SOURCE: Mulryne, J. R. “The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi.” In Jacobean Theatre, edited by John Russell Brown, pp. 201-25. London: Edward Arnold, 1960.

[In the essay below, Mulryne maintains that Webster mockingly repudiates the revenge tragedy form in The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, asserting that in these plays Webster intentionally creates a world of “moral and emotional anarchy.”]

After Shakespeare's plays, Webster's tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, are more often produced today than the work of any other Jacobean dramatist. In some ways this continued popularity is difficult to explain, for, while The Duchess of Malfi might possibly command unthinking and even sentimental esteem, The White Devil challenges and disturbs far more than it flatters. We can adjust ourselves readily enough to so narrow and intense a loathing as emerges from Tourneur's plays for example, because we can stand against it and see it objectively. But Webster succeeds in coming so close to our sympathy, by his evident delight in the figures and the world he creates, that we are forced to come to terms with the experience he offers us. It may be, however, that The White Devil has remained popular at the expense of disregard for an important part of what it has to communicate, and some emphasis on the neglected part is required. As for The Duchess of Malfi, the need is not for a new approach, but for distinguishing what that tragedy has to offer us as dramatic poetry.

It is usual to speak of The White Devil as a play evoking an emotional response that is deep and full ill-defined. Much may be said in support of this view. The effect seems to be achieved largely through the iteration of broadly evocative words—devil, hell, blood, lightning, storm, whirlwind, fury, thunder, death—in a setting that moves between furtive midnight situations and the splendour of Princes' courts, the pageantry of a Papal election, or the formal dignity of a court of law. Wide use is also made of religious terminology, and such socio-religious concepts as ‘charity’ and ‘justice’ are frequently employed as broad emotional counters. Animals associated with violence—wolf, lion, pole-cat—are constantly named, while adjectives such as ‘black’, ‘dark’, ‘horrid’ are used for their emotive potency. And it is true that we often carry away with us from reading or seeing the tragedy some few vivid emotional impressions—of Vittoria's magnificent self-assertion in the face of all odds, of Isabella's meek devotion, of the deep and courageous agnosticism that enfolds the last act of the play. But to be content with these observations is to do scant justice to an alert, agile, and restless intelligence that deeply qualifies the experience the tragedy offers us.

If we examine Webster's metaphoric use of language we will discover, as Eliot has remarked, that it affords close comparisons with that of the metaphysical poets. Brachiano's words to Vittoria, whom he believes fickle, are a good example:

                                        Thy loose thoughtes
Scatter like quicke-silver.

(IV. ii. 101)

Here a very considerable imaginative energy is at work compelling a new fact, making available a new experience, out of two previously separate facts. But the language is rarely under such pressure as this. Much more characteristic is the use of illustrative analogy:

CAMILLO.
The Duke your maister visits me—I thanke him,
And I perceave how like an earnest bowler
Hee very passionatelie leanes that way,
He should have his boule runne.
FLAMINEO.
I hope you do not thinke—
CAMILLO.
That noble men boule bootie? Faith his cheeke
Hath a most excellent Bias, it would faine
Jumpe with my mistris.

(I. ii. 61)

These lines indicate a mind that is alert, observant, witty, an intellect that is notably agile. Even more characteristic is a certain cerebral ingenuity, a reaching out for comparisons to areas of experience not at all obviously related, and by their very unrelatedness and their (often) ‘unpoetic’ associations bringing to the image a bizarre effect. So Lodovico comments on Zanche:

Marke her I prethee, shee simpers like the suddes
A Collier hath bene washt in.

(V. iii. 248)

Here the ingenuity is arguably legitimate; it subserves a definite poetic purpose. On other occasions it evokes only amused surprise:

Come, come my Lord, untie your foulded thoughts,
And let them dangle loose as a bride's haire.

(IV. i. 1)

It is the bizarre note that is dominant here. We are astonished and amused at the feat performed in seeing the two subjects as at all related, rather than made more keenly aware of the situation upon which comment is being offered. This is the vice to which an intellect such as Webster's, as discovered in this play, is peculiarly subject.

The play's versification gives us some further insight into Webster's sensibility, or rather into that dramatic arrest of it that is The White Devil. The blank verse line can attain a freedom from the constraint of metrical domination that places it far from the characteristic verse of Marlowe or even of Chapman, and recalls Donne's handling of metrical cadence. The rhythms of the speaking voice, vigorous, disorderly and at times breathlessly animated, override the metric pattern, and verse slides easily into prose, often the hurried prose of a Flamineo. The sense conveyed is one of unordered activity. Together with that restless intellect, it epitomizes an important part of the experience offered by The White Devil.

If we examine the play in more specific terms, we shall discover how the type of mind we have been speaking of affected its construction, its moral outlook and emotional tone. Given the events of his tragedy, Webster could so have handled them as to confirm the values of the traditional Revenge play, involving an appeal to our sense of pity and of outraged humanity at the murders committed. This would have allowed a simple moral viewpoint from which to order our attitude to his characters. But he has the murders of Camillo and Isabella enacted in dumb show, distancing the events from our sympathy, any incipient pity we may feel for Isabella, a response already unlikely in the weird midnight setting, is immediately deflated by Brachiano's absurdly businesslike comment:

Excellent, then shee's dead.

(II. ii. 24)

Camillo's death is also effectively insulated from our pity. The Conjurer's introductory words come close to burlesque:

Strike louder musicke from this charmed ground,
To yeeld, as fits the act, a Tragicke sound.

(II. ii. 36)

And again Brachiano's comment is laconic:

'Twas quaintly done …

(II. ii. 38)

The same amused repudiation of pity is made explicit on the appearance of Isabella's ghost. Francisco begins by disbelieving its actuality, a response common enough, but goes on:

                                        remove this object—
Out of my braine with't! what have I to do
With tombes, or death-beds, funerals, or teares,
That have to meditate upon revenge? (Exit Ghost
So now 'tis ended, like an old wives story.

