Christina Luckyj
In the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, John Webster makes a brief appearance as a dirty street urchin with a Cockney accent and a puerile taste for mutilation, torture and gore. ‘Lots of blood’, says the aspiring playwright admiringly of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. ‘That’s the only writing’.1 The film gets one thing right: Webster was indeed about 15 years Shakespeare’s junior and, unlike him, a native of London. About everything else it is mostly wrong. Born about 1580 to a wealthy coachmaker (a ‘Renaissance Henry Ford’2), Webster was probably educated at the famous Merchant Taylors’ School before proceeding to the Inns of Court to study law and cultivate prestigious social connections. His prefaces reveal him as a careful playwright with an awareness of the conventions of classical tragedy and a command of Latin.3 After a shaky beginning to his independent playwriting career – his first solo effort, The White Devil, was a flop in the theatre – his Duchess of Malfi was picked up by the prestigious King’s Men (Shakespeare’s company), and was apparently considered a ‘masterpiece’ by his fellow dramatists.4 In our own time, The Duchess of Malfi is respectably ensconced in the canon of English literature, appearing as the paradigmatic non-Shakespearean Renaissance play in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, where it is paired up with King Lear and Twelfth Night. It is the lead title in the launch of the Arden Early Modern Drama Series (still listed under The Arden Shakespeare), and its performance history is probably longer than any Renaissance play apart from Shakespeare’s. Yet the film’s notion of Webster as a low-born sensationalist indulging in excess dates back to his own time: his contemporary Henry Fitzjeffrey offers a satiric portrait of Webster, ‘playwright-cartwright’, labouring to give birth to ‘Some centaur strange: some huge Bucephalus, / Or Pallas (sure) engendered in his brain’.5 This view is picked up again in William Archer’s Victorian attack on Webster’s ‘drenching the stage with blood even beyond the wont of his contemporaries and searching out every possible circumstance of horror’,6 and continues in some recent avant-garde productions of the play, as Roberta Barker points out in her chapter on the play’s theatre history. Webster’s ‘edginess’ continues to be advertised in the Cambridge Selected Plays, which calls him ‘the most controversial of all Jacobean dramatists’, while the Oxford edition heralds him as ‘radically and creatively experimental’.7 In the market, as in the popular film, Webster is both Shakespeare’s ‘brother’, legitimized by association, and Shakespeare’s ‘other’, marginalized by difference.
If Webster has been seen as both strange and familiar, both grotesque and recognizably mainstream (i.e. Shakespearean), this may be due in part to the conspicuously mixed style of The Duchess of Malfi itself. Frequently juxtaposing highly stylized elements with more naturalistic action and dialogue, the play showcases a hybridity that becomes especially challenging for actors; as Peter Thomson observes, ‘we must expect the “impure” confusion of realism and convention [ ... ] to reach the point of crisis for anyone who tries to act in his plays’.8 On one hand, the delicate naturalism of the wooing scene between the Duchess and Antonio with the rapid give-and-take of their flirtatious banter may remind us of similar scenes in The Taming of the Shrew or Much Ado About Nothing. On the other hand, the bizarre masque of madmen or the stagey verbal set pieces (such as Ferdinand’s tale of Love, Death and Reputation) suggest a far more overtly stylized and formal approach. At first glance Webster’s mixture of stylistic registers may seem appropriate to the play’s primary conflict: after all, it is Ferdinand who uses horror-mongering forms such as the ‘spectacle’ of the wax corpses and the severed hand; the Duchess, by contrast, often reaches for analogies from the natural world, likening herself to the ‘robin redbreast and the nightingale’ (4.2.13). Yet, like other characters, the Duchess also frequently turns to artifice. Told that she