[In this essay, Kerwin places the medical theme of The Duchess of Malfi in its historical context to illuminate Webster's critique of authority in general, and monarchical authority in particular. Drawing from a substantial study of contemporary sources on medicine, Kerwin compares the medical “performances” of Ferdinand, the Cardinal, and Bosola to Jacobean medical discourse.]

In the fourth act of The Duchess of Malfi, as the Duchess struggles to preserve her sanity, her brother Ferdinand produces a masque of madmen—a procession of eight characters representing types of desire gone astray. One of them sings:

As ravens, screech-owls, bulls, and bears,
          We'll bill and bawl our parts,
Till irksome noise have cloy'd your ears
          And corrosiv'd your hearts.(1)

Whether Webster's art follows this “corrosive” aesthetic, or whether it offers a spiritual alternative to such bleakness, seems at the center of debate about The Duchess of Malfi. Interpreting this scene, critics have often praised the masque, finding it central to varied interpretations of the play. M. C. Bradbrook approvingly quotes Charles Lamb's verdict that this scene is “not of this world,” and herself continues: “Madness was itself thought of as diabolic possession, and the ‘comic’ masque of madmen prefigures the later madness of Ferdinand.”² Other critics have emphasized that Webster takes part in the vital Jacobean masque genre, with this anti-masque anticipating the Duchess' assassination.³ But while this scene certainly has spiritual echoes, structural elements common to the masque tradition, and formal analogues within the text, I would like to read it, and the play as a whole, from a different perspective. The masque of madmen is introduced as an ostensible ritual of healing, one of several parts of the play in which a nightmarish medicine appears in a theatrical form. The play's medical theater displays how claims to ancient and disinterested tradition can cover up base interests; here, the masque is connected not only to the dark forms of nature—“ravens, screech-owls, bulls, and bears”—but also to the court of Malfi, the “common fountain” (1.1.14) which has become poisoned. Webster's play can help us understand how medical power legitimates itself—the pose of timelessness, similar to some late twentieth-century claims of scientific objectivity, masks the connections between medicine and society. Webster's representations of medicine point toward the configuration in early modern culture of theatrical, political, and medical discourses, and toward the tenuous demonstrations of power upon which the “professions” often depend. I find unsatisfying the label “medical satire” because it implies a separation of medicine into an independent sphere of culture; Webster's play undermines that very act of specialization by aligning physicians with the most unstable sources of Jacobean authority.

The Duchess of Malfi has an explicitly medical frame, not only in its characters and language, but also in the historical context of Jacobean medical politics. The play's use of medical theater—the representation of healing as a performance—repeatedly connects the authority of educated physicians and the attenuated legitimacy of the court at Malfi.⁴ In connecting the problems of doctors and royalty Webster was echoing in very directed ways historical parallels in his own city. The numerous challenges to their authority which London physicians faced were inseparable from—although certainly not identical to—their culture's challenges to king and bishop. The period was as divided about medicine as it was about political and church government, and the various definitions of the good doctor competing in the first half of the seventeenth century were shaped not only by the growth of a scientific worldview but also by narratives of political and religious orthodoxy or revolution. The traditional elements of the College of Physicians were engaged in a defense of a monopoly, and that defense relied upon ritual demonstrations of authority. The debate about theatricality linked medical discourse with broader debates about performance, as physicians, like others in power, responded to heightened fluidity in social boundaries by accusing rivals of seditious independence. But the privilege of medical specialization could not be based on traditional authority alone: Galenic medicine, in both its technical knowledge and its organizational structures, was incapable of meeting the needs facing a country of new social problems and arrangements. Most healers were non-physicians who did not aspire to “professional” status, and the physicians' attempts to create such a status involved a radical centralization of power, and with it a new representation of their own role. Physicians themselves had to rely upon staging, even as the category of the stage became for them a means of distinguishing true healers from those who only act.

This essay analyzes discussions of medical performance for their connections to other narratives about Jacobean authority. It first examines medical discourse about physicians' legitimacy, highlighting how the discussions of a healer's performance incorporate other Jacobean struggles between traditional and innovating authorities. Then it reads the ways John Webster incorporates medical performances into his critique of a “sick” monarchy in The Duchess of Malfi. Webster connects political injustice with a particular style of medical professionalism, asking a viewer or reader to consider connections between rituals of physic and aristocratic misrule. The connection between bad medicine and bad government is one made explicitly by the playwright, but it is my contention that this parallel was also part of the period's competing definitions of the official physician. To different people, what defined the physician was either his noble and specialized wisdom or his oppressive regimen of misrule. Webster's play makes meaning within that debate, taking the anti-professional position by showing an autocratic medicine futilely attempting to perpetuate a received ideology dependent upon rituals that ultimately are not medical at all. For Webster's play—and for the period as a whole—stories of politics, literature, and medicine are mutually constitutive, as rulers, players, and physicians shape each other.

Tudor-Stuart medicine's attention to performance was part of a culture-wide phenomenon in which theatricality was redefined and decentered. Masques, as Stephen Orgel has persuasively demonstrated, served distinctly social functions; they rarely fell into Bradbrook's realm of being “not of this world.” Orgel argues that Caroline court masques reaffirm the official visions of power: “The masque presents the triumph of an aristocratic community; at its center is a belief in the hierarchy and a faith in the power of idealization.”⁵ But The Duchess of Malfi employs medical masques for quite different purposes: they expose the cruelty of both medical and political authority. In his discussion of Shakespeare's staging of exorcism, Stephen Greenblatt has argued that theater can “empty out” a ritual that had power in another realm; Webster's play also restages ritual, with the effect of connecting illegitimate healing not with unlicensed “mountebanks” but with the most credentialed practitioners, physicians.⁶ The profession that was claiming to be above theater by virtue of its specialized knowledge is charged in this play with sharing the same self-staging as a stifling nobility. By focusing on the connections between physicians' power and the meaning of this play, I hope to demonstrate that Webster not only mocks medical claims of professional objectivity, but more crucially displays how those claims depend upon a particular political culture, one in which inherited power struggles to contain newer claims to authority. His attacks upon official medicine are best seen not as universal satire of the hubris of the doctor, but as a thoughtful reflection upon Stuart society; the meaning of medicine in this play can only be discovered when we consider it as a social form. Webster's treatment of medicine actively participated in a critique of Stuart autocracy, both medical and monarchical.

