"I hold it, in these kind of Poems with that of Horace: Sapientia prima, stultitia caruisse; to bee free from those vices, which proceed from ignorance; of which I take it, this Play will ingeniously acquit it selfe."

Webster's introduction to The Devil's Law Case will serve for his earlier tragedy. The Duchess is skilfully and meticulously contrived; like a Pygmalion's image, it has been almost killed by being cherished too much.

Structure

Artfully the characters have been made to reflect upon each other. Julia with the cardinal and Delio in Act II and with Bosola in Act V, where she is the 'great woman of pleasure' who would court a man 'in the street', invites comparison with the duchess who also loves in private and woos for herself. Julia then dies with a resolution which denies second thoughts, a contrast to Antonio, Ferdinand, Bosola, closer to the cardinal; and these contrasts are pointed by dying speeches. If Julia were omitted from the play, none of the main characters except the cardinal would be affected; and the narrative would be clearer and the final Act tightened and more forceful. Her part might be dismissed as an 'ignorant' afterthought. But the author's invention was still unflagging; rather, Julia is an 'ingenious' reflection and elaboration of central concerns of the tragedy.

When we scrutinize the full picture carefully, we can discern the construction-lines that Webster used to organize its troublous and extravagant details. One of the two brothers seems wholly ruled by his intelligence; the other directly contrasted to him by giving way to his passions. Two ambitious men of ordinary stock succeed at court, Antonio on account of his 'virtue', Bosola through his 'corruption'. Later both are revalued, Antonio's 'ambition' becoming 'fearful' so that he is uncertain of 'any safety' he can 'shape himself, and Bosola's forcing him to hide in other 'shapes' than his own. At last Antonio sees the 'quest of greatness' as a child's game with a bubble, and Bosola, supposing that men yield 'no echo', urges 'worthy minds … To suffer death, or shame for what is just'. Cariola dies wildly, in contrast to the duchess. Pescara is considerate, in contrast to Malateste, Roderigo, Grisolan. The madmen are 'loosed', while the duchess is 'chain'd'. Antonio 'sounds' his own danger and escapes, while the duchess looks for 'virtue' and bends herself 'to all sways of the oppressor's will'. Whole scenes are linked together, behind the dialogue, as if in a diagram. So the first presence-chamber scene, with the duchess at ease among her brothers and her court, is reflected in the second, where she is alone and then has to rush from the stage, calling for lights; in Act III she has dreamed of wearing her 'coronet of state' and then receives an embassage outside her palace, in open country; and in Act IV she has her fourth and 'last presence-chamber', as the coffin is brought before her. In the final moments of the tragedy, long after her death, there is a further reflection, identified by the central position of her unnamed son and the silent homage of everyone on the stage; it is partly evaluated in Delio's words:

Nature doth nothing so great, for great men,
As when she's pleas'd to make them lords of truth:
Integrity of life is fame's best friend,
Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end.

The words 'great', 'lords', and 'crown' are not used carelessly, and, if the acknowledgement of the 'mother's right' in her child must be condemned as false to history and primogeniture, it can be 'ingeniously acquitted' as necessary for the completion of a significant dramatic design.

We may speak, as Webster did in the preface already quoted, of the 'ingenious structure of the scene'. His handling of Act-intervals shows the aptness of the phrase. At the end of Act I, for example, Antonio leads his 'fortune by the hand' to his marriage bed, and then Cariola speaks of the 'spirits' of greatness and woman, and of a 'fearful madness'. In the following scene, with the new Act nine months later, the foolish Castruchio is trying to appear an 'eminent fellow' and wants to know if the people will judge him to be one; he is told to 'couple' with an 'Old Lady' who paints to hide her face. Bosola says that they both pay for the 'sin' of their youth, and both misjudge:

Man stands amaz'd to see his deformity
In any other creature but himself.

They have nothing to say to his insults, and he dismisses them, having 'other work on foot':

I observe our duchess
Is sick o' days, she pukes …

The narrative of the previous scene has been dropped for a time, and all its particular concerns. But the new scene keeps its concluding sentiments in the memory of the audience, for comparison and contrast, bringing obvious folly and ambition, and natural behaviour, into the complex composition. This is not a direct comment by the author; the audience is left to discover the resemblances and differences for itself. It is like an antimasque, but one that follows rather than precedes its main action.