looks like ‘some reverend monument / Whose ruins are even pitied’, the Duchess embraces the formal pose quite deliberately: ‘Very proper’, she responds, ‘And Fortune seems only to have her eyesight / To behold my tragedy’ (4.2.32–5). Sometimes the pose is assumed only to be abruptly abandoned, as when the Duchess’s quietly self-assured Senecan set piece on Death’s multiple exits is punctuated by her desperate cry: ‘Any way, for heaven sake, / So I were out of your whispering’ (4.2.214–15). At other times, rhetorical set piece offers various characters the opportunity to hold and dominate the stage while attempting to impose order on the chaotic experiences they undergo, mapping by contrast the unassimilable, unspeakable nature of much of the play’s action. We can see this, for example, when the Duchess delivers the tale of the Salmon and the Dogfish just before she is hauled off to prison (3.5.121–42). Formal artifice can also offer an alternative perspective on the action, especially in the Duchess’s death scene, where Ferdinand is absent and Bosola, disguised as an old man, reminds the Duchess of her physical mortality. Here, the action suddenly seems transformed into an allegorical tableau: even as Bosola is the Duchess’s hired assassin in the plot, his disguise suggests Time or Death confronting Youth and Beauty, bringing her ‘By degrees to mortification’ (4.2.170). In a famous essay, Inga-Stina Ekeblad observes that, consistent with what T. S. Eliot first termed the ‘impure art’ of the Elizabethans, the scene imitates and inverts the structure of the traditional wedding masque.9 It also offers a double vision of the Duchess’s fate: seen naturalistically, she is a helpless individual victim of her brothers’ revenge; seen allegorically, she is an Everywoman who faces, and finally accepts, the inevitable triumph of Death. Webster’s artifice in designing the emblematic death scene thus allows the Duchess an agency and dignity the realism of the action denies her. If such textural variations and stylistic hybridity mark Webster out as fundamentally different from Shakespeare, who generally represents his characters without recourse to highly ‘artificial’ set pieces or sententiae, they nonetheless contribute to Webster’s richly multi-layered effect.
Comparisons with Shakespeare may be invidious but they are inevitable. Webster himself invites them in his preface to The White Devil, where he aligns himself with Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, as well as with ‘the right happy and copious industry’ of Shakespeare, Dekker and Heywood. Coming from a playwright who ‘was a long time in finishing this tragedy’, the allusion to Shakespeare’s popularity may be both genuinely envious as well as a little contemptuous of his fellow dramatist’s prolific output, especially as it is implicitly contrasted with both ‘the full and heightened style of Master Chapman’ and ‘the labored and understanding works of Master Jonson’.10 Yet Webster’s compliment to Shakespeare, however ambivalent, may help us to see fundamental parallels and differences between them. Both of them owe a debt to Thomas Kyd, whose Spanish Tragedy inaugurated the vogue for revenge plays – though where Shakespeare develops Kyd’s anguished Hieronimo into the conflicted figure of the revenger Hamlet, Webster expands the story of Bel-Imperia, a strong and sexually vital woman imprisoned by her brother for seducing a social inferior, into a full-blown portrait of the Duchess’s marriage to Antonio with its challenge to existing social structures. Indeed, The Duchess of Malfi inverts the usual structure of revenge tragedy: insofar as the Arragonian brothers seek to exact revenge for the Duchess’s breach of social order, they are the villains of the piece; as in The White Devil, Webster arouses sympathy for the objects of revenge rather than the revenger.11 In the final act, it is Bosola who finally adopts the revenger’s conventional pose: fatally compromised by having committed the very act for which he seeks revenge, he finally succeeds, like Hieronimo, in destroying the corrupt nobles who have attempted to eradicate the Duchess’s radical challenge to the class system.