II

Doctors have always performed, and Jacobean physicians had an ancient tradition upon which to draw. The medieval physician often performed before an audience in a public consultation. Although some have imagined the dominance of a pre-hospital, patient-centered “bedside medicine,” doctors in this period were not usually alone with their patients; visits were usually done with large numbers of friends or family present.⁷ Traditionally doctors attempted to impress their patients with their sophisticated technical language, even to the point of intentionally employing jargon to improve their status: the medieval text De cautelis medicorum, ascribed to Arnau de Villanova, suggests that an unsure diagnostician should use the phrase opilationem in epate (that is, “obstruction in the liver”) “and particularly use the word, opilatio, because they do not understand what it means, and it helps greatly that a term is not understood by the people.”⁸ While the use of jargon may sound similar to practices of today, customs by which doctors were hired and paid in the late medieval and early modern times were quite different from our own, and helped shape the dynamics of performance. Those contractual procedures involved testing and bargaining, and made doctors dependent upon patients and their families. Doctors were often paid only a fraction of their fee until a cure was effected; if the therapy did not succeed, they received little pay. In addition, patients tested physicians, often pitting one against another before deciding which was more effective and hiring him. In this “buyers' market” a physician's power was radically different from that of his twentieth-century counterpart, for whom the patient's visit usually implies his or her acquiescence to the knowledge of the superior professional. Consultation involved persuasion, and an audience beyond the patient. It required a performance.

But physicians in England by the close of the sixteenth century, when participating in public debates about appropriate medical behavior, described these consultations as the antithesis of acting, and contrasted the illegitimate self-staging of “mountebanks” and “quacks” with “true physicians'” adherence to professional standards. A substantial increase in medical competition caused physicians to assume a less flexible stance. Rooting their authority in Latin texts, especially Galen, they claimed that the physician was free of rhetorical performance by virtue of his professional identity. The attempt to create a sense of a profession depended upon specialization, even though the majority of medical services were performed by part-time healers.⁹ The claim was made, and made repeatedly, that the physician is the only legitimate healer because he does not act.

The Jacobean crisis of medicine was a culmination of long-standing challenges to physicians' authority, reflected in legal traditions and sharpened by changes in England's social fabric. England's sixteenth-century laws regarding medicine were notable in their inconsistency: where the 1517 law establishing the College of Physicians gave it regulatory authority, a 1542-1543 Act, sometimes called the Quacks' Charter, pushed in the opposite direction by defending the rights of individual unlearned practitioners.¹⁰ That charter voiced a populist health care ethos:

At all time henceforth it shall be lawful to any person being the King's subject, Having Knowledge and experience of the Nature of Herbs, Roots and Waters, or of the operation of the same, by Speculation or Practice, within any part of the Realm of England, or within any other of the King's Dominions, to practise, use, and minister in to any outward Sore, Uncome, Wound, Apostemations, outward Swelling or Disease, any herb or Herbs, Ointments, Baths, Pultes's and Emplaisters, according to their Cunning, Experience, and Knowledge … without Suit, Vexation, Penalty or Loss of their Goods.¹¹

With the chartering of the College and the protection of popular medical practice, centralization and decentralization were occurring simultaneously. These two narratives—growth in the number of non-physician practitioners, and increased attempts by physicians to assert a legal monopoly—continued for the next hundred years. For most of the sixteenth century and well into the seventeenth, the College attempted to establish a legal province for the professional physician by expending a huge proportion of its energies trying, often unsuccessfully, to gain a monopoly, and to police transgressors of its strict London regulations against practitioners who were not physicians.¹² Attempts at prosecution accelerated after James I assumed the throne, with 435 individuals prosecuted between 1601 and 1640 (p. 5). William Harvey held the post of College censor for the years 1613-1614, before his famous research placed him in the forefront of English medical science. During his term, meetings of the College were held almost weekly regarding persecution of unlicensed physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, women healers or other empirics; the College spent considerable time trying to maintain a profession of elite physicians.

Despite the prosecutions, however, the Crown often sheltered unlicensed “empirics” and people continued to employ them. A series of social disruptions produced what Bylebyl has called “the crisis of medicine in Jacobean England” (p. 4). The two most important demographic changes were the growth of London, which grew to a population of 200,000 in 1600, and the persistence of the plague, always present but occasionally devastating. The years 1603 and 1625 were especially catastrophic, with deaths in London alone totalling 80,000 for the two years combined (p. 2). The plague was only the most serious cause in producing change; other causes were the persistence of syphilis—the “New Disease” for which there were no Galenic discussions—and London public health problems brought about by rapid urbanization. That this was a crisis of “medicine” and not just of “health” is evident in the failure of the College of Physicians to retain public and royal support.

There were additional incentives for the public to ignore the College's self-proclaimed monopoly. Unlicensed practitioners were willing to employ a wide range of therapies, from traditional ones (herbs, astronomy, spells) to those most advanced (chemical medicine). Medical texts in English were increasingly available to the public, and this availability encouraged the practice of self-diagnosis and treatment. The growing public independence from orthodox medical practitioners was analogous to the Protestant rebellion against church authority and the post-Gutenberg explosion of individual reading and writing. Challenges to old textual authority were voiced across all spheres of culture, and in medicine the ancient traditions of Galenic theory and its text-based practice were met not only by Paracelsus (“the Luther of Medicine”) and Vesalius (whose anatomies helped produce a host of changes in physiology and anatomy) but by a native wave of opposition to the received medical epistemology. Popular medical culture encouraged people to treat themselves, their family members, or their neighbors without struggling over the ancient texts providing the theory for a given Galenic therapy.¹³

And the rebellion was not merely from economic competition; natural philosophers were criticizing the medical establishment for an epistemology which left little room for new ideas. Francis Bacon criticized conventional medicine for its reliance upon a medical canon which supposedly contained a complete body of knowledge: “medicine is a science which has been more professed than laboured, and yet more laboured than advanced; the labour having been in my judgment rather in circle than in progression. I find much iteration but small addition.”¹⁴ His desire for “addition” rather than “iteration,” and his sneer at what had been “professed” as opposed to “laboured,” are representative of wider dissatisfaction with the ways in which older medieval models of medicine were failing to meet the demands of the post-reformation, urbanizing world of Jacobean London. The construction of medical knowledge in scholastic medicine allowed for the discovery of new facts or therapies only within tight constraints. “New” cures were presented as rediscovered cures; the presupposition was that the combination of the physical degeneration of humanity and the loss or corruption of classical texts had hidden previously discovered knowledge from the western world. Medical historian Chiara Crisciani discusses this “problematic attitude toward the ‘new’ and toward the progressive growth of knowledge.”¹⁵ After Hippocrates, medical “history seems to end. … Hippocrates closes the series of author-discoverers; Galen begins that of the author-commentators” (p. 125). New knowledge was presented as clarifying commentary upon older knowledge, so that authority could be corrected without ever being radically challenged. The result was a split authority, in which a researcher maintained a strong dependence. Chrisciani calls this a “conscious ambivalence in which respect is intertwined with interpretative force,” and in which “change is perceived as occurring within a closed system” (pp. 126, 130). In the late sixteenth century, the still-influential epistemology of medieval science was preventing physicians from achieving new authority from their medical knowledge, because innovation was regarded as betrayal or heresy.