(IV. i. 116)

And it is not only the simple values of the traditional Revenge play that Webster repudiates as unsuited to vindication in his tragedy. His sensibility demanded the creation of a world in which no set of values is shown as the ‘right’ one, no attitude as intrinsically better than any other; a world of, in the most literal sense, moral and emotional anarchy.

The first act of the play establishes this immediately and powerfully. The ceremonious opening of the second scene is a brief moment of security (when the accepted values of a polite and ordered society seem to be operant) between the disorder of scene one—Lodovico's headlong bitterness in collision with the equivocal politic ‘good sense’ of Antonelli and Gasparo—and the more involved disorder of scene two. The whispers of Brachiano and Flamineo very quickly mine that opening security. If its values were replaced by Brachiano's illicit infatuation, its depth suggested by that

Quite lost, Flamineo

we could probably make the substitution with some composure. But Flamineo's cynicism cuts clean across Brachiano's idealizing of love, making it impossible for us to accord it our full esteem. And after the logical and theatrical complexity of the gulling of Camillo, the ‘set piece’ with which the scene ends is a fine dramatic embodiment of the anarchy the play deals in. Even the pair, Vittoria and Brachiano, at the centre of the stage are far from being in accord. Brachiano's infatuation is as deep and inarticulate as at the scene's opening, but it is met, not by answering passion, but by Vittoria's pert and self-possessed replies:

                                                            Sir in the way of pittie
I wish your hart-hole.

and

Sure Sir a loathed crueltie in Ladyes
Is as to Doctors many funeralls:
It takes away their credit.(1)

(I. ii. 198)

Vittoria is given to self-advancement, not passion. And this central disaccord undergoes comment from two very different sources, Flamineo on one side of the stage, and Cornelia on the other. Flamineo lecherously interprets what passes, his words like a snigger:

BRACHIANO.
                                                                      I will but change
My Jewell for your Jewell.
FLAMINEO.
                                                                                          Excellent,
His Jewell for her Jewell, well put in Duke.
BRACHIANO.
Nay let me see you weare it.
VITTORIA.
                                                                                          Here sir?
BRACHIANO.
Nay lower, you shall weare my Jewell lower.
FLAMINEO.
That's better, she must weare his Jewell lower.

(I. ii. 213)

And Cornelia's denunciation further complicates this chaos of attitudes. Her words, though in themselves mere cliché, are given immense weight by the coup de théâtre as she steps forward among the unsuspecting group:

BRACHIANO.
Be Dukedome, health, wife, children, friends and all.
CORNELIA.
Woe to light hearts!—they still forerun our fall!

(l. 258)

The rhyme gives the force of an irresistible conclusion. Zanche flees before it and Vittoria acknowledges it by her almost abject pleading: ‘Dearest mother heare me. …’

Cornelia's view has its moment of triumph as she brings before the others' minds the presence they are, as she asserts, wronging, that of Isabella. Their words tail off into the frayed ends of speech. But in a few lines Cornelia's attitude is itself completely overthrown by Flamineo's inversion of all accepted moral standards and normal human feelings:

I would the common'st Courtezan in Rome,
Had bene my mother rather then thy selfe …
Lycurgus wondred much, men would provide
Good stalions for their Mares, and yet would suffer
Their faire wives to be barren—

(I. ii. 328)

Cornelia in her turn can only flee before its inverted integrity, crying, ‘Misery of miseries!’

In reading or seeing the first act we will have been aware not only of the moral chaos it embodies, but also of a current of humour that is never far from the surface. Certainly Brachiano's tense appetite or Lodovico's bitterness or Cornelia's moral fervour are serious and compelling enough. But the introduction into scene two of the elaborate gulling of Camillo, springing from the same sort of delight in complicated deceit that informs many Jacobean comedies of intrigue² (and becomes both more refined and less vigorous in the following century), is the first appearance of a humour that is never absent for more than a few lines. It is the product of a restless intelligence that rarely ceases to mock every serious value, every impressive situation or striking pose, every ‘affirmation’ that the tragedy has to offer us. We have sensed its presence already in the handling of the Revenge Play convention and it constantly modifies our response, even to that most memorable of scenes, the trial of Vittoria. Here too, for all its pageantry, and for all Monticelso's careful preparations, the same irrepressible humour is only just under the surface. It appears overtly both before and after the arraignment, in Flamineo's mock trial with the Lawyer, and in his feigned madness. Both to some extent burlesque the judicial proceedings (as does the Lawyer's pompous jargon) and both impress upon us what we already know, that Vittoria is guilty of incontinence. But this is what it is the court's business to decide. And so we watch the passionate self-assertion of Vittoria, Brachiano's magnificent gestures and the thwarted anger of Francisco with something of amused detachment in our response. The amusement reaches its peak after sentence has been passed and Vittoria utters her absurd cry:

A rape, a rape!
MONTICELSO.
                                                  How?
VITTORIA.
                                                                      Yes you have ravisht justice,
Forc't her to do your pleasure.

(III. ii. 285)

We are not only amused but incredulous. We feel something of the same amused detachment in the quarrel scene between Brachiano and Vittoria. We are aware that all the passionate speeches, accusation and counter-accusation, Vittoria's repentance and Brachiano's, their return to their accustomed wickedness, are built upon the shifting sands of Francisco's deceit. And much the same may be said of the gulling of Lodovico in Act IV. We cannot respond with anything like complete seriousness to his change of heart from villainy to honesty, and back to villainy, for we are unsure of Monticelso's sincerity and we know certainly of Francisco's knavery. An elusive but unmistakable current of humour is made to play about almost every scene and incident; it sets at a distance the anarchy the play embodies and yet in some ways intensifies it, for it is utterly corrosive of any value that would seem about to stem the tide of anarchy and give us a resting place for our sympathy.