Among Shakespeare’s works The Duchess of Malfi is frequently compared to Othello (as Christy Desmet observes), but its nearer contemporary The Winter’s Tale may offer an equally illuminating parallel. Where Shakespeare toys with the fantasy of a match between apparent social unequals Perdita and Florizel, his heroine is always actually a lost princess – as her horror of the notion of grafting (a metaphor for cross-class marriage) makes clear.12 The Duchess of Malfi, by contrast, approves of grafting as ‘a bettering of nature’ (2.1.151) – a view that her own mixed marriage literalizes. Thus Webster presents the emergent notion of ‘meritocracy’ positively, whereas Shakespeare mocks attempts at upward class mobility, as in the figure of Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Hermione, a ruler and a mother like the Duchess, also appears pregnant onstage and suffers false accusations regarding her sexual promiscuity with heroic dignity. Indeed, the final scene in which Hermione’s statue turns to warm life may be echoed in the Duchess’s early insistence to Antonio that she is ‘flesh and blood’ not a ‘figure cut in alabaster’ (1.2.364–5). If so, the parallels between the women highlight essential differences between them: unlike Hermione’s, the Duchess’s death is irredeemable, her flesh and blood are perishable (as Bosola reminds her) and her intense sufferings, the result of her own social choices, stand at the luminous centre of the play. This tragic isolation singles the Duchess out among female characters in Renaissance drama: while Shakespeare also gives dramatic prominence to a number of complex tragic women such as Juliet and Cleopatra, they remain defined by and dedicated to their lovers in death as in life. By contrast, the Duchess of Malfi is, Frank Whigham points out, ‘the first fully tragic female figure in Renaissance drama’.13 Webster eschews the simple kind of heroic martyrdom that Hermione represents by suggesting that the Duchess’s solitary and heroic death, however undeserved, is crucially the outcome of her own desire. Though she is no revenger, the Duchess, like Hamlet, acts on human impulses in the name of virtue only to discover that she cannot control the consequences of her choices.
Thus, unlike Shakespeare, whose tragic female characters such as Desdemona, Hermione and Cordelia represent virtue victimized, Webster chooses instead to offer a far more nuanced portrait of a woman whose chosen departure from ‘the path / Of simple virtue’ (1.2.357–8) leaves her exposed to the mercies of others – and to the judgements of early modern audiences. Webster’s main source for the plot of The Duchess of Malfi was William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1567), a translation of Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques (1565), itself an adaptation of Matteo Bandello’s original Italian novella fictionalizing historical events that had occurred more than a century earlier. In Painter’s version, neither the Arragonian brothers nor Bosola make an appearance until well after the birth of the Duchess’s second child, whereas in the play they cast a shadow over the Duchess from the beginning, heightening her ambiguity. For if Ferdinand in Act I clearly confirms Antonio’s ‘character’ of him as a ‘most perverse and turbulent nature’ (1.2.88) and a living embodiment of tyranny, Ferdinand’s caricature of his sister as a ‘lusty widow’ (1.2.256) who intends to violate her vow never to remarry is also confirmed by the action that follows. Certainly, Antonio’s initial idealization of the Duchess’s ‘divine [ ... ] continence’ (1.2.118), framed in the outdated Petrarchan language of Elizabethan love sonnets, is startlingly undone by her sexually forward wooing of him with ‘but half a blush’ (1.2.370). And the scene in which Ferdinand suborns Bosola to do his bidding by offering him gold and a promotion precedes and inevitably colours the scene in which the Duchess offers a ring and a ‘wealthy mine’ (1.2.341) to help her servant Antonio ‘raise’ himself (1.2.330). In Act II, we see her gobbling up ‘apricocks’ (2.1.137; pun intended)14 in a suggestive evocation of her sexual appetite, and she becomes the victim and satiric butt of Bosola, a character whose role Webster greatly expands from the source. These elements have led to some critics claiming that she should be perceived as flawed and guilty,15 while others insist that she must be seen as heroic and virtuous.16 Such a divided response to the Duchess is anticipated in Painter, who declares, given that ‘M. Bologna was one of the wisest & most perfect gentlemen that the land of Naples that tyme brought forth, & for his beautie, proportion, galantnesse, valiance, & good grace, without comparison [ ... ] Who then could blame this faire Princesse, if [ ... ] she did set her minde on him, or fantasie to marrie him?’ (353).17 At the same time, Painter does blame her: ‘you see this great and mightie Duchesse trot & run after the male, like a female Wolfe or Lionesse (when they goe to sault,) and forget the Noble bloud of Aragon whereof she was descended’ (372). His curious ambivalence reaches its peak when his severe judgement on the Arragonian brothers as ‘more butcherly’ (383) than some legendary tyrants of history is matched by his moral disapprobation for the lovers: ‘We ought never to clime higher than our force permitteth, ne yet surmount the bounds of duety, and lesse suffer our selves to be haled fondly forth with desire of brutal sensualitie’ (388). Although Webster never endorses Painter’s severe censure of the lovers, he does not shy away from showing the Duchess in potentially compromising situations, thus challenging conventional moral judgements.
