John Webster's Sensational The Duchess of Malfi

Let's head back to the theatre for a really blood-soaked tragedy!  And while we're at it, let's think about the intersection between art and social criticism.

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• 9:13 (Cont.) John Webster's Sensational The Duchess of Malfi

Transcript

How are you?  Welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast, the show that tries to make tweed jackets with leather elbow patches cool again.  Make Tweed Cool Again!  That’s our slogan.

I thought that today, we’d head back to the theatre.  It’s been a while since we had our pots boiled with a really sensational revenge tragedy, full of blood and madness and intrigue.  Well, John Webster’s 1614 curtain shredder The Duchess of Malfi is such a potboiler that you could make your plum pudding in it!  Perhaps I do dear John an injustice – I don’t mean to imply that this play is just a bit of hack work, because it’s actually a great work of art, but it also includes some real gothic, even almost film noir, elements: secret, scandalous marriages, spies, murders, evil churchmen, and apricots, that most lascivious of all pitted fruits.

But before we nibble at such forbidden fruits, I’d like to give a shout-out to a great friend of the show; in fact, a great friend full stop.  Thank you so much, Dada Drew, for your very generous gift.  Drew was a teaching colleague of mine at a Catholic prep school for a number of years and, in addition to being an inspiring teacher and maybe the most brilliant mind I’ve ever met, he is one of maybe two of the most cherished friends I’ve ever had.  Thank you, dear sir, and God bless you and yours.

Have any of you seen the movie Shakespeare in Love?  Came out in 1998, I believe.  It’s a fictional account of a young Will Shakespeare, struggling to write Romeo and Juliet, being inspired by and falling in love with a young woman who has disguised herself as a man (natch) to audition for the theatre.  It’s quite a good film and I commend it to you if you’ve not seen it.  

Anyway, I bring it up because there’s a curious scene involving a rather grimy young boy who passes his days feeding live mice to alley cats.  Shakespeare asks the little urchin about his favorite play, Titus Andronicus (probably Shakespeare’s most cruel and grossest drama).  The boy replies, “I like it when they cut their heads off. And the daughter mutilated with knives...Plenty of blood. That is the only writing.”  We can imagine such a boy today, skulking in his parents’ basement in a black leather trench coat playing some first-person shooter video game and slurping energy drinks.  After Romeo and Juliet premieres, the boy gives it a thumbs-up, offering this review: “I liked it when she stabbed herself.”  Charming child.  At any rate, this gruesome little guttersnipe is John Webster, and those movie-goers who recognized the name had a knowing little chuckle at the joke, for his plays feature just the kind of violence this young cherub so approved of.

It should be said, for legal reasons perhaps, that this scene is purely the fanciful creation of screenwriter Tom Stoppard and included as an Easter egg for Elizabethan eggheads.  And I should say also that my cavalier comparison of the young John Webster to a Gamergating incel was a manufactured calumny intended only to raise a cheap smirk.  My apologies to any of Mr. Webster’s descendents who may be listening and who were offended.

Truth is, though, that we don’t really know much about the life of our playwright, only a bleached and incomplete skeleton of facts.  Born somewhere around 1580 in London’s Newgate area, in the auspiciously named parish of St. Sepulchre, he was probably the son of a carriage maker in the Merchant Taylor’s guild, his mother a blacksmith’s daughter.  He likely attended that guild’s school.  Some 18 years later, the Middle Temple, one of the Inns of Court, admitted a “John Webster, lately of the New Inn” and this may well have been our man.  At the age of 25, he married the 17 year old Sara Peniall, whom he had gotten up the duff seven months earlier, and their child rejoiced in the name of John Webster III.  He may have died in 1632, but had certainly gone to that great after-party in the sky by 1634, as fellow playwright Thomas Heywood’s “Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels” of that year mentions Webster in the past tense.  Beyond that, we really only know of his professional activities, maybe a bit of acting and certainly a good deal of writing, the writing that gloried in the depiction of bloodshed from which Stoppard so whimsically extrapolated his film’s blithely cruel street urchin.

Despite writing perhaps a dozen plays and enjoying a good reputation in his time, Webster is now remembered for really only two tragedies, The White Devil of 1611 and our play, The Duchess of Malfi from three years later.  Both are rather macabre and are based on real events in Italian history.  Given their rather gruesome portrayals of human cruelty, Webster fell out of favor by the beginning of the 18th century and was all but forgotten in the 19th.  But following the horrors of the early 20th century, Webster’s vision of a doomed humanity gained purchase and his two major tragedies have enjoyed a vigorous perfomance schedule since first being resurrected in 1945.