One character, Flamineo, comes close to being simply an embodiment of this temper. No situation, no character, and no value remains invulnerable to the exercise of his eloquent, cynical wit. His comments forced us to modify our response to the meeting between Vittoria and Brachiano in I. ii; he performs the same function in the House of Convertites scene and before the arraignment. Even the ‘grave Leiger Ambassadors’, otherwise wholly serious figures, undergo the searching and distorting glance of his mockery; no gravity could sustain the maliciously precise imagery of:

He carries his face in's ruffe, as I have seene a serving-man carry glasses in a cipres hat-band, monstrous steddy for feare of breaking—He lookes like the claw of a blacke-bird, first salted and then broyled in a candle.

(III. i. 76)

Thus the Spanish Ambassador is epitomized, as Camillo and Vittoria had been before him. But the most astonishing piece of mockery on which Flamineo engages—the most astonishing on which a tragic dramatist could have him engage—is when in Act V he pretends to the experience of dying, a mockery of the last reality. He is persuaded of the treachery of Vittoria and Zanche as soon as they discharge the pistols, but is nevertheless allowed to indulge in an orgy of imagined suffering; it is appropriately grotesque:

                                        O I smell soote,
Most stinking soote, the chimneis a-fire,
My liver's purboil'd like scotch holly-bread;
There's a plumber laying pipes in my guts, it scalds.

Immediately after the imagined torture he rises and remarks:

O cunning Devils! now I have tri'd your love,
And doubled all your reaches. I am not wounded:
                                                                                                                        (Flamineo riseth.)
The pistols held no bullets: 'twas a plot …

(V. vi. 142 ff.)

Up till this point the audience believes with Vittoria that Flamineo is mortally wounded. Its expectations are abruptly deflated—as they were in the dumb-show scene. In the midst of an act of death and confrontations of death the incident is not far removed from burlesque. Upon reflection it will become clear how fantastic was the impulse that drove Webster to write it. The darkness of the last act is shot with a ray of mockery, and a strand of bizarre amusement penetrates our response to the contemplation of death offered there.

One characteristic of Flamineo's wit deserves emphasis. Consider his excited delight in Doctor Julio:

O thou cursed antipathy to nature—looke, his eye's bloud-shed like a needle a Chirurgeon stitcheth a wound with—let me embrace thee toad, & love thee O thou abhominable lothsome gargarisme, that will fetch up lungs, lights, heart, and liver by scruples.

(II. i. 303)

The word that immediately springs to mind is ‘grotesque’. We use it, not only because the language employed links areas of thought and sensation in most unusual relationships, but because the attitudes represented lie very close to the extremity of our experience. The grotesque invites our laughter and as soon quenches it in a sense of baffled surprise. The laughter of Flamineo cannot therefore play the role that laughter most often plays in drama, the role of a normative agent. Such a function would be inappropriate to the world of this play, where no norm is proposed. Flamineo's wit is, indeed, peculiarly sterile (the use of ‘abhominable’ in the passage quoted is suggestive). It has the effect much more of making us uneasy, of unsettling our response, than of adjusting it.

Flamineo has more than once been described as simply a mouthpiece for Webster, and with reason. For the same delight that went into creating him—there is no mistaking the superabundant vitality of his language—and into his amused mockery of others shows itself again in the dramatist's handling of several situations in the play. We have mentioned already the scenes in which Lodovico, Brachiano, and Vittoria repent and turn again to wrongdoing, their virtuous (and Lodovico's vicious) sentiments made equally hollow by being based upon nothing firmer than Francisco's deceit. Something of the same delight emerges from the play's use of hypocrisy. One thinks of such incidents as the extraordinary dialogue at the opening of Act IV when the ‘innocent’ Francisco develops his high-minded platitudes, while Monticelso takes upon himself to urge on him the Machiavellian course of action he fully intends. And there is that other scene (V. vi) of extended hypocrisy as Flamineo, and then Vittoria and Zanche, pretend to a selfless loyalty to the memory of Brachiano. (Flamineo is even allowed to reverse his attitude completely and explicitly within thirty lines—see lines 3 and 32-3.) But the most surprising hypocrisy in the play concerns the meek and, one would have expected, entirely undeceitful Isabella. She accepts with resignation Brachiano's angry repudiation of their marriage (II. i. 195-206) but, fearing that the separation might bring about war between her brother and her husband, she acts on Francisco's return as if she had reproached Brachiano, rather than he her. Lines 255-65 are a precise parody, complete with comic exaggeration, of the earlier lines, with Isabella taking over Brachiano's words and he hers. The absurd nature of the situation is pressed home on us by Isabella's virtuosity in cursing Vittoria:

To dig the strumpets eyes out, let her lye
Some twenty monethes a-dying, to cut off
Her nose and lippes, pull out her rotten teeth, …

Francisco's comment adds thefinal touch of humour:

Now by my birth you are a foolish, mad,
And jealous woman.

(II. i. 248-67)

No more unapt description of Isabella could easily be imagined; all her words are an outrageous parody of her true feelings. A similar mocking delight in the brittleness of attitude emerges, in particularly excited terms, from III. iii, where Flamineo and Lodovico deliberately agree to adopt an attitude of ‘genteel melancholy’, and then Lodovico drops his assumed guise for its opposite as soon as he hears of his pardon. None of these incidents is employed principally to forward the plot, or to give insight into character—the usual functions of hypocrisy on the Jacobean stage. They are simply further strands in the texture of mockery that Webster weaves about the events of his tragedy.