What kinds of ‘conventional’ seventeenth-century judgements were brought to bear on a figure like the Duchess? Until recently, most early modern males, like Hamlet, were thought to have regarded the remarrying ‘lusty’ widow with the same loathing and contempt expressed by their Roman Catholic forbears. ‘For what body would not abhorre her, that after her first husbands death, sheweth her selfe to long after another & casteth away her spouse Christ?’ asks Vives in his Instruction of a Christen Woman.18 Barbara Todd explains that ‘the remarriage of any widow confronted every man with the threatening prospect of his own death and the entry of another into his place’ (55).19 More recently, however, Jennifer Panek has suggested that early modern widows, far from being discouraged from remarriage, were in fact frequently coerced into it by a society that depended on the recirculation of their assets; the ‘lusty widow’ stereotype, she argues, functioned as an enabler rather than a preventer of remarriage, representing men as providers of pleasure in exchange for goods.20 Thus, the Duchess may not be quite as transgressive as she may first appear. Although she represents herself as a pioneer ‘going into a wilderness’ (1.2.275), the marriage she seeks in wooing Antonio is in some ways quite conventional, as she later points out to Ferdinand: ‘Why might not I marry? / I have not gone about, in this, to create / Any new world, or custom’ (3.2.108–10). If she begins the play advertising her legal independence as a widow by making her ‘will’ (1.2.292) – a right to which only widows were entitled – she does so in order to give up authority to her husband and become a feme covert. ‘If I had a husband now, this care were quit’ (1.2.298), she declares. After handing her wedding ring to Antonio, she announces, ‘You may discover what a wealthy mine / I make you lord of’ (341–42), immediately declaring her subordination as a wife whose property becomes her husband’s upon marriage. Yet even here the Duchess remains unconventional: partly because her marriage remains secret, she retains her ‘masculine’ authority as widow and ruler and continues both to issue commands and to generate the action; Antonio aptly remarks, ‘My rule is only in the night’ (3.2.8). Indeed, the Duchess is far more active in Webster’s play than in Painter’s narrative; whereas her counterpart in the source has to be reminded by her maid of her aristocratic privilege and admonished for her dependence on Antonio,21 Webster’s Duchess famously announces ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’ (4.2.137). In Painter, the maid and Antonio generate the plans to fly to Ancona and then Milan that in Webster come from the Duchess herself. Rather than advancing an oversimplified view of the Duchess as right or wrong, good or evil, Webster suggests that she occupies a complex position at the contested site of conflicting contemporary attitudes to marriage, women and authority, as Frances Dolan argues in her essay in this volume.
How would the Duchess of Malfi have been received by early modern audiences? That would no doubt have depended not only on their individual views about gender and class, but also on their particular religio-political allegiances, as Leah Marcus observes in her chapter; like modern audiences, Renaissance audiences did not share a single uniform response. Evidence suggests that powerful and unconventional women who lived in early modern London aroused both positive and negative reactions in their contemporaries. One such woman who may have been in Webster’s mind while writing The Duchess of Malfi was King James’s cousin Arbella Stuart, whose marriage to William Seymour was forbidden by the King and punished by imprisonment in the Tower, where she eventually starved to death. Belinda Peters notes that while some of James’s subjects saw his actions as a justifiable response to Arbella’s rebellious marriage, for others ‘usurpation of the rights associated with marriage, even by an anointed king, was understood by more than just playwrights, clerics and political theorists as an act of tyranny’.22 Sara Jayne Steen has also argued convincingly from primary sources that, while some of Stuart’s contemporaries censured her actions, many were deeply sympathetic to what they saw as a love match in the face of royal disapprobation.23 Another contemporary woman who elicited a mixed response was Lady Anne Clifford, who waged a protracted battle with King James for the estates she believed were her rightful inheritance, despite the fact that her father had entailed them to her uncle in default of male heirs. In a June 1617 entry in her Diary, Clifford records that ‘many did Condemn me for standing out so in this business, so on the other side many did Commend me in regard that I have done that which is both just and honourable’.24 The Duchess of Malfi itself represents public opinion about its heroine as ambivalent: if the pilgrims refer to her ‘mean’ marriage and her ‘looseness’ (3.4.25, 30), they also comment on the cruel and violent injustice of the Arragonian brothers’ proceedings against her as a ‘free prince’ (3.4.26–37). Often derided as unruly and disobedient, strong and independent-minded women who pursued marital or dynastic goals to which they appeared to be entitled could clearly also be admired.
