]

Sensitive apprehension of pain lies behind his brutality, and sharpens it, but whilst the modern reading of his impulses as incestuous allows a valid presentation, it seems probable that in Webster's day the same effect upon the audience would have been reached by different means.

Bosola, created by fusing three historic figures in a single tragic rôle, is sometimes felt to be unconvincing, but on stage the part becomes capable of dominating the play. Bosola is a professional murderer, prepared to kill a servant to prevent him unbarring a door; he has served as a galley-slave for murders committed at the Cardinal's instigation. Yet he is also a ‘fantastical scholar’, slow in working, much concerned with curious learning. When he defends Antonio, as a faithful servant missing reward, and the Duchess unwarily discloses her marriage, he offers her the powerful tribute of the unbeneficed scholar's prayers. Her choice of virtue above greatness will bring her good fame from ‘neglected’ poets, who will presumably win their own immortality from her story.

Antonio, ‘this trophy of a man / Raised by that curious engine, your white hand’, will also be praised by poets when heralds have exhausted their easily bestowed nobility. Tributes to the Duchess from needy poets in England had in fact been provided by Robert Greene and George Whetstone (see Boklund, pp. 18-19).

But Bosola also counsels their flight should be disguised as a religious pilgrimage to Loreto (transport is his job). This proves the Duchess's undoing, for it is Papal territory. His praise is immediately followed by the sickening drop to his rôle as spy:

                                                            What rests but I reveal
All to my lord? O this base quality
Of intelligencer!

[III. ii. 326-8]

Bosola, the chief instrument in the Duchess's betrayal and subjection, also bears the strongest witness to her virtues. In prison he may hope, in some confused way, to save her soul if not her body from Ferdinand's damnable plan to ‘bring her to despair’; but there is a collusive relation between the two men that makes the servant in some way an emanation of his lord.

Ferdinand, in such utterance—or, again, when Bosola urges the need for her penance—‘Damn her! that body of hers / While that my blood ran pure in 't was more worth / Than that which thou wouldst comfort, call'd a soul’ (IV. i. 121-3)—and in the constant imagery of fire, blood and tempest that surrounds him, may be considered as diabolically possessed even before his madness takes over. This leaves Bosola also the prisoner of dark powers, tempted by devils in human form (as a ‘scholar’, he might have been once in holy orders).

Ferdinand has sworn in the bedchamber scene that he will never see the Duchess more. When Bosola meets her it is always in some form of disguise: ‘vizarded’ at her capture, dressed as an old man (the stage emblem for mortality), then a ‘tomb maker’, then playing ‘the common bellman’. Whether for their effect upon her, or for relief to himself, these disguises enable Bosola to act as a kind of priest, even whilst he conducts the execution. Yet at the end he is still asking for reward from Ferdinand; he expects to be paid the rate for the job—a pension. He is cheated by the two devils who have brought him so low.

Bosola is not the same kind of Protean shape-changer as Flamineo; his melancholy is not assumed, and his ‘antic dispositions’ have more than a touch of Hamlet about them; but he is a Hamlet who cannot unpack his heart with words. However, his death speech is firmly orchestrated (‘One can almost see the conductor's raised baton,’ ejaculates one critic). He begins on a low note, with the unwilling murder of ‘his other self’, his fellow-servant and the lover of the Duchess, Antonio:

Such a mistake as I have often seen
In a play.

[V. v. 95-6]

He recollects ‘the dead walls or vaulted graves’ where the Duchess's voice had echoed, but he hears none:

                                                  O this gloomy world!
In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness
Doth (womanish and fearful) mankind live.

[V. v. 100-102]

He rises to a brave sentiment, but falls away as he too feels ‘Charon's boat’ approach:

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

[V. v. 103-5]

Then, ‘staggering in distrust’, he ends on this faint litotes.

He can mock his own degradation wittily—‘I think I shall shortly grow the common bier for churchyards’ (V. ii. 311-12)—yet, with all his many rôles, Bosola is never permitted the luxury of being a self. He is the masquer, in both senses: he comes with ceremony to his captive Duchess; he leads those scenes that have been generally understood as parody or inversion of a Court masque. Additionally, the play, from beginning to end, depends upon varying or enlarging, contracting or inverting the forms of a masque.

The year 1613 had seen a great number of masques, in particular the three given for the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine on St Valentine's Day, 1613. Two of these masques contained antimasques of madmen.¹⁶ The Court masque, as developed by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, celebrated the splendours of the royal house by the epiphany or revelation of some great personage (usually the Queen), who carried the image of a divine or heroic being, supposed to be drawn down to inhabit a mortal frame. It was a rite of cosmic harmony, linking the government of the realm with the government of the spheres, or the marriage of some great persons with the unity of the cosmos. It was a secular sacrament. It was magic. The masquers ultimately came down from their stage to join the audience; the ‘revels’, or dances, which ensued, preceded sometimes by the offering of gifts, were the main function of the rites.