Another aspect of that mockery concerns itself with single words and concepts. We are often quite uncertain how much weight to give to words that represent familiar values. In the Trial scene, for example, the words ‘charity’ or ‘uncharity’, ‘justice’ and ‘injustice’ are bandied about from side to side without ever taking real roots in meaning. The insecurity behind such words is a necessary corollary of the world of moral chaos Webster discovers to us. But insecurity gives way at times to something much closer to mockery. In Act V, for example, Zanche reveals that Brachiano, just murdered by Lodovico and Francisco, had been responsible for Isabella's death. Lodovico is delighted that their deed has been ‘justified’. But Francisco regards his delight as mere sentimental naïveté:

Tush for Justice!
What harmes it Justice?

(V. iii. 277)

The concept has been so drained of meaning that the absurd question seems to make sense. The meaning of ‘charity’ undergoes an even more evident mockery. Lodovico and Gasparo, surprised by the returning company at their work of devilish hatred mouthing curses over the dying Brachiano, cover their dismay with:

                              for charitie,
For Christian charitie, avoid the chamber.

(V. iii. 173)

No more complete distortion of a word's meaning is possible. The impulse that led Webster to choose that particular form of words at that particular moment is comparable for its fantastic humour to the incident of Flamineo's counterfeiting of death.

There is one moment at which Webster appears to break through the texture of dramatic illusion, in order to concentrate all the separate beams of this mockery. It occurs during Francisco's soliloquy in IV. i. Banishing the figure of Isabella's ghost from his mind, he turns to the job in hand:

Come, to this waighty businesse.
My Tragedy must have some idle mirth in't,
Else it will never passe. I am in love,
In love with Corombona; …

(l. 122)

Here the dramatist is offering an unambiguous comment upon the whole revenge narrative with which his play purports to deal. ‘Idle mirth’ and the lilting cadence of ‘I am in love / In love with Corombona’ establish the ironic tone of ‘waighty’ in the first line. This is the extreme point to which mockery can go; it extends to reflecting on the seriousness of writing the drama itself.

Webster's restless, mocking intelligence is a presence that is continually modifying the great and passionate events his narrative offered him. There is indeed a constant tension in this play between an impulse that creates, and one that criticizes, making the experience it communicates a more complex one than has generally been allowed. The success it enjoys is precarious. It takes a delight in thwarting our readiest impulses—those most viable in the theatre—and deflating the values we have always accepted; one can sympathize with the bewilderment of that first audience so unceremoniously handled in the Preface to the play. And yet, though precarious and disturbing, a full response to The White Devil is a rewarding experience. For the tragedy succeeds in embodying within the dramatic form, even if hazardously, a sensibility composed of such apparently incompatible impulses. It is a success Webster was never able to repeat, and we may look in vain among Jacobean plays for a tragedy that both disturbs and exalts in quite the same fashion.

In the above discussion we have done no more than mention that act which many have found the most impressive in the play. Act V is largely an examination of the attitudes forced on individuals by the one inescapable fact in the play's chaotic world, the fact of death. But even here Webster refuses to draw us clear of mockery. We have referred already to Flamineo's preposterous charade of dying; we may add his ‘interview’ with Brachiano's ghost, its tone poised nicely between mockery, aggressiveness, and fear. And there are the astonishing Flamineo-Zanche and Francisco-Zanche ‘love’ episodes to distort, and in the distortion to parody, any sympathetic impressions of romantic love we may still cherish. All possible ironies are also drawn out of the disguise assumed by the avengers, and Webster deliberately strengthens them by giving Flamineo several speeches—his only sincerely complimentary speeches in the whole play—to descant on the impostors' prowess or virtue. Most striking of all is the incident of the feigned Capuchins at Brachiano's deathbed, when the Church's stately Latin formulae are read, only to be burlesqued by a similarly antiphonal chant, but now of savage glee, as Lodovico and Gasparo exult over the dying man.

It is against such a background that the various reactions to death must be seen. To isolate from its context the self-assertion of Vittoria or Flamineo, for instance, and to advance it as representative of the play's way of seeing death, is to damage severely the complex nature of this act. That self-assertion is as much the momentary product of the chaotic and deceit-ridden circumstances of Webster's world as master over them. T. S. Eliot's phrase ‘cheering oneself up’³ as descriptive of the Stoic defiance of death is only inappropriate here in that it suggests a reaction far too leisurely and deliberate to describe adequately Vittoria's and Zanche's courage, a courage forced out of despair. Behind Vittoria's brave words:

                              Yes I shall wellcome death
As Princes doe some great Embassadors;
Ile meete thy weapon halfe way.

(V. vi. 220)

we cannot forget her hurried desperation when Flamineo first threatened her, nor his grotesque counterfeiting of death, and all the ironies of that play with the pistols. Yet sanctioned by some of Webster's most deeply felt poetry, there is undoubtedly a sense of clearer air here, of freedom from all the deceit and the hypocrisy, if only for a moment. Webster rarely comes so close to offering us an unconditional affirmative.

Flamineo's death is rather more characteristic of what we have come to recognize as the dominant tone of this play. It would be surprising if the equivocal humour we associate with him did not qualify to some extent that proud invitation:

Search my wound deeper: tent it with the steele
That made it.

(V. vi. 239)

One should hesitate to attribute to ‘bad workmanship’ the mere garrulity of his two last speeches, compared with Vittoria's concise last words. And the note of mockery, of an irony that offers comment upon the virtuous commonplaces on his lips, should at least be suspected in: ‘'Tis well yet there's some goodnesse in my death’ (V. vi. 269). Throughout he has been simply a voice, eloquent, witty, mocking, and it is therefore supremely fitting that he should convey his experience of death in these terms:

                                        I have caught
An everlasting could. I have lost my voice
Most irrecoverably.