Like Arbella Stuart and Anne Clifford, the Duchess of Malfi can challenge the traditional restrictions associated with her gender largely because of her rank – her ‘greatness’ trumps her role as ‘woman’ (1.2.410). Yet paradoxically, rank is also precisely what she seeks to cast aside by marrying Antonio; the play supports Bosola’s contention that ‘Some would think the souls of princes were brought forth by some more weighty cause than those of meaner persons; they are deceived [ ... ] the like passions sway them’ (2.1.106–10). His view, that the high-born can be as sensual as their social inferiors, is the corollary of the Duchess’s insistence that the low-born can outrank their superiors in virtue (3.5.117–19). The Duchess, however, is no ordinary woman: rather, she clings to her identity as ‘Duchess of Malfi still’ (4.2.137) and, while kneeling submissively to face death, commands her executioners to ‘pull down heaven’ upon her (4.2.223). Like Webster himself, who appeals to his ‘eminent’ patron George Harding, Baron Berkeley while insisting that ‘the ancientest nobility [is] but a relic of time past’ (121), the Duchess both embraces and renounces traditional hierarchies of class and gender. Indeed, Mary Beth Rose has argued that the play collapses under the burden of its own contradictions, as ‘the relation between past and future emerges [ ... ] as one of conflicting loyalties between two worthwhile modes of thought and being’.25 The play thus straddles past and present, the old and the new, as Antonio himself suggests of the Duchess: ‘She stains the time past, lights the time to come’ (1.2.127).
Dominant and submissive, aristocratic and humble, driven both to ‘pray’ and to ‘curse’ (4.1.92–3), the Duchess is a figure whose paradoxical and fluid nature is shared by other major characters – especially by Bosola who, as Ferdinand’s servant and critic, is impelled first by a perverse sense of loyalty to commit murderous acts and later by a complex mixture of penitence and bitterness to avenge the very acts he committed. Both the Duchess and Bosola are distinguished by their strangely metatheatrical awareness: subjected to Ferdinand’s theatrical torments, the Duchess cries: ‘I account this world a tedious theatre, / For I do play a part in’t ‘gainst my will’ (4.1.81–2); having murdered Antonio in error, Bosola laments ‘Such a mistake as I have often seen / In a play’ (5.5.93–4). If the other characters appear to be mired in the fictional world, Bosola and the Duchess appear to have independent lives outside the fiction that allow them to comment on it, thus heightening our sense of their richness and depth. Yet even Ferdinand and the Cardinal are far from cardboard villains. Both experience arresting moments of insight: gazing on his sister’s dead body, Ferdinand’s eyes ‘dazzle’ (4.2.254) in a startling realignment of his vision; looking into a pond, the Cardinal sees ‘a thing armed with a rake / That seems to strike’ at him (5.5.6–7). Their recognitions usher in the sprawling – and, for readers and audiences, often frustrating – final act from which the Duchess has been withdrawn. Transformed into a magical talisman of ‘sacred innocence’ (4.2.355) rather than worldly desire, associated with the ‘ruins of an ancient abbey [ ... ] Piece of a cloister’ (5.3.2–5), the Duchess has on one hand become a living ‘relic’ whose godliness continues to function for others even after her death.26 On the other hand, the Duchess is vividly reanimated – both analogically, in Julia, another ‘great wom[a]n of pleasure’ (5.2.179) whose spirited wooing ends in brutal murder,27 and literally, as echo or even as spectral character.28 Her liminal presence with its potential to arouse ‘a guilty conscience’ (5.5.4) may place her on a continuum of Catholic and Protestant beliefs, as Todd Borlik argues in his chapter.