Ah, “The Duchess of Malfi” by John Webster—a splendidly dark and enthralling Jacobean tragedy that positively drips with intrigue and malice!  Allow me to whisk you through this baroque drama with the flourish it so richly deserves.  Here’s quick and dirty.

The play opens with the Duchess of Malfi, a widow, who secretly marries her steward, Antonio. This bold act defies the social conventions of the time, particularly given that her brothers, Ferdinand and the Cardinal, are vehemently opposed to her remarrying. They believe it tarnishes the family name and jeopardizes their political ambitions, not to mention the hints of their incestuous desire for her. 

The Duchess’s secret is eventually uncovered, and her brothers’ wrath is unrelenting. Ferdinand, has hired a man named Bosola—a disaffected former servant who becomes a spy and assassin— to uncover the Duchess's secrets and bring about her ruin. He does so by the cunning device of feeding her apricots, thought to bring about the labor of pregnancy.  The Duchess blissfully unaware of the full extent of the threat she faces, is initially happy with her new life and the birth of her children.  She has three in secret – which leads one to question Bosola’s effectiveness as an informer.

Nonetheless, Bosola’s investigations eventually reveal the Duchess’s secret life. As Ferdinand’s jealousy and madness escalate, he becomes obsessed with her, and the Cardinal plays a duplicitous game, pretending to be a concerned brother while secretly plotting her downfall. During a supposed pilgrimage, suggested to the Duchess by the Janus-faced Bosola (she is so naive) the Duchess is arrested and imprisoned in a dark and horrifying dungeon.

The Duchess, in a deeply tragic and poignant moment, is forced to confront the horrors of her captivity. Ferdinand pretends to show her Antonio’s severed hand as well as his corpse and the corpse of her son.  She is then treated to a parade of lunatics, a rather retrograde presentation of the mentally ill, designed to have the Duchess join their ranks. But Antonio and the boy are not dead!  They were only waxwork figures!  Oh, good joke! Ferdinand, driven to the brink of madness, orders the murder of the Duchess and her children. On stage – not tastefully offstage as less lurid playwrights might have it – grim executioners strangle the life from our titular character.

As the play nears its tragic conclusion, the aftermath of the Duchess’s death unfolds. Bosola, wracked with guilt and remorse, and having accidentally murdered Antonio, confronts the Cardinal and Ferdinand. His role in the Duchess’s tragedy weighs heavily on him, leading to a dramatic confrontation. Ferdinand and the Cardinal meet their grim ends, having been undone by their own treachery and moral corruption.

Bosola ultimately seeks some measure of redemption, but his death, too, is inevitable.  A friend of Antonio’s, Delio, enters with the couple’s other son, and the play ends with the implication that the boy will become the Duke of Malfi, restoring a just order.

Oh!  Did I mention that before he dies, Ferdinand turns into a werewolf?  Well, not literally, but we get a ripping scene of him imagining that he’s a wolf, and we hear tell of his howling at the moon, desecrating graves, scratching at fleas, and blowing down the houses of neighboring pigs.  Only some of that is true.

Well, there you go, litterbugs.  How’s that for a ripping yarn?  You see why Shakespeare in Love was able to make that little joke about the lurid young Webster?

Let’s talk about Webster’s sources for this most subtle play.  As I said earlier, the story was, as they say, inspired by true events.  In 1498, at the age of 19, one Giovanna D’Aragona, Duchess of Amalfi, having married her steward, Antonio of Bologna and bearing him three children, (wow, they must have been at it like rabbits!) was widowed.  Rumors abounded that her two brothers then murdered her for sullying a noble family by a common marriage, but they were never formally accused and died quite natural deaths.

The story then gets picked up by a fella named Matteo Bandello, who tells it in his Novelle of 1554.  It’s likely Bandello knew Antonio of Bologna personally, so his account carries a good deal of authority.  Francois de Belleforest adapts Bandello’s histoire tragique in the same volume that contains a source for Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  In 1567, Englishman William Painter includes the tale in his collection called The Palace of Pleasure.  