(V. vi. 270)

Whereas Vittoria, and to some extent Flamineo, rose for a moment at death above the insecurities of their world, Brachiano's madness is a mental disorder that can but echo the disordered world of which he has formed part. His delusions play about those two aims, the satisfaction of lust and monetary gain, which have driven men to activity in it, and the humorous overtones of madness (to a Jacobean audience) have the effect of burlesque: it sees and does not see, confounds ‘Deepe Sence with follie’ (V.iii.74). Cornelia's madness is of a different kind, evidence of a retreat from the disordered universe before her. She is utterly uncomprehending when one of her sons kills the other:⁴ ‘Why here's no body shall get any thing by his death’ (V. ii. 30). She had at least expected the motive of personal gain to lie behind action in Brachiano's court. Flamineo had not even that motive, and so her bewilderment overturns her brain. Her (for the most part) exquisite dirge ‘Call for the Robin-Red-brest and the wren, …’ suggests one way of escaping disorder; but it is escape and not confrontation or solution.

The play ends with Giovanni. We have seen him three times before:⁵ in II. i when his precocious chivalry almost succeeded in reconciling Brachiano to Isabella; after the arraignment when he announced his mother's death to Francisco; and in V. iv when as newly created Duke he banished Flamineo from his presence. On all three occasions he is represented as a sympathetic figure, escaping the deceit and mockery of his world. He could well have been used in the last scene, therefore, to enforce a sense of a new order appearing, after the disorder of ‘these bad times’. Certainly an intention of this kind can be drawn out of his words, but the emphasis upon it is slight. What is most striking about his last speech of conventional moralizing is its perfunctoriness:

Remove the bodies—see my honoured Lord,
What use you ought make of their punishment.
Let guilty men remember their blacke deedes
Do leane on crutches, made of slender reedes.

(V. vi. 300)

The very lack of emphasis on the idea of a new order, and the near-nonchalance of that word ‘use’, suggest that Webster did not wish to enforce any sense of a coming health. His imaginative perception of disorder was too keen to bear so easy a compromise.

The Duchess of Malfi is a less challenging play than The White Devil, if on its own terms more satisfying and complete. Much of the earlier play's tense exuberance has gone, replaced by a more leisurely manner, and a dramatic style that achieves its effects in many scenes by a very close approach to naturalism. This ease of statement is made possible by the acceptance of an easily identifiable social and moral viewpoint, with reference to which each of the characters may be judged. The social norm operates principally in terms of a well-run state, where reward follows upon desert, and the moral norm appears chiefly in terms of constancy in sexual relations and openness in other dealings. Throughout the play we are never left in doubt as to our evaluation of any action; the steadiness of tone Bosola can assume in Act IV is evidence of this:

The Office of Justice is perverted quite
When one Thiefe hangs another.

(IV. ii. 329)

or in the last Act:

                    when thou kill'dst thy sister,
Thou tookst from Justice her most equall ballance,
And left her naught but her sword.

(V. v. 52)

Francisco's ‘Tush for Justice’ would be quite out of place here. When death comes, each character dies acknowledging the ill he has done. He acknowledges, that is, a principle above and beyond himself, in contrast to Flamineo's ‘Noe, at my selfe I will begin and end’ (V. vi. 258).

It is at the Duchess's own death that we have most firmly impressed upon us the sense of man as a small frail creature, very far from commanding his universe—a sense entirely alien to the purely human-directed and human-centered activity of The White Devil:

BOSOLA.
Thou art a box of worme-seede, at best, but a salvatory of greene mummey: what's this flesh? a little cruded milke, phantasticall puffe-paste: our bodies are weaker then those paper prisons boyes use to keepe flies in: more contemptible: since ours is to preserve earth-wormes: didst thou ever see a Larke in a cage? such is the soule in the body: this world is like her little turfe of grasse, and the Heaven ore our heades, like her looking glasse, onely gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compasse of our prison.

(IV. ii. 123)

Some lines later the Duchess is strangled:

Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength,
Must pull downe heaven upon me:
Yet stay, heaven gates are not so highly arch'd
As Princes pallaces—they that enter there
Must go upon their knees.

(IV. ii. 237)

It is not emotionally unacceptable that she should die with explicit Christian humility, the attitude at the opposite pole from stoic self-assertion. In this play the courage that is born of despair gives way to a meek yet resolute acceptance of death. Man is by no means made despicable in his dying, but he is securely ‘placed’ here in relation to his environment, and to a Fate that is never defined but is always a powerfully felt presence.⁶ The whole temper of the play lends itself far less easily to posturing or to grandiose statement than did that of The White Devil. It is the product of a sensibility that is more chastened, more aware of suffering, less tense and excited than that which governed the earlier play.

The tragedy's peculiar tone is indeed deeply influenced by the quiet, uninsistent rhythms of conversation—in the betrothal scene, or the scene in the Cardinal's lodgings at Rome, or again the bedchamber scene in Act III, or the desultory jesting of part of the first scene, or that other scene of aimless jest about Count Malatesta (III. iii). One often senses in fact a self-critical intelligence behind the words on the page, checking any tendency to false rhetoric, deflating over-emphatic statement or posturing. In its simplest manifestation this takes the form of an enquiring comment upon one character's words by another. During the first scene, for example, after Antonio has over-praised the Duchess at length and in good set terms, Delio remarks:

                                                            Fye Antonio,
You play the wire-drawer with her commendations.

(l. 210)

The same watchfulness is evident in this short exchange:

FERDINAND.
He that can compass me, and know my drifts,
May say he hath put a girdle 'bout the world,
And sounded all her quick-sands.
BOSOLA.
I doe not
Thinke so.
FERDINAND.
What doe you thinke then, pray?
BOSOLA.
That you
Are your owne Chronicle too much: and grosly
Flatter your selfe.