So perhaps it is not surprising that in attacking their competitors physicians used the metaphor of theater, because fictional role-playing presented an alternative way of knowing to that of traditional medicine, and to scholastic philosophy and hereditary politics as well. Franco Moretti discusses theater's power to demystify political power through representing it; rather than working to secure consent for reigning social structures, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, he argues, worked to undermine “the values of absolute monarchy” (p. 27). Tragedy helped get the public ready for regicide by “deconsecrating” royalty. In medicine as well, tragedy can work to challenge absolutism, and hence was particularly dangerous to physicians.

Two sustained articulations of physicians' attacks against the theatricality of their innovating competitors can be found in a London pamphlet of 1602: a translation of a tract by the German doctor Johann Oberndorff, Englished as The Anatomyse of the True Physition, and the Counterfeit Mounte-bank. Wherein both of them, are graphically described and set out in the Right and Orient Colours. The translator is “F. H.,” Francis Herring, a fellow of the College of Physicians, who followed his translation with his own essay of almost equal length, entitled “A discovery of certain Strategems, wherby our English Empirickes have been observed strongly to oppugne, and oft times to expugne their poore Patients Purses.”

Oberndorff specifically contrasts the consultation practices of quack and doctor as being like two types of acting, constituting a false and true theater. The false healer, “like a Diogenes or Timon, who desires to be alone and singular,” shuns communal assent for his diagnosis. But the true healer is the obedient actor, who “doth not refuse to joyne with learned Phisitions, when they visit their Patients, and conferre together about the curatio[n] of Diseases: but doth heedfully observe those learned Colloquies, and Consultations, and carefully commit them to memory: putting likewise his owne hand little by little unto the worke, and in Cases of difficultie and danger, is nothing ashamed to follow the Advise and Direction of skilfull and well-practised Physitions” (p. 3). Like a player learning his lines, a doctor puts on his role, which for Oberndorff is internalized academic learning. The true physician is “polished and adorned with Pallas golden chaine: I mean throughly Furnished, with those Arts and Tongues, which are most requisite and necessary in a Phisition” (p. 1). The ethics of this praised medical practice are based in communal identity—the good doctor puts “his owne hand little by little” into a group consensus. He grounds himself as well in “those learned Colloquies, and Consultation,” even to the point of memorizing them. Oberndorff continues his definition of the doctor's role by praising “the true Philosopher or Phisition (for those two in our Age make one)” (sig. C1). The equation of scholar and physician conveys doctors' faith that the classical tradition combines specialized training with a stabilizing eloquence.

When Oberndorff and his editor Herring turn their gaze toward their competition, they define them using two criteria which merge gradually together: lack of learning, and social instability. The first-stated source of the offenders' evil is that they are not university trained—Herring says their titles are “not attained in Schooles, but imposed by the Common people” (sig. A3v), and Oberndorff continues, “[T]hey are such as cannot abide to take any paines or travell in studie: they reject incomparable Galens learned commentaries, as tedious and frivolous Discourses, having found thorow Paracelsus Vulcanian shop, a more compendious and short way to the wood” (p. 4). Finding legitimation in popular choice rather than university or guild testing, they anger the physicians because their claim to practice lacks official validation. But even more than their ignorance, their rivals' independence disturbs physicians. They are not professionals because they do more than heal. Oberndorff writes that mountebanks

for the most part are the abject and sordidous scumme, and refuse of the people, who having runne away from their Trades and Occupations, learne in a corner, to get their livings, by killing of men. And if we pluck off the vizards wherein these disguised Maskers do march, and bring them to the Light which (like Owles) they cannot abide, they will appeare to be runnagate Jewes, the cut-throats and robbers of Christians, slowbellyed Monkes, who have made escape from their Cloysters, Simoniacall and perjured shavelings, busie Sir John lacklatines, Thrasonicall, and unlettered Chymists, shifting & outcast Pettifoggers, light-headed, and triviall Druggers, and Apothecaries, Sun-shunning night birds, and corner creepers, dull-pated, and base Mechanickes, Stage players, Juglers, Pedlers, prittle-pratling Barbers, filthie Grasiers, curious Bath-keepers, common shifters, & cogging Caveliers, bragging Soldiers, Bankerupt marcha[n]ts, lazy Clowns, one-eyed or lamed Fencers, toothlesse and tattling old wives, chattering Char-women, and Nurskeepers, long tongued Midwives, scape-Tibornes, Dog-leeches, and such like baggage, and earth dung.

(pp. 2-3)

Oberndorff and Herring reserve for even stronger criticism a worse rank of offenders, the intentionally malicious “wizards, witches, and poisoners.” But the energetic catalogue of the unapproved quoted here provides an angry tour through the Elizabethan underworld (Herring has translated loosely: “Caveliers” and “scape-Tibornes” point to a distinctly English landscape). Underneath the appealing surface lies irreligion, laziness, and violence; masterless men, the runaways of trade and army, combine with the theological nightmares of Catholicism and Judaism or with the dangers of female slovenliness. All of the doctors' competitors enter the list: surgeons, barbers, grocers, apothecaries, alchemists, and women healers. Actors are a part of the roll call—the “stage players” in the indictment—but more significantly, they are Oberndorff's metaphor for the entire problem, since all of the offenders are described as “disguised Maskers.”