What sets the source material apart from Webster’s tragedy is its forthright didactic nature.  Belleforest and Painter, especially, see the Duchess as a moral degenerate for having married beneath her class.  Despite the fact that the trope of a common man marrying a noble woman was a staple of medieval romance literature, especially in the work of the Provencal troubadour poets, the cultural stereotype of the widow as whore dominated the Renaissance imagination.  Hamlet’s vituperations against his mother Gertrude are only the most famous example.  A 1592 translation of Juan Luis Vives’ The Education of a Christian Woman condemns the lusty widow, arguing that sex in widowhood, even “legitimized” by remarriage, betrays her wedding vows, for her husband is “still alive with the life of the soul” evidences the persistence of St. Jerome’s misogynistic charges so pleasingly mocked by Chaucer’s Alison of Bath.  

In an early meeting between the Duchess and her brothers, Ferdinand articulates the prevailing wisdom: “they are most luxurious will wed twice.” The Duchess offers what she no doubt sees as a witty riposte: “Diamonds are of most value, They say, that have pass'd through most jewellers' hands.”  But Ferdinand cuts her down: “Whores by that rule are precious.”  The Duchess then protests too much, saying she will never remarry.  The Cardinal, sounding like the embittered Hamlet, rejoins:

 So most widows say;

 But commonly that motion lasts no longer

 Than the turning of an hour-glass:  the funeral sermon

 And it end both together.

Seems that widows are like hunting dogs, once they get the taste of blood, they are henceforth insatiable, and must be collared.

So at the start of Webster’s play, we do get a clear presentation of male anxieties about the sex-starved woman of a certain age, and we might think that what will follow – as it does in the sources – is a morally edifying story about a slutty dowager who gets what’s coming to her.  And Webster’s version does present the Duchess’ death as a consequence of her marriage.  

But, Webster fails to present the character of a libidinous wanton.  I think only the most blue-nosed moralist would find the Duchess sexually rapacious or even immoderate.  Arguably, the worst sin she commits is lying to her brothers in the above-quoted conversation when she tells them: “Will you hear me?  I will never marry!”  Some scholars see in this fib evidence that Webster intends the audience to regard the Duchess with ambivalence, that she is not, actually, a fully moral human being and that we should be wary of sympathizing with her.  But I’m not sure how much of a lie it actually is – seems to me it’s just a way of telling her bullying siblings to back the hell off, with which I would, in fact, sympathize.

Yet we should also not make the critical mistake, as it seems many modern readers would like to, of seeing in The Duchess of Malfi some kind of proto-feminist martyr story.  That reading goes something like this.  A woman, who remains unnamed – we only know her by her title – inherits political and economic power at the death of her husband.  As she is still young, beautiful, and clever, her brothers (emblems of traditional masculine power, the State in Ferdinand’s case and the Church in the Cardinal’s) see her as a threat to patriarchal hegemony and marshal the forces of their privilege, physical and ideological, against her.  However, she sidesteps such institutional barriers.  For instance, note the scene of her proposal and marriage to Antonio.  The Duchess instigates the proceedings – indeed, Antonio here appears pretty weedy and dull-witted (I wonder what she sees in him?).  She gets a bit frustrated with him at one point:

The misery of us that are born great!

  We are forc'd to woo, because none dare woo us;

  And as a tyrant doubles with his words,

  And fearfully equivocates, so we

  Are forc'd to express our violent passions

  In riddles and in dreams, and leave the path

  Of simple virtue, which was never made

  To seem the thing it is not.

This speech could be called the Sadie Hawkins Lament, if Ms. Hawkins had been gorgeous and rich.  The Duchess complains that her nobility intimidates suitors, and so she must take matters into her own hands, but must do so slyly, cunningly and – ironically, we may note – thereby confirm anti-woman stereotypes about both their immodesty and duplicity.  Because I think you can easily substitute the word “woman” for the word “great” in that speech’s first line and the sentiment would still ring true.

Then, the marriage ceremony itself is almost entirely extra-institutional: there is no priest, no church, no flowers, no documents.  Only the vows between Antonio and the Duchess witnessed by Cariola, the handmaid.  The Duchess reminds us that:

lawyers say, a contract in a chamber

  Per verba [de] presenti is absolute marriage.

  Bless, heaven, this sacred gordian which let violence

  Never untwine!

Antonio replies:  

That we may imitate the loving palms,

 Best emblem of a peaceful marriage,

  That never bore fruit, divided!

And the Duchess wonders: “What can the church force more?”  So, while there is a kind of nod to orthodoxy (she does cite the opinions of anonymous lawyers), the marriage is remarkable for its disregard of social form.  It is private, not public, and therefore beyond the scope, as the lovers believe it, of church and state.  However, we should note the Duchess’ callow reference to their marriage as a Gordian Knot.  Fans of Greek legend will know the story of that knot, so tangled and intricate that it was said any one who could undo it would rule all of Asia.  Alexander the Great pops along and cuts it through with his sword.  The Duchess does not foresee the brute violence that will undo their lovers’ knot.