The Duchess’s central role as a catalyst for social transformation and tragic recognition may also have had political significance for Webster’s audiences and readers; as John Russell Brown observes, ‘The story of the tragedy was a syndrome for contemporary issues’ (p. xxxix). The Duchess of Malfi was first performed in 1613, a year marked by two prominent marriages: the auspicious political marriage of King James’s daughter Princess Elizabeth to the Protestant Prince Frederick, and the scandalous second marriage of Frances Howard to the King’s Scottish favourite Robert Carr, a couple whose association with court corruption was later spectacularly confirmed by their arrest for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury.29 Certainly, when Bosola compares the Arragonian brothers to ‘plum trees, that grow crooked over standing pools; they are rich and o’erladen with fruit, but none but crows, pies and caterpillars feed on them’ (1.1.49–52), it is hard to resist seeing this as a slur on James, who showered gifts (including this lavish wedding) on favourites such as Carr. The relationship between Antonio and the Duchess offers a utopian alternative, as Bosola describes it: ‘For know, an honest statesman to a prince / Is like a cedar, planted by a spring: / The spring bathes the tree’s root; the grateful tree / Rewards it with his shadow’ (3.2.265–8). However disingenuously, Bosola here wistfully gives voice to the imagined possibility of a creative and complementary relationship between ruler and virtuous advisor. James himself appropriated the emergent ideal of companionate marriage to reassure those members of the 1610 Parliament who feared his contempt for the common law, declaring that ‘The marriage between law and prerogative is inseparable and like twins they must joy and mourn together, live and die together, the separation of the one is the ruin of the other’.30 Despite the failure of the Great Contract, a proposal for the surrender of some of James’s monarchical rights in exchange for funds approved by Parliament, members of Parliament continued to use the marriage metaphor to describe the ideal relation between themselves and the king: ‘Look to nourish the love between the king and the Parliament, for that is the bed out of which issue may be raised, if not at this time yet at another’, declared the Solicitor in November 1610.31 Can we see in the close and intimate marriage between the Duchess and Antonio not merely a private relationship but also an idealized political symbiosis between ‘judicious’ ruler and ‘most provident council’, as Antonio puts it in his opening speech (1.1.6–18)?
Containing ‘diverse things printed that the length of the play would not bear in the presentment’, the quarto of The Duchess of Malfi was published in 1623, a decade after the first performance. Extant in two different states (Q1a and Q1b), it may well have been corrected in mid-run by Webster himself.32 Carefully prepared for readers, the play may have been printed to capitalize on recent political events.33 When James’s son-in-law Frederick accepted the crown of Bohemia in 1618 after a successful Protestant uprising against the unpopular Catholic Hapsburgs, the absolutist James disapproved. But when Spanish troops under the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II of Austria drove Frederick into exile with Princess Elizabeth and their children, James’s Protestant subjects expected their King to intervene. James not only refused to defend international Protestantism, but continued to pursue alliances with Spain, seeking a Spanish match for his son Charles.34 His subjects’ outrage cut across class lines to unite Protestants: the London mob staged hysterical anti-Spanish demonstrations while key court figures pressed for military involvement. In 1623 The Duchess of Malfi may have called to mind this contemporary crisis – the flight, banishment and separation of Antonio and the Duchess reflecting the recent humiliating exile of Princess Elizabeth, who in 1620 fled Prague, heavily pregnant, with her servants and children, persecuted by the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand and actively rejected by her family of origin.35