(III. i. 104)

This command of tone is at work throughout; its effect is to bring events closer to our sympathy than those of almost any other Jacobean play.

There are at least two occasions on which this self-critical intelligence is used with a sensitivity that makes for dramatic genius. Bosola in dying takes over the role of moral interpreter, summing up for us the play's lessons with calm detachment:

                                                            Fare you well—
It may be paine: but no harme to me to die,
In so good a quarrell: Oh this gloomy world,
In what a shadow, or deepe pit of darknesse,
Doth (womanish, and fearefull) mankind live!
Let worthy mindes nere stagger in distrust
To suffer death, or shame, for what is just—
Mine is another voyage.

(V. v. 122)

Those last four words, simple, direct, and immediately evocative of this particular human predicament, coming upon the rhymed and sententious couplet, are an outstanding dramatic realization. Even more impressive is one of the Duchess's last speeches:

What would it pleasure me, to have my throate cut
With diamonds? or to be smothered
With Cassia? or to be shot to death, with pearles?
I know death hath ten thousand severall doores
For men, to take their Exits: and 'tis found
They go on such strange geometrically hinges,
You may open them both wayes: any way, (for heaven sake)
So I were out of your whispering.

(IV. ii. 222)

Here the sudden drop from an exalted, generalized contemplation of death, to a sense of the particulars of the actual situation (the executioners' whispering) is evidence of a supreme dramatic awareness. And few dramatists are so securely in control of their tone that they can allow an emotion that is close to petulance to impinge upon such a solemn moment as the death of their play's central character. That Webster could and did do so shows how much of his concern in this play is directed towards an adequate portrayal of a tragic human experience.

There are occasions, however, when we are made extremely uncomfortable by faults of taste, by the absence of that same self-critical intelligence. At times a withdrawal from speech rhythms to a more stylized kind of utterance is successful, as in the consistently non-naturalistic Echo scene (V. iii). More often, in scenes that aim at complete naturalism, we are treated to a kind of solemn parading of commonplace or proverbial sayings and allusions, that retreats from conversation and in so doing damages the suppleness of the dramatic movement. In the bedchamber scene (III. ii), for example, the frank physicality and bantering tone of the first thirty lines are precisely right; the Duchess's later, ‘I pre-thee When were we so merry?’ is an apt reflection on them. But when Cariola is invited to say when she will marry, and she replies she never will, Antonio launches out into a series of classical allusions:

O fie upon this single life: forgoe it:
We read how Daphne, for her peevish flight
Became a fruitlesse Bay-tree: Sirinx turn'd
To the pale empty Reede: Anaxarete …

(l. 31)

Webster's sense of dramatic propriety checks at this, and he has Cariola reply: ‘This is a vaine Poetry.’ Had this been allowed to stand, we could have accepted her comment as to some extent compensating for the awkwardness of the previous lines. But Webster has her immediately begin an unnatural and stiff discussion of the Judgement of Paris. The thread of the conversation has been lost, and Antonio's next question, contrived to allow a clever answer, is remarkable for the flaccidity of the verse:

I doe wonder why hard-favour'd Ladies
For the most part, keepe worse-favour'd waieting women,
To attend them, and cannot endure faire-ones.

(l. 53)

All the supple give-and-take of the earlier lines is overlaid by a perverse determination to introduce a clever exemplum. There follows the, again, supremely apt speech of the Duchess, punctuated, as G. Rylands suggests, by the sweep of her hand as she brushes her hair. When Ferdinand enters, the rhythms of the scene immediately tauten, and Ferdinand's threatening and the Duchess's pleading note are finely caught. But again Webster is unable to resist the temptation to recite a fable:

Upon a time Reputation, Love, and Death,
Would travell ore the world: …

(l. 145)

The rhythms of this speech are entirely unconvincing in this dramatic context. This is in fact the bane of Webster's writing, that damaged The White Devil as well as this play. His commonplace book was always at his elbow, and while in borrowing from it he almost always immensely improved, he is nevertheless too often willing to interrupt the fluency of a scene by the introduction of commonplace exempla, far removed from the tenor of ordinary conversation. It is not that these are in themselves improper to drama, but that, given the overall movement of most scenes in this play, their introduction is unavoidably damaging.

A general tendency to relax the dramatic movement for the insertion of material that does not support the forwarding of the central dramatic interest is responsible for the agreed failure of the play's fifth Act; the point is not that the Duchess is dead, and therefore interest ceases, but that the deaths of Antonio, Ferdinand, and the Cardinal follow in too leisurely a fashion. Ferdinand's madness, terrible though it is, suffers greatly from being extended, and from being involved in the pantomime-action with the Doctor. The Marquis of Pescara scene (V. i) is almost childishly naïve; certainly it is connected with one of the play's main moral concerns, the desert-reward theme, but it is here dramatically unnecessary. And the Julia-Bosola intrigue in scene ii invites impatience only; it is almost without dramatic tension of any kind. Some of the same complaints could be directed against other parts of the play—against the unnecessary extension of the scene following Antonio's mock banishment, for example. The tragedy easily survives all these faults only by virtue of the superb control of tone and atmosphere elsewhere.

This discussion of the mode in which the dramatic writing is conducted—and sometimes fails—is relevant to an understanding of the play's central situation—the Duchess's relationship with Antonio—and the way it is challenged. Clearly enough Webster's concern is not primarily with a merely physical discovery of the relationship by Bosola or Ferdinand, but with a far more insidious penetration of its security.