Herring blames the rise of these impostors on disturbing new social mobility: “It cannot be sufficiently lamented, that the most auncient, worthy, and honourable Profession of Physicke, which hath been in preceding Ages, a Colledge of learned, grave, and profound Philosophers, is now become a Common Inne, Receptacle, and Sanctuarie of Makeshifts, Bankerupts, and Impostors” (p. 24). Oberndorff wishes that his rivals would “containe themselves within their Shops and Ware-houses,” and he shifts finally to direct address to these impudent upstarts: “Know thy self. … Dwell within their Selfe, and break not thy Ranke” (p. 21). Unreliable acting is revealed to be caused by new social arrangements, the “Common Inne” of the marketplace.

Oberndorff's attacks are part of a culture-wide assault upon the theater, which has been related to anxieties and changes in economic, gender, and religious practices. Jean-Christopher Agnew has sketched out a connection between market culture and theatrical culture, in fact defining the rise of the market from 1550 to 1650—the supposed “long sixteenth century”—as a period of fluidity which often described itself in theatrical metaphors. He notes “a newly discovered, Protean social world, one in which the conventional signposts of social and individual identity had become mobile and manipulable reference points.”¹⁶ Agnew sees the age as one of a “peculiarly shape-shifting character” (p. 9), and argues that the image of the life as a stage takes on a new set of meanings, less religiously didactic and more socially reflective: “the deepened resonance between commerciality and theatricality transformed the ancient Stoic and Christian metaphor of the theatrum mundi from a simple, otherworldly statement on human vanity into a complex, secular commentary on the commodity world” (p. 12). Of course many historians and literary critics have discussed the idea of theatricality in the age; Agnew's distinction lies in his projection of that idea onto the marketplace.¹⁷ I contend that the social consequences of a more self-consciously theatrical culture extend into medical practice, and take a particular form there. Physicians who made charges of medical malpractice often did so in terms conflating social fluidity and theatricality, accusing their rivals of being economic actors.

Oberndorff demonstrates a medical version of antitheatricality as he describes the improper form of consultation, not the colloquies of the learned but the independence of the individual:

And according to the divers Dispositions and Humours of Men, that hee may fit and Please all, he layeth aside the Behaviour and Gravitie of a Phisition, and putteth upon Him the Person of a Sycophant, and Parasite, making account as the World goeth, to thrive better thereby, then by his profession: refusing no Servitude or Drudgery, how base so ever, that hee may creepe into Favour with his Good Maisters, and Mistresses, and get into that Great Lord, or Rich Ladies Bookes. One while he playeth the Apothecarie, an other while the Cooke, an other while the Serving Man: other while serving in stead of Mother Midnight, and sometime hee is content to carrie the Pisse pot, abasing Himself to every Servile and Slavish Office. Nay by your leave, Sometimes (which is of all other most unworthy, and unbefitting) hee playeth the Foole and Jester, and now and then (which is worst of all) the Bawd and Pandore.

(p. 11)

The language of acting here serves to define illegitimacy, as playing a role is equated with dishonesty, in direct contrast to the reliable role of a physician's “profession.” Historically, non-physician medical practitioners of the period often combined specialized medical work with other labor,¹⁸ and that versatility meets Oberndorff's scorn here. Apothecary, Cook, Serving Man, Midwife (“Mother Midnight”), Urinal-carrier, Fool-Jester, and Bawd-Pander—like Jacques' Everyman in As You Like It, Oberndorff's mountebank plays seven parts while on his stage, unlike the putatively singular physician.

Part of the actor's power comes from appearance, and Oberndorff attacks mountebanks for their control of gesture and their violations of sumptuary decorum:

But that nothing may be wanting … hee laboureth in his Gate, Gesture, and Attire, to resemble the right Aesculapian: but so, that he is like an Ape clad in Purple, with a whole rable of Toyes and Trinkets, that by Garish, Outlandish, and uncouth Apparell, his great Gold Chaine, and glistering Rings upon every finger, he may draw to him the Concourse, and Admiration of the People, and more readily utter his Cart-load of Leasings.

Now as this Stage like Bravery requireth no small cost: so doeth it greatly further our Magnifico in many Prettie and Cunning Shifts and Tricks of Gaining.

(p. 14)

As the Elizabethan actor could represent officers of state, bringing churchmen or nobility to life in ways which might challenge their authority, so an Elizabethan citizen could represent a physician, and threaten the preserve of his practice.¹⁹ Herring's tract casts rival practitioners as illegitimate actors, as medical cony-catchers whom he is bound to expose. He narrates the work of two particular deceivers: “Thus these two Veterators, or Couzening Copsemates act their Parts, as it were on a Stage, circumventing and insnaring simple Men and Women, altogether unacquainted with these quaint Devises” (p. 32). After they succeeded in selling their wares, “each of them [was] vaunting that he played his Part best” (p. 33). Again and again, Oberndorff and Herring dismiss their medical rivals as actors, in contrast to the “True Physitian,” who “carrieth not two faces under one Hood, but his Heart and Tongue, his words and actions agree and goe hand in hand together” (p. 7). Although the learned physicians in their consultations performed their own self-staging, they were creating a public persona ostensibly free from such rhetorical involvement. Even more than lack of education, role-playing draws the physicians' attack: the professional is defined against the protean.

The birth of the medical professional was clearly a difficult one. Before the more flexible epistemology developed in the scientific revolution, physicians depended upon an inherited and ostensibly closed system of knowledge, and attempted to maintain authority by command. Harold Cook has traced the College of Physicians' reinvention of itself in the latter half of the seventeenth century, after the disciples of William Harvey developed a conception of knowledge as produced in experiments rather than handed down from antiquity. Cook writes: “they promoted a new kind of ‘scientific’ medical learning that incidentally maintained their place at the top of the medical hierarchy as learned men, something the College of Physicians could now do only as a learned society, not as a regulatory body.”²⁰ But in Jacobean England this transformation was only beginning. Physicians' claims to absolute authority depended upon inherited privilege, and allowed for no role but the command performance.

III

John Webster's most famous tragedy blurs the distinctions between political and medical performances, as physic in The Duchess of Malfi supplies ritual and language for the perpetuation of a tyrannical regime. Nobles and the play's two physicians—a mad doctor in Act 4 and a comic one in Act 5—all try to rule, or cure, by hierarchical fiat. Far from mere farce, the doctors' scenes display dynamics which are interwoven with the ruling politics of the play, making doctors part of what Jonathon Dollimore calls “the legitimation of the power structure” and “the ideological imperatives of order”²¹: the ineffectual physicians in the play mirror and help produce the command structure of the evil nobility. The Cardinal, Ferdinand, and Bosola all assume the language of the doctor, especially in their treatment of the Duchess. Webster places the medical performance in the context of a corrupt autocracy, and makes the two mutually dependent.