Webster's ingenious structure is accentuated verbally. This aspect of his art has often been noticed: various animals, birds and diseases, powdered hair, 'Quietus Est', anchorites, cannon, horsedung, poison, ruins, tombs, mines, eclipses, a glass-house, geometry, tythes, coal, and many other matters are mentioned in one scene and then in others, so helping to bind the composition together and suggesting ironies and revaluations. A chain of references to witchcraft illustrates this technique. In Act I, Ferdinand associates it with death, poison, and sexual attraction:

be not cunning:
For they whose faces do belie their hearts
Are witches, ere they arrive at twenty years—
Ay: and give the devil suck. (I.i.308-11)

In Act II, Bosola says a lady's closet would be suspected 'for a shop of witchcraft …', and then, later, the cardinal tells Ferdinand that his rage carries him:

As men convey'd by witches through the air,
On violent whirlwinds.
(II.V.50-1)

In the next scene there is a lengthy, yet energetic, digression as Ferdinand argues that witchcraft cannot force a man to love, and then, finally, 'The witchcraft lies in her rank blood'. It has become a synonym for the power of sex: Ferdinand's rage seems motivated by it and he is fascinated by it; women are said to minister to it; Ferdinand says it is in the veins of the duchess. In the next scene, Ferdinand almost brands his sister as a witch and then rushes from the stage:

When he hears that Antonio is the father of her children he says nothing at first; it is Delio who comments: 'In such a deformed silence, witches whisper Their charms'. When he visits his sister in the darkened prison she supposes that he has practised 'witchcraft' in leaving a dead man's hand in her grasp. In the last Act, the idea recurs with Julia who asks how Bosola has put a 'love-powder' in her drink to make her 'fall in love with such a face'. Ferdinand now speaks of innocence, justice, patience, 'beasts for sacrifice', hell, death, silence, warfare, 'The devil', and pain; after his sister's death he forgets witchcraft.

More general concepts, like madness, blood, death, silence, noise, virtue, nature, darkness, and light, similarly recur throughout the play. As much could be said of most tragedies, but Webster seems to have been particularly aware of the reiterations. So Ferdinand will only see his sister in the 'dark'; and after her death his 'eyes dazzle' at the sight of her, and he leaves to 'hunt the badger …, a deed of darkness'. For Bosola, the duchess returns momentarily from 'darkness' to reveal his own conscience as a 'black register'. Ferdinand now howls like a wolf at midnight; he has 'cruel sore eyes'; he knows that slaughter 'must be done i' th' dark', and that the 'day' may be lost. The cardinal knows, too, that the death of his sister must be hidden within his breast, as in a 'dark and obscure' grave. Antonio sees the duchess for a moment in a 'clear light', and Bosola, while recognizing another existence, sees his own world as a 'shadow, or deep pit of darkness'. Finally, Delio remembers that the 'sun shines' and the impression of eminent men can melt like the imprint of someone who had fallen in a frost: any brightness they had given was like a stain in snow. The reiterations are frequent but inconstant, varying restlessly and, sometimes, uneasily: they do not suggest the fulfilment of an ample pattern, but a prolonged engagement with both 'form and matter', an attempt to record all repercussions and to question all established positions.

Language

Webster's verbal artifice is incessant; nowhere else is his work so nearly over-cherished. During a performance the audience must either be held by strong, intelligent speech and so follow—or try to follow—the quick turns and deep allusions, or else it will lose contact and be left to understand intermittently.

The range of Webster's vocabulary and imagery is obvious. To this he added a subtlety derived from curious lore, and from mythology and emblematic traditions. He introduced elaborate similitudes that compare the devil to a 'rusty watch', or the duchess to a mouse. He used enumerations, apostrophes, antitheses, rhetorical questions, and many other figures of speech. As he loaded his dialogue with sententiae from other writers, so he 'wrote up' consistently: and the audience (and the actor beforehand) must strain to follow.