It had long ago been a feature of revenge tragedy to end with such a masque, only to have the masquers turn upon their hosts in a bloody act of vengeance. (A masque had historically been used in the reign of King Richard II to kidnap Thomas of Woodstock, who was then murdered.) The play-within-the-play at the end of The Spanish Tragedy, the masques in Marston's Antonio's Revenge and The Malcontent, the double masque in The Revenger's Tragedy would have been known to the King's Men as well as to Webster. Excitement, surprise, the dropping of disguise were features which belonged also to secret revenge.

Webster developed the old rite, which had its own security built in, into a new drama of insecurity and scepticism. Open alternatives are left by him unresolved. His rite is not one of harmony but of disharmony, not of brilliant light but of darkness. As the ghost of the old revenge play has become no more than the active image of a mourner's fancy, so the melancholy of a Prince Hamlet is domiciled not only in the Cardinal, ‘a melancholy churchman’, but in Rosencrantz's successor, Bosola the spy.

At Court, the fable, however slight, must be strongly symbolic; the music, dancing and splendid costumes offered a delicate blend of homage to the King, to the Ambassadors of other kings, to the Court, and to some divine Truth which was being ‘shadowed’ platonically by the action.

The Duchess of Malfi opens with tilting matches and her brother's warning the Duchess to give over her chargeable revels; he characterizes them (as they were often characterized in tragedy) as breeding-places for lust. Her little masquerade with Antonio follows immediately, when she leads through a discussion of accounts and testamentary deposition to the wooing.

Ferdinand's sudden appearance in his sister's bedchamber with his gift of a poniard is a masquerade of the deadliest kind; her own masquerade of dismissing Antonio follows, but he and she cannot resist playing upon their real situation with such quibbles as ‘H'as done that, alas, you would not think of’ and ‘You may see, gentlemen, what 'tis to serve a prince with body and soul’ (III. ii. 183-209).

There follows a dumb show of the Duke and Cardinal receiving the news, whilst Delio and Pescara interpret to the audience the sinister mime:

These are your true pangs of death,
The pangs of life, that struggle with great statesmen.

[III. iii. 56-7]

The second dumb show (of the Cardinal's assuming a soldier's habit, and the banishment of the Duchess and Antonio from Ancona) is conducted before a very rich shrine. It leads directly into the scene of the Duchess's capture, and the inverted rites of the prison scenes, whose masque-like character has already been shewn.

It has already been pointed out also that Webster's elegy for Henry, Prince of Wales, who died on the eve of his sister's wedding, provided material for The Duchess of Malfi (see page 3). Laments for the Prince were often bound up with wedding songs for the Princess. This is powerfully reflected in the elegy by a little fable of how Sorrow is masked in the robe of Pleasure. This fancy of ceremony being used for the opposite purpose to its original one may be taken as a clue to the way in which Webster, in his tragedy, is using the masque—the more masterfully, since a blending of ‘mirth in funeral and dole in marriage’ had actually occurred in the winter of 1612-13.

Webster's A Monumental Column, registered on Christmas Day, 1612, within six weeks of the Prince's death, was bound up with other elegies by Cyril Tourneur and Thomas Heywood. The religious note is here sounded clearly and unequivocally. Webster was to remember Prince Henry again ten years later, in his very latest production (see page 180).

Theories that Henry and his sister had often been reflected in the drama have been put forward of recent years.¹⁷ In this play Webster transmuted the sorrow that rose from the failure of national hope in one who, like the Duchess, ‘died young’, into a sorrow that could not be defined, that resisted comfort. He took his elegiac fable from an old play, The Cobbler's Prophecy by Robert Wilson, which means perhaps that it was still performed. Pleasure was sent down to earth by Jupiter, but, recalled in thunder, left behind on her ascent her ‘eye-seeded robe’ (a common dress in masques).¹⁸ Next comes Sorrow—who bears a likeness to Bosola:

Sorrow that long had liv'd in banishment,
Tugg'd at the oar in galleys, and had spent
Both money and herself in court delays
And sadly number'd many of her days
By a prison Kalendar.

[ll. 162-6]

Finding the robe, her face painted by an old Court lady, Sorrow is disguised and courted by great statesmen, to whom she gives

                              intelligence that let them see
Themselves and fortune in false perspectives.

[ll. 184-5]

And ‘since this cursed mask, which to our cost / Lasts day and night’ any Pleasure is false; as Robert Wilson had said, ‘'Tis pain that masks disguised in Pleasure's weed.’

Pain is the ‘disguised’ feeling that unites the unsympathetic twins, Ferdinand and his sister; pain, disguised by Bosola under many maskings, emerges at last as welcome:

It may be pain, but no harm to me, to die
In so good a quarrel.

[V. v. 99-100]

And Antonio had suggested at parting from the Duchess (III. v. 61-5) that they are like some delicate, fine instrument, being taken to pieces to be mended; here he echoes the elegy:

Like a dial broke in wheel or screw
That's ta'en in pieces to be made go true.

[A Monumental Column, ll. 241-2]

This hope he cannot sustain; his dying words are

Pleasure of life, what is 't? only the good hours
Of an ague.