The play's doctors, and the doctor-like actions of the rulers, often take the Jacobean dramatic form most closely linked to the celebration of power, the masque. The most unambiguously successful healing therapy in the play is reported by a servant:

A great physician, when the Pope was sick
Of a deep melancholy, presented him
With several sorts of madmen, which wild object,
Being full of change and sport, forc'd him to laugh,
And so th'imposthume broke.

(4.2.39-43)

The servant announces that Ferdinand intends “the self-same cure” (43) for his sister, in the form of the masque of eight madmen. But while the cure may have worked in Rome, it is far less potent in Malfi, where Ferdinand replaces the “great physician” as the director of the healing show. Nowhere in this play does anyone create a successful performance; the good physician is as absent as the virtuous prince.

Ferdinand's masque includes a doctor “that hath forfeited his wits / By jealousy.”²² This doctor's characterization points both to the actions of the Cardinal, Ferdinand, and Bosola and to the market concerns of Jacobean London physicians. In a fusion of categories typical of Webster's poetic style, the doctor's delusions connect a variety of contradictions: psychological, spiritual, and social. His anxieties first connect control over his wife with control over his profession: “Shall my pothecary outgo me, because I am a cuckhold? I have found out his roguery: he makes alum of his wife's urine, and sells it to puritans that have sore throats with overstraining” (4.2.82-85). The fear of the apothecary (in England apothecaries successfully won their own company in 1617, after a long struggle with physicians) combines medical and sexual rivalry, making the doctor a figure of double powerlessness.²³ He next switches psychological directions and boasts of his powers—his abilities “to make all the women here call me mad doctor” (ll. 98-99), and his mystical cures: “I have pared the devil's nails forty times, roasted them in raven's eggs, and cured agues with them” (ll. 106-09). Sexual and spiritual fantasies of control are followed and exceeded by his supposed crowning medical triumph: “All the college may throw their caps at me, I have made a soap-boiler costive—it was my masterpiece” (ll. 112-14). The technical significance of the cure is that diarrhea was an occupational hazard for soap-makers²⁴; the cure provides another sign of a man obsessed with his ability to control things—his business, his wife, and bowel movements. Like Ferdinand, the mad doctor has a passionate urge to work out anxieties about bodies. In The Elizabethan Stage Doctor as a Dramatic Convention, Philip Kolin notes the technical significance of the “masterpiece,” but sees in it a sign of the ridiculous: “the insane doctor and Ferdinand dabble in impossibly grotesque cures. Uncovering the absurdity of his medicine, the insane physician boasts of a remedy whose folly lies in its contradictory nature. Equally contradictory is Ferdinand's use of madness as a cure for his sister's lust” (p. 171). But a cure for diarrhea is in no way inherently contradictory. The mad doctor's signal trait, and his similarity to Ferdinand, is his anxiety about control and release, and his mixing of the sources of that anxiety. These anxieties can be read as more than “contradictory,” an “absurdity,” or “madness”; they draw strength from a network of extra-textual analogues in the medical culture, in the College's attempts to restrict innovating non-professionals. The mad doctor longs to have his peers applaud him for his performance, and to conquer a technical problem with new knowledge. Such a wish, however, was too independent for a doctor to fulfill within the reigning conventions of his profession. The scene's historical echoes suggest that London's medical marketplace is producing a new stage, and that physicians must find a new role.

The male characters have rhetorical similarities with this mad doctor and with the spokesmen for the College of Physicians, emphasizing the contradictions in their social roles as well. The madman's monomania about control is parallel to the way the Cardinal and Ferdinand, and their agent Bosola, respond to the Duchess' attempts at independence, as well as to Jacobean physicians' anxieties about the dangers of other and uncontrollable medical actors. He is a middle term connecting historical struggles to the formal patterns of the play's textured imagery, as voiced by its ruling troika. The three characters together are an amalgam not only of a ruling elite, but also of the medical profession and of a theatrical company.

The Cardinal's role-playing often involves feigning illness or healing, but acting is both his tool and his downfall. Financing plots in the background like a producer, he shows his medical expertise as a knowledgeable poisoner and as a diagnostic specialist. His area of expertise is diagnosis of sick internal organs, a subject he uses even in courtship. Julia recalls: “You told me of a piteous wound i'th'heart, / And a sick liver, when you woo'd me first, / And spoke like one in physic” (2.4.37-39). Always a diagnostician, in his moralizing condemnation of his sister he is also “like one in physic” when he ascribes what he perceives as evil to be rooted in her heart's placement: “So far upon the left side!” (2.5.33). After poisoning Julia, he creates an alibi which draws on his doctor-like prestige: “I'll give out she died o'th' plague; 'twill breed the less inquiry after her death” (5.2.321-22). But this duplicitous doctor-figure ends up dying because of the private stage he publicly demands after Ferdinand's madness, when he commands his servants to ignore any calls they might hear from his chambers:

It may be to make trial of your promise
When he's asleep, myself will rave, and feign
Some of his mad tricks, and cry out for help,
And feign myself in danger.

(5.4.13-16)

Echoing the Cardinal's own twice-used word “feign,” one of his supporters says “Fie upon his counterfeiting” (5.5.20) as he hears the screaming man. The Cardinal's theater fails him; instead of consciously playing the “mad tricks” of his brother, the Cardinal is now more like the madmen of the masque, who “bill and bawl [their] parts” from genuine terror. The manipulation of theater has proven impossible.

Similarly destroyed by his art is Ferdinand, the trio's surgeon and director, who plagues his sister in an art of medical theater which destroys both its patient/audience and its practitioner/stager. His imagination runs less to diagnoses than to therapies, and they are usually violently purgative. Also similar to the mad doctor in the masque, Ferdinand seeks complete control. He sometimes treats others, sometimes himself: he wants “to purge this choller” which he feels inside (2.5.13), and of his sister he advises:

          Apply desperate physic:
We must not now use balsamum, but fire,
The smarting cupping-glass, for that's the mean
To purge infected blood, such blood as hers!