Yet this is not literary decoration. Besides accenting the structure of the play, the verbal elaboration is intervolved with each dramatic moment. (Webster is the rare dramatist who is obviously literary without ceasing to be wholly dramatic; once they have mastered it, actors delight in his language.) His puns illustrate this. Often words seem chosen for the sake of a quibble: 'dead wall', 'swing', 'executed', 'quicksilver'. Some seem always to awaken word-play, like 'blood' (lifeblood, lineage, passion) or 'will' and 'wilful'. But these tricks cannot be neglected without greatly simplifying or even falsifying the drama: they suggest a double level of consciousness in the speaker. Doubles entendres are concentrated at special points: in the public scenes between the duchess and Antonio to show their sexual instincts secretly or unthinkingly controlling their words, and, more remarkably, in Ferdinand's speeches almost every time he is on stage before his sister's death, giving even to some of his lightest talk a halfhidden sexual urgency. In a tragedy of love, such effects are crucial.

When Webster's dialogue is considered dramatically its theatrical life is evident, but it is no less difficult or ambitious. There are sudden surprises, giving an impression of reserves of excitement or power: 'You are my sister', 'Look you, the stars shine still'. Simple words suggest large realizations: 'You have parted with it now', 'Cover her face …'; or sudden irony, as in Bosola's 'I am very sorry' as the duchess is taken in labour, or Ferdinand's 'How is't, worthy Antonio?' when he considers him his sister's bawd; or a new simplicity or trust: 'Do not think of them', 'This good one that you speak of, is my husband'. There are rapid transitions, from 'We'll only lie, and talk together … keep us chaste', to the acceptance of 'O, let me shroud my blushes in your bosom …', from Ferdinand's sustained denunciation of Antonio to his curt judgement on his sister, and then to a slow self-pity:

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

Alternate speakers can be so far apart from each other as 'I am Duchess of Malfi still' from Bosola's reasonable answer, 'That makes thy sleeps so broken', and his following couplet.

The line of the dialogue—if we may liken speech in drama to drawing in a painting—the line is light and discontinuous, rapid or deliberate at will but neither persistently. The longer speeches usually accumulate power by numerous touches or seem to release it in a moment after a passage of uncertainty: the line has no regular, constructed development. Only in couplets and sententious utterances is it firm and straight; only occasionally, as in the stories of Reputation and the Salmon and the Dogfish or Bosola's 'meditation' and dirge, does it have a prolonged regularity. These variations have been called 'unnatural' and unnecessary, but in performance they prove their worth in strengthening, by momentarily simplifying, the composition: they are necessary 'fixes', or 'holds'. Nor are they isolated moments, but related to a tendency towards sententious speech in almost all the characters. The light and discontinuous line and the occasional, momentary regularity create a style wholly appropriate to a drama of interplay between passion and conscious thought, contrasts of appearance and truth, and interrelationships of characters who often try to live for themselves alone. Webster wished to show a fragmentary and disordered world and at the same time to suggest that some men conceived of a 'fix'd order' and a fame that outlasts death.

Viewpoint

Although Webster chose a simple, affecting story, his dramatization has perplexed and divided opinion. 'The most serious error that critics of Webster have committed', says Professor Ribner in his Jacobean Tragedy (1962), 'has been to regard him as a dramatist lacking in moral vision'. But a concern with such matters has not brought agreement. According to Ribner, Antonio's death proves 'the nobility of his endurance', and according to Professor Ornstein, in The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy (1960), his death is 'contemptible'. Una Ellis-Fermor thought that the cardinal 'redeems himself at the last' (Jacobean Drama (1936), but Dr Gunnar Boklund sees him revealed then as a 'coward', without 'even the redeeming feature of bravado'. To some critics the courtship of Antonio by the duchess is 'a charming idyll' (Ribner), but others say that 'the more we consider the Duchess, the more hints of guilt seem to appear' (C. Leech, John Webster (1951). Bosola is said to be more a chorus than a character; or, on the other hand, to show a development from illusion to self-knowledge. Ferdinand's madness is 'convincing' and 'unconvincing'; his motivation 'sexual', 'emblematic', 'routine', 'muddled'. Whether critics look for a 'moral vision' or consistent characterization, they do not often agree. Not all would subscribe to Professor Leech's temperate judgment [as expressed in 'An Addendum on Webster's Duchess', P.Q., xxxvii (1958)]:

in The Duchess we are pulled successively in different directions, and on the completion of our reading are likely to feel we have the task of constructing a whole of which Webster has given us the separate parts.

Some believe that the play would always 'ingeniously acquit itself.'