If The Duchess of Malfi may have evoked topical events for early modern readers and audiences, it has continued to serve as a mirror for contemporary experiences. Not until the two world wars were critics inclined to accept Webster’s dark and violent world as anything more than egregious horror, observes David Gunby in his historical survey of Webster criticism; such collective traumas may explain the twentieth-century focus on Webster’s ‘moral vision’ as either anarchic or moralistic. More recently, as Dympna Callaghan observes in her account of twenty-first-century criticism, our interest in gender and sexuality, death and horror – reflected in a contemporary taste for the gothic – has driven interpretations of The Duchess of Malfi. And, as Roberta Barker argues in her chapter on performance history, the play’s dialogue between ‘high’ and ‘low’ has allowed both ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ interpretations to hold the stage. The new historicism is an important influence on the four chapters that devote fresh attention to Webster’s place in the complex landscape of seventeenth-century religion and politics. In their essay, ‘Staging Secret Interiors: The Duchess of Malfi as Inns of Court and Anticourt Drama’, Curtis Perry and Melissa Walter read the ‘proto-Gothic’ spaces of Webster’s play as allegories for the secret operations of tyranny. Locating The Duchess of Malfi in a politicized Senecan-Boccaccian tradition filtered through the admonitory Elizabethan Inns of Court drama Gismond of Salerne, they argue that in Webster’s play the Arragonian brothers impose their own corrupt interiority on the Duchess via the play’s imaginary architecture. In their view, the play reworks established literary tropes to register immediate fears about corruption and favouritism in the court of King James. In her essay ‘The Duchess’s Marriage in Contemporary Contexts’, Leah S. Marcus also situates the play in its contemporary political context, arguing that it represents the Duchess’s clandestine marriage as a form of Protestant – even Puritan – resistance to James’s attempt to regulate marriage practices through his ‘popish’ ecclesiastical courts. Webster’s religio-political allegiances become especially clear, she claims, when his play is compared to Shakespeare’s more orthodox Measure for Measure. Frances E. Dolan’s ‘Can This be Certain?’: The Duchess of Malfi’s Secrets’ takes up the secrecy of the Duchess’s marriage, here to consider it as a source of both vulnerability and power. Importantly, she reminds us of how little we and the play’s characters can know, really, about the intimate relation between Antonio and the Duchess – a relation that both entices and eludes us. Even the turn to social history, as it offers evidence of a complex and contradictory culture in flux, does not help us pluck out the heart of their mystery. For Todd Borlik, in his essay, ‘ “Greek is Turned Turk”: Catholic Nostalgia in The Duchess of Malfi’, the power of this play resides in its position between two competing faiths; thus he reads three key episodes (the visit to the shrine of Our Lady of Loreto, Antonio’s meditation among the ruins and the Duchess’s death scene) to argue that the play excoriates corrupt Catholicism while mourning its salvific potential. Arguing from sometimes divergent positions, these essays attest to the play’s enduring and mysterious power to stimulate and elude interpretation. Finally, Christy Desmet’s essay on teaching resources surveys print and online editions, discusses a range of possible pedagogical approaches to the play and offers an annotated bibliography of criticism.
All citations to Webster’s play in this volume, unless otherwise noted, refer to the 2009 edition of The Duchess of Malfi, edited by Leah Marcus, and published by the Arden Shakespeare, an imprint of A&C Black Publishers Ltd.
1. Shakespeare in Love, dir. by John Madden, perf. by Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow, Judi Dench (Universal, 1998).
2. Charles Forker, The Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 4.
3. See Webster’s Preface to The White Devil, in which he answers imagined objections that ‘this is no true dramatic poem’ by showing his knowledge of ‘all the critical laws, as height of style, and gravity of person’, and subsequently reveals that he ‘was a longtime in finishing this tragedy’ (The White Devil, ed. by Christina Luckyj [London: A&C Black, 2008], pp. 5–6).
4. Both Thomas Middleton and John Ford use the term ‘masterpiece’ in the commendatory verses attached to The Duchess of Malfi; indeed, Ford writes: ‘Crown him a poet, whom nor Rome, nor Greece, / Transcend in all theirs, for a masterpiece’ (p. 126).
5. In Don D. Moore, ed. Webster: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 33.
6. In Moore, p. 139.
7. The Selected Plays of John Webster, ed. by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), back cover of paperback ed.; The Duchess of Malfi and Other Plays, ed. by Rene Weis (Oxford, 2009 reissue), online catalogue (http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199539284.do?keyword=john+webster&sortby=bestMatches)
8. ‘Webster and the Actor’, in John Webster, ed. by Brian Morris (London: Ernest Benn, 1970), p. 32.
9. ‘The “Impure Art” of John Webster’, Review of English Studies n.s 9 (1958), 253–67. See David Gunby’s discussion of this essay in this volume.
10. ‘To the Reader’, The White Devil, ed. by Christina Luckyj (London: Methuen, 2008), pp. 5–6.