(23-26)

The breakdown of the unstable bonds between himself, his twin sister, and his family as a whole reveals an identification with those he hates, both his sister and the doctor in the final act.²⁵ Ferdinand's attempts to control his sister as a means of ordering his own life are represented in medical terms, and part of his treatment for her involves staging healing masques, of the sort reputedly effective for the pope. Act 4 includes three masques Ferdinand stages for the Duchess: the kissing of the dead hand, the wax effigies of Antonio and the couple's children, and the masque of madmen already discussed. But the theological justification given for those cures—“to bring her to despair” (4.1.116)—does not account for Ferdinand's physical obsessions: “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” (121-23, my emphasis). He covers self-interest with a rhetoric of salvation; like many masques, Ferdinand's is at heart self-gratifying. Ferdinand envisions even more pageantry: “masques of common courtesans,” and “bawds and ruffians” serving her food (124, 125). His goal is a perverse theater: “she's plagued in art” and takes the counterfeit “for true substantial bodies” (111, 115). Ferdinand's dramaturgy simultaneously aspires to blood transfusion, in the purifying of the Duchess' blood, and to exorcism, in the reformation of an imagined physical degradation that is figured as sin.

Bosola is the actor in the company, taking on disguises and giving set speeches, playing roles alternatively of insider and outsider. While he presents himself masked, as a grave-maker and as a figure of passing time, his occupational diversity extends to galley slave, soldier, master of horses, and executioner. In theatrical terms he is a Revenger and a Vice, and has the fluctuation in representational qualities often found in those characters: he can be the most blunt as well as the most protean.²⁶ Like the Cardinal and Duke Ferdinand, Bosola's healing roles are emphatically attempts to manipulate through theatrical illusion. The most violent occupations are combined with wide-ranging medical skills. Like the diagnosing doctor, Bosola gives medicaments to the Duchess to prove her pregnancy; like a theologian, he dons the mantle of a spiritual healer (“black deeds must be cured with death” [5.4.45]); and like a surgeon, he calls for blood-letting:

Physicians that apply horse-leeches to any rank swelling use to cut off their tails, that the blood may run through them the faster; let me have no train when I go to shed blood, lest it make me have a greater when I ride to the gallows.

(5.2.315-19)

Always for Bosola playing the medical role means violence. He has been perhaps the most attractive of the three men to a romantic strain of critics because he shows the ability to distance himself temporarily from dominant ideology and its attendant workings, eventually killing the Cardinal. He fulfills the railing function often associated with both satirists and surgeons.²⁷ But any self-knowledge he attains about the regime's violence and authoritarianism does not help him avoid those evils, as his independence is never permanent.

Bosola echoes Oberndorff's and Herring's claims to be completely non-theatrical and claims a similar rhetoric-free status:

I will not imitate things glorious
No more than base: I'll be mine own example.—
On, on, and look thou represent, for silence,
The thing thou bear'st.

(5.4.81-84)

But he continually imitates things, “glorious” and “base.” Speaking as he dies, he confesses to being “an actor in the main of all” (5.5.82), and calls his murdering of Antonio “Such a mistake as I have often seen / In a play” (95-96). His rhetoric of independence from role-playing, like that of the College of Physicians (whose self-staging also aspires to be its “own example”), is thoroughly inconsistent with his actions. In fact all three conspirators play in a medical theater more semiotically complex than the model proposed by the College. These three men all succeed or fail on their ability to take up new roles and to improvise—not to be above role-playing by virtue of inherited power or knowledge.

Bosola's ultimate alliance with the power centers he occasionally attacks is evident in his treatment of women. He provides the play's most medically centered demonstration of misogyny in his satirical attack on the “Old Lady” in Act 2. This particular professional example is just one case of the ruling regime's apparent raison d'etre: the control of the feminine, an impulse perhaps most fully expressed in the dying Ferdinand's history of the play's actions, “My sister! O! my sister! there's the cause on't” (5.5.71). Jacobean physicians spent large amounts of energy attempting to eradicate women healers as rivals, excoriating them as quacks or witches.²⁸ The Old Lady first appears in Act 2 scene 1, and Bosola attacks her for her face-painting and her store of folk remedies. His catalogue of abuses touches off one of the longest speeches in the play, swelling from prose to verse, on the monstrosity of women's face-painting and diseased humanity (35-71). The same midwife returns later in the scene, immediately after Bosola has himself employed on the Duchess a form of folk medicine similar to that used by women healers—he muses, “there's no question but her tetchiness and most vulturous eating of the apricocks are apparent signs of breeding” (2.2.1-3). But despite (or perhaps because of) his similarity with this supposedly female craft, upon her second appearance on stage he interrogates the midwife harshly; in his words, he must “mention your frailties” (14), in hers, “you are still abusing women!” (11-12). Most doctor-like, Bosola discredits her as a witch. Critics have regarded his speech as more of Webster's satire on the medical profession, but I think they have been too quick to universalize about medicine, and to align Bosola's views with Webster's. For example, Kolin writes: “In the figure of this decayed matron, Webster offers us one of the most stinging ironies in the play. It is this maquerelle figure, in appearance like one of the hags of hell, who ushers future generations into life with her hands still fresh with the stench of her odious closet. The progeny of Malfi are tainted emerging from the womb” (p. 167). But Kolin has assumed Bosola's characterization is accurate; there is no textual evidence that the midwife's closet is hellish, or any more unsanitary than a physician's bag. It would be possible to stage this scene as a part of the play's long attack on women. Such a staging would be consistent with both internal and external patterns—the play's theme of controlling women, and the Jacobean physicians' attempts to control other medical practitioners.

The appearance in Act 5 of a real doctor to attempt to heal the mad Ferdinand can be seen in the context of all the medical scenes which have preceded it: it is the last in a series of staged and cruel therapies, masques in which official will is forced on a resistant patient. Although strikingly comic, the doctor in many ways reflects historical realities, and epitomizes the play's satire of medical professionalism. He combines treatment of the body—with his Hippocratic rhetoric about controlling “the air” (5.2.3)—and of the mind, with his therapeutic masque. He diagnoses Ferdinand with a rare form of melancholy known as lycanthropia, which he defines for his listeners. While he considers Ferdinand cured, he fears a relapse, and it is in his method of cure that his practice becomes much more than farce, by virtue of its similarity with both other parts of the play and actual professional debates. He will employ force:

If he grow to his fit again
I'll go a nearer way to work with him
Than ever Paracelsus dream'd of: if
They'll give me leave I'll buffet his madness out of him.