[V. iv. 67-8]

If an overarching fable were to be sought for the whole play, it could be a masque of Good Fame. This was a favourite figure in masques, and the central one in Ben Jonson's Masque of Queens;¹⁹ good fame is immortality. Antonio pledges care of her good fame to his Duchess, Ferdinand tells her that reputation, once lost, is lost for ever. The very curious fable that she tells Bosola on her capture implies that good fame cannot be discerned till death; only a complete life may be measured, when those who seem to have few claims may be found to have most. Bosola himself had earlier promised the Duchess good fame through the poets who heard of her story; and this was indeed the way in which it was kept alive.

The Cardinal's good fame is destroyed at his death. At the very last, the faithful Delio brings on the eldest son of Antonio and the Duchess, hoping to instate him in ‘his mother's right’. This was not the Duchy of Amalfi but her personal dowry; yet such an action would involve the recognition of a legitimate marriage, for a bastard could not inherit anything. It is Delio who closes the play on the simplest of major harmonies:

Integrity of life is fame's best friend,
Which nobly, beyond death shall crown the end.(20)

From the complexities that negate it, this proverbial flourish may be rescued if it is applied to the play itself. It is in fact Webster asking for his reward, his applause. ‘Crown the end.’ On this occasion he received it.

Notes

1. Addressed to Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. Plays with contrasting double moods had been seen ever since the two parts of Tamburlaine; Marston, Dekker and Chapman himself had written such double plays—as Shakespeare did in Henry IV.

2. William Heminges, ‘Elegy on Randolph's Finger’. Randolph, a minor playwright, had been at Westminster School with Heminges. I think that the allusion may suggest that Webster himself was dead, and his brother now head of the family; but the tragic jests about the Styx in The Duchess of Malfi, and the severed hand, might have caused an association.

3. Ben Jonson prefixed a list of actors to Every Man out of his Humour in his Folio of 1616, but did not indicate their rôles.

4. Boklund [The Sources of the White Devil, Uppsala, 1957] deals with the different accounts deriving from Bandello.

5. Plays of this period acted by the King's Men included The Tempest, King Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, the very spectacular The Second Maiden's Tragedy, Fletcher's Valentinian, a lost Twins' Tragedy.

6. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ed. Valerie Eliot, [London] 1971, pp. 106-7. Eliot has slightly changed his quotation from III. iii. 61-2; and Webster has slightly changed it from Arcadia; see pp. 49-50.

7. Allen Tate, The Swimmers and Other Selected Poems, Oxford, 1970, p. 75.

8. E.g. Susan to Sir Charles Mountford in Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, Evadne to Melantius in Beaumont and Fletcher's A Maid's Tragedy, the Colonel's sister to the Colonel in Middleton and Rowley's A Fair Quarrel, Penthea to Orgilus in Ford's The Broken Heart.

9. This line is modelled on William Alexander, Julius Caesar; cf. also A Monumental Column, ll. 132-3; ‘We ought not think that his great triumphs need / Our wither'd laurel.’

10. In The History of Morindos the deceived King of Bohemia placed the body of his wife's scullion lover in a coffin and tied to it the live body of his queen, closing up the coffin.

11. The Lords' Masque, by Thomas Campion, for the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth, had an antimasque led by Mania with a troop of Frantics.

12. Compare her earlier words: ‘With such pity men preserve alive / Pheasants and quails, when they are not fat enough to be eaten’ (III. v. 110-13) and the fable she tells about preparing fish to be eaten. Her threat to starve herself to death recalls the death by self starvation of the penitent Mistress Frankford in A Woman Killed with Kindness and anticipates that of Penthea in The Broken Heart.

13. James Calderwood, ‘Styles of Ceremony in The Duchess of Malfi’, Essays in Criticism XII, reprinted in Hunter, John Webster, ‘Penguin Critical Anthologies’, [London] 1969.

14. The improvised marriage ritual of the Duchess might serve as model for Giovanni and Annabella; Ferdinand has a horrible image of using his sister's heart as a sponge (II. v. 15-16) which is actually seen in the later play as Giovanni enters with Annabella's heart upon his dagger. On the other hand, ‘nuptial twins’ was a term applied to a married pair who were of the same age.

15. Cf. Antonio's stoic maxim, ‘Through in our miseries Fortune hath a part / Yet in our nobler suff'rings she hath none; / Contempt of pain, that we may call our own’ (V. iii. 56-8), a great improvement on William Alexander, ‘For in our actions Fortune hath a part / But in our sufferings all things are our own’.

16. Campion, The Lords' Masque, and Beaumont, The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn. Webster might have been associated with The Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn, by Chapman, as organized by Richard Martin.

17. See Frances A. Yates, Shakespeare's Last Plays, [London] 1975, and various works by Glynne Wickham.

18. The ‘Rainbow Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth, now at Hatfield, shows her in a robe covered with ears, eyes and mouths, signifying Fame. Chapman also depicts a number of such robes in his part of Hero and Leander.

19. Webster took material from this masque for his dedicatory letter to Lord Berkeley.

20. ‘Integrity of life’ is denied to Beaumont's and Fletcher's heroes; Philaster, Arbaces, Amintor all have to play rôles that do not fit them. But the crisis of identity for the Duchess is insoluble; Amintor kills himself but the other two are ‘adjusted’.