This disagreement should be expected. The main source offers conflicting judgements. The action is subtly planned. The dialogue is delicate and vexed. The play was intended for skilled performance in an intimate theatre, before a sophisticated audience. And we know that Webster worked arduously and persistently, and sought intractable issues: at the centre of his earlier tragedy was the dazzling incongruity of the 'White Devil'. From the beginning of The Duchess the audience is taught to look for contradictions, and to expect subtle resolutions:

if't chance
Some curs'd example poison't near the head…

Some such flashes superficially hang on him, for form; but
observe his inward character…

What appears in him mirth, is merely outside;…

… will seem to sleep o' th' bench
Only to entrap offenders in their answers;…

As I have seen some
Feed in a lord's dish, half asleep, not seeming
To listen to any talk; and yet these rogues
Have cut his throat in a dream…

Your darkest actions—nay, your privat'st thoughts—
Will come to light.
(I. i. 13-316)

The cardinal at one moment turns Bosola away and then, in private, recommends his preferment. Antonio is the duchess' steward who is sent a brief message by his mistress, and then her beloved. Contradictions span the whole play: Ferdinand tells his sister that it is a sin to remarry, and in Act IV calls her innocent; she doubts and then affirms a renewal of love in 'another world'; the cardinal seems 'fearless' and then falls helplessly, like a young hare.

What 'principle of unity' is there in this view of men and actions? First, an 'atmosphere', developing in the course of the tragedy: a dark sensationalism and menace, contrasted with softness, intrigue, madness, moral sayings. Around 1920 this was Webster's chief appeal; for Rupert Brooke, F. L. Lucas, and T. S. Eliot:

He knew that thought clings round dead limbs
Tightening its lusts and luxuries.
(T. S. Eliot, 'Whispers of Immortality')

Since then critics have searched rigorously for a unified 'moral vision', and have divided opinion; and this division points to the play's other unity. So does the play's style and structure. It is a unity of empirical, responsible, sceptical, unsurprised, and deeply perceptive concern for the characters and society portrayed.

This view sounds like a product of the 1960s, but it was also Jacobean. Webster's concern with 'secretest thoughts' is echoed in Bacon's essay 'Of Friendship', published in 1612: 'There be some whose lives are, as if they perpetually played upon a stage, disguised to all others, open only to themselves. But perpetual dissimulation is painful …' Webster was interested in pretence and self-deceit, changes and reversals of rôles, as modern writers are, and as Jonson was in Volpone, The Alchemist, or Epicoene, and Shakespeare in Iago, and as John Ford would be some twenty years afterwards. He did not question moral laws methodically like Donne in Biathanatos or Montaigne in 'An Apology of Raymond Sebond', but, with them and many others, he was sceptical of particular examples: regretfully his duchess contrasts man's restrictions to the freedom of 'birds that live in the fields'.

The originality of Webster's viewpoint is shown partly by his understanding acceptance of strange fantasies in thought and behaviour: in The Devil's Law Case, Jolenta is made conscious of this:

Oh my phantasticall sorrow!—Cannot I now
Be miserable enough, vnlesse I weare
A pyde fooles coat? Nay worse, for when our passions
Such giddy and vncertaine changes breed,
We are neuer well, till we are mad indeed.
(III. iii. 208-12)

It is also found in the moments of gentleness and clear thought which he gave to his giddy and dismal world, or in his sense of reality which made him place the last moments of his duchess—which, to Bosola, seemed like 'Heaven' opening—in the fourth Act, although he knew 'the last Act' should be the 'best i' th Play'; he saw the painful and inept attempts to accommodate such a death and recognized them as part of that death and necessary to the unity of his tragedy.

Characters

The main characters 'live' as if they played on a stage and tried, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, various disguises. Love, guilt, and disaster seem to direct them, fatefully, towards an hour when each must unmask. But there is no assurance that they end truthfully. Perhaps they immediately snatch another seemingly protective dissimulation and are never exposed to the audience's view. In performance the precise moment of truth, or moment in which truth is possible, will depend on the interpretations, personalities, and physiques of the actors: what must be ensured, if the tragedy is to be fully presented, is that the whole cast recognizes Webster's means of presenting his characters so that they 'live', so that the audience is made aware of their depths of consciousness and subconsciousness. The contradictions must be welcomed and a secret co-ordination maintained throughout each rôle.