(23-26)

No new authorities here, only tradition and brute force. When Ferdinand arrives on the scene, still conversing madly and attacking his own shadow, the doctor moves in to “cure.” He asks directly: “are you mad, my lord, are you out of your princely wits?” (55-56). Upon being largely ignored, he resolves “to do mad tricks with him” (61).

In beginning this performance, the doctor comes even closer to the previous actions of the nobleman he now treats. Ferdinand himself draws the parallel: “Hide me from him; physicians are like kings, / They brook no contradiction” (67-68). The doctor incorrectly thinks his patient fears him, and undresses for action; the quarto version of the play says that he “puts off his four Cloaks one after another” (Brown, p. 144). To this ceremonial uncloaking and the accompanying loss of status Ferdinand replies with the threat of a more radical undressing: “I will stamp him into a cullis, flay off his skin, to cover one of the anatomies this rogue hath set i'th' cold yonder, in Barber-Chirurgeons' Hall” (77-80).²⁹ Although the doctor's proposed therapy of pelting his patient with urinals of rosewater is a less savage form of treatment than most of the other images of the play, its inefficacy and intended bullying recall much that has gone before.

This scene is the nightmare of an early modern physician: trying to get patients to obey him, he is physically assaulted. The topsy-turvy nature of things is not a foil but an example; medical chaos is another form of traditional authority's moral disorder. Webster creates a portrait of the profession of physicians, and it is an unflattering picture both of them and of the noblemen who adopt their rhetoric. The play is a parody of medicine—it certainly should not be read as an attempt at “realism” of medical portrayal. The outline of its medical plot is not a universal medical farce but one appropriate to a particular moment, an historically situated medical satire which enacts a story of professional medicine at a time of anxiety over its assumed independence and regulatory authority, and also the legitimacy of monarchical absolutism. In ways that parallel but subvert official medical discourse, the play imagines a doctor's identity as a reflection of noble attempts at self-promotion and self-protection. The Duchess of Malfi is a protest play, condemning the ways the professional doctor, like the nobleman, combines theatrically and authority; both Webster's doctors and his tyrants attempt to enforce absolute control but create absolute chaos.

Of course the attempt to read drama historically is the great interpretive shift of our era. In her reading of the play, Catherine Belsey locates its central subject as a tension between two modes of theatrical semiotics: “The Duchess of Malfi, I want to suggest, is a play poised, formally as well as historically, between the emblematic tradition of the medieval stage and the increasing commitment to realism of the post-Restoration theater.”³⁰ In her attempts to study the tension between two sources of signification, traceable in the structural elements of “realism” and “formality” (p. 117), Belsey's shift in emphasis opens the door for the inclusion of historical change. My rereading of the significance of the medical elements of the play emphasizes the depiction of local discontents; in its concern about the theatrical in the Jacobean medical world, The Duchess of Malfi participates in the representation of cultural combat often ascribed to the genre of city comedy. Local political issues are at the heart of the play's medical performances: attempts to cure are figured as attempts to rule, and in a particularly authoritarian fashion, one which shares the most extreme claims of monopoly voiced by James I and the College of Physicians.

Theater in The Duchess of Malfi becomes a stage for oppression, in which changing one's part initiates tragedy, and in which the pose of timelessness usually serves to justify convention. Surely the appeal to a better world is not always part of the corruption, however, as the moving case of the Duchess has suggested to countless readers. After Ferdinand discovers the Duchess is married, she replies, “Why might not I marry? / I have not gone about, in this, to create / Any new world, or custom” (3.1.109-11). But perhaps she has created a new world, as the role of remarried widow is too independent a part for her brother to accept. Shown the “sad spectacle” of her family as dead, the Duchess abandons the attempt at worldly independence and places the language of life-as-a-play within a spiritual context: “I account this world a tedious theater, / For I do play a part in't 'gainst my will” (4.1.84-85). The Duchess' rejection of the world suggests that the only goodness is spiritual, as do the play's closing lines, spoken by Delio: “Integrity of life is fame's best friend, / Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end” (italics Webster's). But although the play gestures toward a better world “beyond death,” it also shows villains using the rhetoric of antiquity to further their corruption. Professional medicine provides a language for their tyranny, and Webster's continued employment of it demonstrates that appeals to transhistorical power very rarely have the benignity they do in Delio's and the Duchess' valedictions to integrity. The language of professional medicine provides other, more secularly powerful claims to timelessness, and by fusing them with the language of the play's noblemen, Webster connects the absurdity of the play's medical failures to Malfi's governors. I think that is why the medicine is there; like the ridiculous doctor of the fifth act, it acts as a shadow of royalty. Webster blurs the boundaries of medical and political representation, creating in the play-world of drama a heightened attentiveness to the forms and rituals claimed by both the medical professional and the nobleman.

Notes

1. 4.2.65-68. All quotations from the play are from The Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown (London, 1964).

2. “Renaissance Contexts for The Duchess of Malfi,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: John Webster's “The Duchess of Malfi,” ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1987), p. 44.

3. See Brown's introduction, p. xxxvi, and Inga-Stina Ekeblad, “The ‘Impure Art’ of John Webster,” Review of English Studies n.s., 9 (1958), 253-67. Ekeblad notes other plays with similar anti-masques, and the folk tradition of the charivarium or wedding-night masque (261).

4. Questions of “integrity” in The Duchess of Malfi usually pertain to the title character, and the play's final, stirring lines (to be discussed below), but they also support misreadings of the play's medical characters by overemphasizing the amount of consensus within the Jacobean medical culture. Critics have often emphasized the prevalence of medicine in Webster's work, but rarely have they gone beyond “internalist” history, whether that history be medical or literary. (Internalist and externalist medical histories refer to an emphasis upon, respectively, science as a separate discipline and science as a product of non-scientific social forces.) See Macleod Yearsley, Doctors in Elizabethan Drama (London, 1933); Herbert Silvette, The Doctor on the Stage (Knoxville, 1967); Maurice Hunt, “Webster and Jacobean Medicine: The Case of The Duchess of Malfi,” Essays in Literature 16.1 (Spring, 1989), 33-49; and Caroline Di Miceli, “Sickness and Physic in Some Plays by Middleton and Webster,” Cahiers Elisabethains 26 (Oct. 1984), 41-78. Robert Simpson's study Shakespeare and Medicine (Edinburgh, 1959) notes Webster as Shakespeare's numerical equal in his medical imagery, with The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi each including “about 25 major medical references” (p. 33).