Two scenes image for us that security: the betrothal scene and the scene in the Duchess's bedchamber. In both, and more particularly in the latter, is expressed the happiness and light of an undeceitful relationship. But they are never more than islands of light in surrounding darkness. For the world in which they are set is entirely alien to the values they represent, and upon which they are nourished. Instead of the recognition and reward of merit (Bosola emphasizes this aspect of the relationship when the Duchess tells him of her marriage) we have the Cardinal's and Ferdinand's malpractices. In place of the frank speaking, with its sense of a healthy human relationship, we find the aimless and insipid jesting of part of the opening scene or of the ‘Count Malatesta’ scene (III. iii), giving an impression of a world that is restless, insecure, watchful. More particularly, instead of a genuine selfless love, the world outside the Duchess's circle offers various distortions of the love-relationship. Bosola, for example, immediately he discovers that the Duchess is with child, directs at the Old Woman a series of jests that reduce love to the level of lust; Ferdinand's extravagant detestation when he hears of his sister's pregnancy exaggerates and distorts the physical aspect of the relationship. And the apparently ‘irrelevant’ scene in the Cardinal's lodgings, when both he and Delio (an unlikely character to employ) play with Julia's affections, indicates something of the purely physical and deceit-ridden ‘love’ this world entertains.

When the Duchess chooses to defy her brothers' world her choice inescapably involves an element of deceit or at best evasion. We of course fully sympathize with her decision to reject the over-fluent and over-insistent exhortations of the Cardinal and Ferdinand against re-marriage. But she is forced to tell them a deliberate lie, and from that moment on her relationship with the world beyond her own small circle is one of uneasy watchfulness. The lovers' contact with that world becomes more and more furtive and uncertain, aptly symbolized in prospect by a remark of the Duchess to Cariola:

                                        wish me good speed
For I am going into a wildernesse,
Where I shall find nor path, nor friendly clewe
To be my guide.

(I. i. 403)

The threat offered to their relationship by Ferdinand or Bosola is of a deliberately unspecific nature. It is imaged throughout in terms of a restless and malignant quiet, and it is this insidious and ill-defined pressure that tests their spirit and brings them both to death. It at once reveals its character in the night scene that follows upon the birth of the Duchess's first child. The setting, and the short sharp phrases in which Bosola and Antonio converse, are powerfully evocative of a sense of nervous insecurity, commingled with a vague foreboding as drops of blood blot out Antonio's name, and Bosola reads out the stars' unfavourable predictions. On each occasion that the threat is renewed it preserves the same tone of malignant quiet. When Ferdinand visits Amalfi to spy on his sister, he comes to her out of the darkness of the night and in a moment of ominous stillness, as she sits brushing her hair in false assurance that she is among friends. The indirectness of the threat is preserved by having him refuse to hear Antonio's name, though the Duchess would gladly disperse the almost claustrophobic uncertainty by mentioning it. When eventually he does hear it, Webster's near-immaculate feeling for atmosphere has the announcement made amidst the aimless jesting at Count Malatesta's expense. Again the emphasis is upon an evil stillness:

PESCARA.
The Lord Ferdinand laughes.
DELIO.
Like a deadly Cannon,
That lightens ere it smoakes.
PESCARA.
These are your true pangues of death,
The pangues of life, that strugle with great states-men—
DELIO.
In such a deformed silence, witches whisper
Their charmes.

(III. iii. 65)

The last long series of challenges that bring the Duchess close to insanity, but fail to break her spirit, are equally stealthy and insidious. The noise of madmen at their gibbering dance brings relief only to her oppressed brain:

                                                            nothing but noyce, and folly
Can keepe me in my right wits, whereas reason
And silence, make me starke mad.

(IV. ii. 6)

It is the other, unnervingly quiet kind of challenge that disturbs her. Ferdinand approaches his sister in darkness, and leaves her grasping a dead man's hand. He shows her a waxwork of her supposedly dead husband and children. Bosola, posing first as tomb-maker and then as bell-man, makes final trial of her spirit with all the paraphernalia of death. The shadowy theatricality of the waxwork show, of Bosola's pose as tomb-maker and bell-man, of the coffin and executioners on the stage, preserves the stealthy unreality that has been characteristic of the trials the Duchess has undergone.⁷ It is a powerful sense of an oppressive stillness that finds no relief, so constantly felt and so impossible to recount in detail, that has enfolded her tragic progress from the youthful laughter of the bedchamber scene to a death at which

                                                            her infelicitie
Seem'd to have yeeres too many.

(IV. ii. 282)

When she is dead, our sense of the unnerving stillness of her experience, its veiled and insidious threat, is given moral force in a consciousness of utter futility and waste. For Ferdinand does not know why he had Bosola murder her:

I bad thee, when I was distracted of my wits,
Goe kill my dearest friend, and thou hast don't.
For let me but examine well the cause;
What was the meanenes of her match to me?
Onely I must confesse, I had a hope
(Had she continu'd widow) to have gain'd
An infinite masse of Treasure by her death:
And that was the mayne cause.

(IV. ii. 298)

That reference to the ‘infinite masse of Treasure’ has been taken by critics to be indicative of a fault in Webster's construction of the play. Ferdinand's motive, they say, should have been made clearer from the outset. But the opposite is the case. From the beginning Webster has deliberately refused him a clearly defined motive; when he set Bosola to spy on his sister in the opening scene, his instructions were:

                                                            I give you that
To live i'th Court, here: and observe the Duchesse,
To note all the particulars of her haviour:
What suitors doe sollicite her for marriage
And whom she best affects: she's a yong widowe,
I would not have her marry againe.
BOSOLA.
No, Sir?
FERDINAND.
Do not you aske the reason: but be satisfied,
I say I would not.