Bosola is obviously complex. An observer might believe that 'he rails at those things which he wants'; but that is half the truth. Despite the energy of his railing and his service for Ferdinand, there is almost nothing he wants: his 'garb' of melancholy sits naturally upon him after his preferment, as before. He has served in the galleys 'for a notorious murder' and has become an isolated man. He takes as much, and as little, pleasure in describing his own corruption as the vices of anyone else. Nor does he only rail: he mocks Antonio but then praises him, and mocks him again and praises him again. His one constant development is a growth of pity and admiration for the duchess. This begins as irony in the second act, leads him to disguise himself with a vizor and then as a tombmaker and as the common bellman who seeks to save souls, and then as a presenter of a masque to celebrate love and death; and finally pity leads him, after he has been rejected by Ferdinand, to tears and repentance and the attempt to find some deed 'worth his dejection'. He has found something he needs; but he has not changed. He still dissimulates instinctively and murders; although the duchess 'haunts' him, his world is still 'gloomy' and 'fearful'. He knows what worthy men should do and that his 'is another voyage', to death; he dies, as he had lived, alone.

Bosola believed at one time that he wished to see Antonio 'Above all sights i' th' world', and yet he killed him on meeting: so far had Bosola been from controlling his actions and so far had Antonio failed to impress himself as the husband of the duchess. The brave horseman and upright steward fails to find words to answer his mistress' suit; he describes her movingly when they are separated at court, but when she declares her love he speaks of himself. He fails to confront Ferdinand when he seems to threaten his wife's life, and rather suspects Cariola of treachery. He knows that 'Man, like to cassia, is prov'd best, being bruis'd', and 'proves' himself by kissing 'colder' than 'holy anchorite', sounding his own danger, and riding off. He returns, attracted to the nets that are laid for him by hope of 'safety'; his wife's sorrow is clearly in his mind, but at the end he revalues life as a meaningless 'quest for greatness'. This may be truth after dissimulation, for it echoes the wooing scene when he recognized a 'saucy and ambitious devil' dancing in the ring which the duchess put upon his finger. Wishing that his son should 'fly the courts of princes' may be his deepest response. Bosola may have been right: drawn to danger by ambition, beauty, and the excitement of mastering his horse, Antonio may have been, at a deeper level, 'drawn to fear'.

The cardinal is proud, reserved, resourceful: the obvious contradictions in his rôle—moralist and lecher; prelate and soldier—seem fully under his control. But he is 'weary' as well as active; and his imagination can hold him in terror by the side of his fish-ponds or in speculation about the fire of hell. He had seemed fearless, but then gives way to panic. When Bosola sees this, he believes the cardinal's 'greatness was only outward'. But adversity reveals more resources: 'Help me, I am your brother', and, when this cry is ignored, a concern with justice and payment.

Too much and too little attention has been given to Ferdinand's incestuous excitement. Too little because the critics have often missed his sexual puns and the sudden flashes of his speech, and the series of allusions to witchcraft. Usually his sexual imagery, the irrationality of his rage, his 'Damn her! that body of hers …' in response to the suggestion that she should have a penitential garment 'next to her delicate skin', and his concluding, 'My sister! O! my sister! there's the cause on't', have been considered the main indications of this motivation. And sometimes it has been dismissed as irrelevant to the tragedy, or insufficiently worked into its development. But it is precisely when these hints are considered within the play as a whole that Webster's intentions become clear: a hidden motivation for Ferdinand is in keeping with the general mode of characterization. It is like the characterization of other plays, too: the incestuous hints between Cesario and his sister in Fair Maid of the Inn, I. i, which verbally echoThe Duchess, III. ii, Clare's strange behaviour in A Cure for a Cuckold which is not explained until IV. ii when she confesses her hidden desire for Bonvile (a scene which again echoes The Duchess), and Jolenta's strange confession in The Devil's Law Case of being 'bewitched' to be plighted to Ercole (I. ii. 253-60) which is not resolved until the last scene when she silently accepts this man whom she thought she did not love.