   Medically-oriented readers have traced medicine within texts, but do not pressure medicine's dependence as a category of practice and theory. Literary critics have been largely concerned with connecting medicine to form; by far the best work is Philip Kolin's impressive 1975 The Elizabethan Stage Doctor as a Dramatic Convention (Salzburg, 1975). Kolin draws on the work of Madelaine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison, 1954). Absent from the critical discourse has been attention to medicine itself as both subject and socially multivalent metaphor, an historical reality that is in flux, malleable, and part of the changes of the age, and also a force helping to shape the drama's structure.

5. Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, 1975), p. 40.

6. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford, 1987). The power of theater to destabilize authority by representing it in another venue has received considerable attention recently. See also Franco Moretti's “The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form as the Deconsecration of Sovereignty,” in Signs Taken for Wonders (London, 1983).

7. I am referring to Norman Jewson's influential division of medical history into three periods: bedside, hospital, and laboratory medicine. “The Disappearance of the Sick-Man from Medical Cosmology, 1770-1810,” Sociology (1976), 225-44. In many cases medieval physicians might not even have seen their patients; inspection of urines could be done without a visit, although that practice came under increasing attacks in the late sixteenth century. Like Foucault, Jewson sees the rise of clinical medicine as reducing the patient's centrality in the diagnostic process. For details on historical doctor-patient relationships, see Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Renaissance Medicine (Chicago, 1990); Pelling, “Medical Practice in Early Modern England: Trade or Profession,” in The Professions in Early Modern England, ed. Wilfrid Prest (London, 1987), pp. 90-128; Michael McVaugh, Medicine Before the Plague: Practitioners and their Patients in the Crown of Aragon 1285-1345 (Cambridge, Eng., 1993).

8. Quoted and translated by McVaugh, p. 139.

9. Vern L. Bullough, in The Development of Medicine as a Profession (New York, 1966), places the period of professionalization of physicians in the sixteenth century. Margaret Pelling sounds quite a different note by demonstrating the part-time status of most healers in “Medical Practice.” Pelling's argument is that professionalization was the norm only for physicians, and that the majority of healers defined themselves as having multiple roles.

10. Margaret Pelling, “Appearance and reality: barber-surgeons, the body and disease,” p. 96, in London 1500-1700: The Making of the Metropolis, ed. A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay, (London: Longman, 1986).

11. Quoted in the 1543 entry of the Statutes at Large, Vol. II, 1763, p. 337.

12. Charles Webster gives an overall evaluation: “The task that the College set itself was formidable, and ultimately almost all-engrossing. Between 1600 and 1640 the official records of the College are preoccupied with interminable disputes with sister medical organizations, and with the diverse classes of unorganized practitioners labeled by the College as illiterate ‘empirics.’ Very little of the business transacted by the College was unrelated to the above disputes.” “William Harvey and the Crisis of Medicine in Jacobean England,” p. 4; in William Harvey and His Age: The Professional and Social Contexts of the Discovery of the Circulation, ed. Jerome J. Bylebyl (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 1-27.

13. See Paul Slack, “Mirrors of health and treasures of poor men: the uses of vernacular medical literature of Tudor England.” In Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge, Eng., 1979).

14. Quoted by K. Charlton, “The Professions in Sixteenth-Century England,” University of Birmingham Historical Journal, 12.1 (1969), 29.

15. Chiara Chisciani, “History, Novelty, and Progress in Scholastic Medicine,” Osiris 6 (1990), 118.

16. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750, (Cambridge, Eng., 1986), p. 7. The phrase “long sixteenth century” is Immanuel Wallerstein's.

17. Exemplary treatments of this theme from a more traditionally literary perspective are Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, 1981); and Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theater: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama Under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge, Eng., 1980). For a discussion of the ways theatricality, both as a value-laden image and as a way of imagining, helped to shape the discourse of “nonconformist” theological writers, see Ritchie D. Kendall, The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity, 1380-1590 (Chapel Hill, 1986).

18. See Pelling, “Medical Practice,” pp. 93ff. She calls definitions of medical practice which exclude “combinant guilds” such as barber-surgeons and grocer-apothecaries “a trivial and unrealistically narrow conception of legitimate medical practice” (p. 100). She continues, “Medicine was very often practiced either simultaneously or alternately with other employments, by, for example, blacksmiths. Both the clergy and the gentry were likely to be involved in medicine.”

19. Greenblat discusses the example of a bishop's vestments and other transgressive role-playing in Shakespearean Negotiations.

20. The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca, 1986), p. 109.

21. Radical Tragedy (Chicago, 1986), pp. 27, 58.

22. I follow Kolin (pp. 168-70) in assigning lines to speakers in this scene.

23. Douglas Bruster has argued that much Jacobean imagery of cuckoldry is rooted in changes in market exchanges. Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge, Eng., 1992). This scene in Webster's play provides a medical example of Bruster's thesis.

24. Bruster, p. 122.

25. He tells his brother the Cardinal: “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” (2.5.63-66). This confession of his imaginative fusion with his sister provokes his brother to ask, “Are you stark mad?”

26. For the representational versatility of the Vice character see Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore, 1978). Bosola shares this privileged stage power with another satirized stage physician, Alcon in Samuel Daniel's The Queene's Arcadia, in Three Renaissance Pastorals: Tasso, Guarini, Daniel, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Binghamton, 1992).

27. See M. C. Randolph, “The Medical Concept in English Renaissance Satiric Theory,” Studies in Philology 38.2 (April, 1941), 125-57.

28. An introduction to this issue can be found in Margaret Pelling's and Charles Webster's “Medical Practitioners.” In Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge, Eng., 1979).

29. Kolin (pp. 171ff.) interestingly interprets Ferdinand's attack on the doctor as an attack upon himself, as he recognizes himself in the doctor's behavior and language, “for his [the Doctor's] particular treatment grotesquely sums up the nature of perverted medicine in the play” (p. 174). Kolin notes that briefly before this scene Ferdinand had attacked his own shadow, increasing the parallels with his attack on the Doctor. I would add that the Doctor's questioning is similar to the Cardinal's of his brother in an earlier scene (2.5.63-66), so that Ferdinand's attack is also a displaced assault on his brother.

30. “Emblem and Antithesis in The Duchess of Malfi,” Renaissance Drama 11 (1980), 115. This essay highlights the psychological as a contrast to the emblematic; I stress the social.