(I. i. 268)

Any third-rate dramatist could have invented a reason to put in Ferdinand's mouth. Webster saw that to do so would be to damage irreparably the nature of the experience he wished to communicate. It is the very absence of a real motive in the oppressors that helps to make the Duchess's tragedy so unnerving. And Webster's mastery of the theatre, his control of tone and atmosphere, have so created the Duchess's experience of oppression that it corresponds to the malignant aimlessness of the threat.

One complexity has been suggested in Ferdinand's relationship with his sister: that he feels for her an incestuous passion. While it could easily be over-emphasized, the suggestion is far from ridiculous. In the remorseful speech quoted above, after the fumbling talk of ‘An infinite masse of Treasure’ Ferdinand speaks with far greater decision of what had obviously moved him more deeply: ‘her Marriage—That drew a streame of gall quite through my heart.’ And earlier speeches have been informed with the same sense of personal distress: after the most general moralizing exhortation we have the direct involvement of:

                                                            Thou art undone:
And thou hast taine that massiy sheete of lead
That hid thy husbands bones, and foulded it
About my heart.

(III. ii. 130)

There is a sense of an extremely close relationship defiled in:

                                                            I could kill her now,
In you, or in my selfe, for I do thinke
It is some sinne in us, Heaven doth revenge
By her.

(II. v. 82)

and in:

Damne her, that body of hers,
While that my blood ran pure in't, was more worth
Then that which thou wouldst comfort, (call'd a soule).

(IV. i. 146)

Our instinctive protest at the suggestion is occasioned not so much by the cast of mind it proposes in Ferdinand, but by the rigid nature of the formulation. It implies far too readily the desire to consummate the passion. For this idea Webster gives no authority. We want rather a term which suggests Ferdinand's deep involvement with the image of the Duchess, in the realm of physique, as well as of character. Some sort of ‘involvement’ must be posited to account for the outburst of II. v in all its extravagance and its over-emphatic physicality. Ferdinand is of course unaware of the nature of his own emotions; it is tempting to suggest that this basic emotional imbalance is behind all his intense frustrated cruelty to his sister—but this is perhaps over-ingenious. Yet the naturalism of the play, its subtle insight into turns of mind, the fluctuations of speech and varying of rhythm give us some grounds for supposing that Webster may have intended a complexity of this kind.

We have noted already the preservation of an overall tone that gives a coherence of mood to the play, a coherence broken only by occasional faults of taste. But it is in smaller compass, on the level of single lines or speeches that Webster's dramatic and poetic genius vindicates itself most surely. And it is when the pressure on the verse is greatest, when it seeks to echo abnormal states of mind and emotion that we can most easily appreciate its artistry. There is, for example, that finely dramatic scene in which Bosola seeks to discover whether the Duchess is with child. One speech in particular embodies superbly the breathless impatience of the pregnant woman:

Duchess. I thinke she did: come hether, mend my ruffe—
Here, when? thou art such a tedious Lady; and
Thy breath smells of Lymmon pils, would thou hadst done—
Shall I sound [i.e., swoon] under thy fingers? I am so troubled
With the mother.

(II. i. 115)

The metrical pattern of the verse almost collapses under the short phrases and interjections, while the d's, t's, and s's give the actress ample opportunity for expressing impatience in her voice. What is perhaps the finest piece of dramatic writing in the play conveys a mood much more complex. The Duchess, believing Antonio and her children dead, has reached a state of emotional exhaustion touched with insanity. The repetition of ‘I am not mad’ in her speech, with its faint disturbance of metre and its note of thwarted insistence, is superbly evocative of a mind precariously balanced. And, as Muriel Bradbrook has pointed out, the image of the oar conveys exactly a sorrow that is almost a physical burden:

                                                            I'll tell thee a miracle—
I am not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow.
Th' heaven ore my head, seemes made of molten brasse,
The earth of flaming sulphure, yet I am not mad:
I am acquainted with sad misery,
As the tan'd galley-slave is with his Oare,
Necessity makes me suffer constantly,
And custome makes it easie.

(IV. ii. 25)

And even when Webster seeks to follow his characters over the borderline between the normal and the insane his touch is unfaltering. There are few lines in drama as starkly terrifying as that put into Ferdinand's mouth as he wanders crazed over the darkened stage:

Strangling is a very quiet death.

(V. iv. 38)

Almost all Ferdinand's speeches in the last act share this same immediately felt quality, particularly those spoken in the confusion that reigns at the Cardinal's death. But, like the other examples quoted, they lose much by being divorced from their context—an indication of their stature as dramatic poetry.

Something of the same ability to enter into, to realize, the thoughts and emotions of the characters was present at moments in The White Devil, particularly in Act V, but it was not sustained there with anything like the persistence of, for example, the scene of the Duchess's dying in this play. For the earlier tragedy was much more a creature of the will and the intellect than this more humane, more humble, more elegiac play. The Duchess of Malfi challenges and exalts and disturbs us much less than its predecessor, but it carries with it a much greater emotional depth and coherence.

Notes

1. The witty inversion to which ‘credit’ is here subject is a minor example of that witty playing with established concepts that occurs throughout the tragedy.

2. The two catalogues of knaves in the play—the Conjurer's and Monticelso's—also remind us forcibly of the world of Jonson's or Middleton's City Comedies.

3. Selected Essays (1932), p. 131.

4. This in itself is the most poignant illustration of the inability of conventional values (in this case the duelling code) to cope with the self-regarding energy of almost all the characters in the play.

5. Apart from appearing as an actor in the first dumb-show, and a momentary appearance in V.iii.

6. See Bradbrook for a most suggestive comment upon the manner in which Webster handles this ‘Fate’.

7. Antonio's experience is of the same order; the Echo scene and the scene of his death are possessed by the same stealthy uncertainty.