Too much attention has been paid to Ferdinand's hidden desire, in that it has been allowed to obscure his inward pain and deep sense of guilt. His response to news of his sister's child is not all rage, sexual fantasy, and frustration. There are tears and, after his resolve to 'seem the thing I am not', the simple words, revaluing the whole scene:

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. 63-6)

It is this, and not his fury, which makes the cardinal ask, 'Are you stark mad?' Immediately his sexual fantasy is released again and then, surprisingly, he resolves not to stir until he knows who 'leaps' his sister. The next scene, at Malfi, when Ferdinand is said to bear himself 'right dangerously', shows him again holding back, and he acknowledges all the 'quicksands' of the world within himself. In his sister's bed-chamber he tells her to 'die', but then to 'pursue her wishes'; he refuses to see her lover because he is 'now persuaded' it would 'damn' them both; he tells a tale of Reputation and like an 'apparition' flees from his sister's 'beauty' vowing never to see her again. Ferdinand is motivated by pain and guilt, although this is only once explicit in words, as well as by pride and desire. After he has tortured the duchess with madmen and ordered her death, his acknowledgement of her innocence, his attempt to cover up the 'main cause' for seeking her death, the value he puts on 'pardon' for Bosola, his refusal to see him again, and his incipient madness in a cry for darkness, all speak pain and guilt. So does his lunacy, raging like a wolf and studying patience, seeking solitariness and condemning the world for 'flattery and lechery'. So does his whispering about the 'quiet death' of strangulation, and his last entry calling for a fight and assuring others that bodily pain is insignificant: 'The pain's nothing: pain many times is taken away with the apprehension of greater'. His last speech acknowledges his sister as the 'cause' of his fall, and speaks, too, of the enduring diamond and of laceration by one's own dust. Once Webster's means of presenting the inward nature of his characters is recognized, Ferdinand's motivation is revealed as the strongest and most unequivocal in the play: perhaps it had to be so, because of its subconscious origin and force.

The duchess herself has been copiously praised: her intelligence and sensuality, and the tender and outward movement of her imagination; her discretion and rashness; her pride, simplicity, and submission to 'heaven's scourge-stick'. The encomiums are easy and warrantable: and also inconsistent. Moreover, it can be argued that Webster approved, or that he disapproved, of her neglect of rule, her lies and 'jesting with religion', her base, secret, and second marriage: there is no clear judgement in the play, only that Bosola and Ferdinand at last declare her to be innocent. But for the audience, as for these characters, the contradictions are lost to sight in recognition of a certain and absolute effect. Here, perhaps, is a typical Websterian conceit. From majesty that woos and virtue that may 'seem the thing it is not', there is a development, through adversity, to a majesty in suffering and a natural virtue. In 'obedience', kneeling, and a desire for sleep in death—in submission—the duchess reveals her strength and power over others. At first the irreconcilable demands of greatness and womanhood showed, to Cariola's eyes, a 'fearful madness': now the madness is all around her and she herself appears to be deeply at peace. She is still the same woman—proud, instinctive, passionate, intelligent—but stripped of her obvious greatness she has been 'proved' great: she has lost everything and nothing. It is very difficult to describe her characterization: hesitantly, for it sounds callow, we might argue that the Duchess of Malfi had to submit in order to rule. But certainly the main effect of the tragedy is the terror, pity, and admiration aroused by her death.

Effect

Many details have to be held in the mind in order to discuss Webster's characters. And, indeed, there is a careful ingenuity in every element of the writing—all except one, which is not verbal: the large and sweeping impression of the play in performance.

In the first three Acts, crowded court scenes alternate with private scenes. The focus moves incessantly, illuminating briefly a whole court, groups, couples, individuals; no one person holds the stage for long. The birth of the first child in Act II is attended by alarms and followed by a still darkness. In Act III the flight from Malfi leads the duchess and her husband to the open country where they separate and the duchess becomes a prisoner. In Act IV, the prison provides the one consistent setting and a steady dramatic focus: it is dark, and alternately frighteningly still and frighteningly wild. The duchess dies separated from everyone she loves or knows. Then the last Act is a mixture of slow cunning and sudden moves. Entries seem timed by some manipulating fate: there is a sharp decisiveness ('O, my fate moves swift!'), an elaborate involvement ('you'll find it impossible To fly your fate'), and a contrivance ('Such a mistake as I have often seen In a play'). In a tragedy where appearances and judgements change like quick-silver, and the plot has many by-paths and hesitations, and some irreducible contradictions (the neglect of the son of the first marriage and, perhaps, Bosola's long failure to find the duchess' husband), the simple eloquence of the shape of the action is especially impressive. The dramatist's silent handling seems to have something like a 'meaning' : a suggestion that the duchess had to die, and her impermanent world to be destroyed.

And, briefly, in the last silent homage to the son of the duchess, there is a hint that men may, perhaps, wish for some renewal and order….