11. See Harold Jenkins, ‘The Tragedy of Revenge in Shakespeare and Webster’, Shakespeare Survey 14 (1961), 45–55.
12. See The Winter’s Tale 4.4.82–100.
13. Frank Whigham, ‘Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi’, PMLA 100 (1985), 174.
14. See Dale B. J. Randall, ‘The Rank and Earthy Background of Certain Physical Symbols in The Duchess of Malfi’, in Critical Essays on The Duchess of Malfi, ed. by Dympna Callaghan. Randall concludes that apricocks were commonly perceived both as aphrodisiacs and as a bawdy euphemism for the penis.
15. See Joyce E. Peterson, Curs’d Example: The Duchess of Malfi and Commonweal Tragedy (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978), and Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Sussex: Harvester, 1983).
16. For an example of what has become the prevailing view of The Duchess of Malfi, see Linda Woodbridge, ‘Queen of Apricots: The Duchess of Malfi, Hero of Desire’, in The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama, ed. by Naomi Conn Liebler (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 161–84.
17. Leah Marcus, ed. The Duchess of Malfi (London: Arden, 2009), p. 353.
18. Joannes Ludovicus Vives, A Very Fruteful and Pleasant Boke Called the Instruction of a Christian Woman, trans. by R. Hyrde (London, 1529), sig. Cc5r.
19. ‘The Remarrying Widow: A Stereotype Reconsidered’, in Women in English Society 1500–1800, ed. by Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 54–92; see also Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), p. 178; Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 69.
20. Jennifer Panek, Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 10–25 passim.
21. The maid chides the Duchess: ‘Did hys only presence assure you against the waits of fortune?’, and also reminds her, ‘I have heard you many times speak of the constancie & force of minde, which ought to shine in the dedes of Princesses, more clerely than amongs those dames of baser house & which ought to make them appere like the sunne amid the litle starres’ (in The Duchess of Malfi, ed. by Leah Marcus [London: A&C Black, 2009], p. 369).
22. Belinda Roberts Peters, Marriage in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 160.
23. ‘The Crime of Marriage: Arbella Stuart and the Duchess of Malfi’, Sixteenth-Century Journal 22.1 (1991), 61–76.
24. The Diary of Anne Clifford 1616–1619: A Critical Edition, ed. by Katherine O. Acheson (New York and London: Garland, 1995), pp. 84–5.
25. The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 166.
26. Peter Lake observes that ‘It is sometimes remarked that protestantism [ ... ] by rejecting the sacramental world view of traditional catholicism, effectively destroyed any concept of the holy, that is, of a divine presence immanent in the material world. However, it could be argued that this view of the growth in grace of elect individuals reproduced just such a notion of the holy, located in the lives and qualities of the godly, who became, as repositories of the Holy Spirit, active in the world, almost holy objects in themselves’ (‘Feminine Piety and Personal Potency: The “Emancipation” of Mrs. Jane Ratcliffe’, The Seventeenth Century 2 [1987], 145).
27. See my essay, ‘ “Great women of pleasure”: Main Plot and Subplot in The Duchess of Malfi’, Studies in English Literature, 27 (1987), 267–83.
28. Antonio claims that ‘on the sudden, a clear light / Presented me a face folded in sorrow’ (5.3.43–4). In her edition, Marcus notes that ‘Q1 lists Echo among the characters in the massed entrance for the scene [ ... ] suggesting that the Duchess may play the part of Echo’ (p. 131).
29. For a full account of the Carr-Howard marriage and its social implications, see Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
30. Proceedings in Parliament 1610, ed. by Elizabeth Read Foster (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966), II, 50.
31. Proceedings in Parliament 1610, II, 312.
32. See Marcus, pp. 63–67.
33. The Duchess quarto shares many of the characteristics Zachary Lesser identifies with ‘literary’ plays printed to appeal to ‘select’ readers of the middling sort such as ‘students at the Inns of Court, the younger sons of gentry, lacking the wealth of inheritance’: the title page with its Latin motto and emphasis on the Blackfriars performance, the commendatory verses and the presence of continuous printing in the text (Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], p. 74).
34. For an account of the crisis see Derek Hirst, England in Conflict 1603–1660: Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth (London, 1999), pp. 103–9.
35. For an example of another historical drama that probably reflected the contemporary concern with the Princess’s plight, see Jerzy Limon’s Dangerous Matter: English Drama and Politics in 1623/24 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), especially chapter 2, ‘The matter of the King and Queen of Bohemia’.