Anyway, though, they rush off to bed to get started on that rabbiting.  So it seems we have a powerful woman just, you know, living her best life.  Leaning in to her best self.  Take that, patriarchy!

And, of course, at the end, she is murdered for her transgressions of gender – punished, one might say, by a threatened phallocentric power structure.  Her son, notably, assumes the dukedom, and all is once again right with the world.

So that’s the political fable most often applied to this play today, and many, many other texts.  While I in no way disavow it – as far as it goes, it’s perfectly cogent and accurate – but it, like many readings that apply an extra-literary interpretive paradigm, runs the risk of ignoring, or at least diminishing, The Duchess of Malfi as a literary, an artistic, text.  Questions of character development, dramatic structure, versification, imagery and symbolism are all subjugated to an overriding social or political position.  The problem I have with that is that, at some point, literature ceases to be a distinct form of cultural expression and instead is reduced to merely a cultural artifact.  

Here’s what I mean by that.  Beginning in the 1960s in Europe, especially France, and then blossoming in the United States throughout the last two decades of the 20th century, a movement broadly called critical theory took root in academic literary studies.  A focus on various political and philosophical theories displaced the previous critical method, which focused on the aesthetic, formal, and linguistic theories in studying literary texts.  Again broadly speaking, scholars and critics concentrated less on the traditional compositional aspects of literature and more on what texts revealed about the economic, gender, racial, and power assumptions of the society in which the poem or novel or play was produced and consumed.  Readers began looking for evidence of classism, feminism, racism and colonialism, heteronormativity in literature in nearly the same way a sociologist or anthropologist would do when studying laws, advertising, economic policies, folkways, and other non-literary artifacts.  For these scholars, a poem is no different than a diary entry, a civil statute, an editorial, or a shopping list.  All these tell us something about what it was like to live in a particular society at a particular time.

And again, allow me to say, there is great value in the creation of such knowledge.  Trouble is, at some point, we are left with essentially no new understanding.  At some point, to argue that the Duchess of Malfi presents and reinforces an anti-woman attitude in early modern English or Western society is not to argue anything at all.  Essentially, all such critical approaches amount to in the end is saying that “This text reflects the beliefs of its time.”  Well, no kidding.  All texts do that.  So did family structure, religious values, economic activity, and political organization.  The question that remains for me, then, is why did John Webster or Amelia Lanyer or William Shakespeare bother to reflect their society in this particular, and rather demanding, fashion?  Why write poetry or drama if all that matters is the slogan, the chant for activism in the street?  Why compose a sonnet cycle when a Tweet will do?  There must be more to this writing than is captured in critical theory’s sometimes tacit assumption that “a text is a text is a text,” that a blog post has no essential difference from a screenplay.

So it’s imperative that conscientious readers attend to the formal elements of literature as literature, while not necessarily ignoring that literature’s social or political origins and implications.  While Webster’s play does indeed present us with cruel examples of misogyny and the frustrations of middle- and lower-class characters, it is not simply a proto-Marxist-feminist polemic.  Note how carefully Webster constructs his tragedy, how he doubles scenes and plot points and characterizations.  Ferdinand and the Cardinal, for instance, are two sides of the same coin.  Ferdinand is splenetic and wrathful, prone to emotional overreactions.  He is brutal and violent.  Contrastingly, the Cardinal is cool and calculating, a amoral malevolence.  He chides his turbulent brother: “You fly beyond your reason,” calling the other’s unruly outbursts idle rage and intemperate noise.  The Cardinal himself points out that he can “can be angry   Without this rupture.  There is not in nature   A thing that makes man so deform'd, so beastly,   As doth intemperate anger.”  This charge of beastliness and deformity re-emerges later while Ferdinand growls and drools as a werewolf, a creature with reason.

Or we can look to the death scenes of the Duchess and Cariola.  The former dies with aristocratic dignity.  When Ferdinand offers her their father’s dagger to end her own life, she says, “For know, whether I am doom'd to live or die,   I can do both like a prince.”  Before she dies, her concern is not for herself, but for the welfare of her children: “I pray thee, look thou giv'st my little boy   Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl   Say her prayers ere she sleep.”

Finally, as the executioners wrap the cords around her neck, she directs them, “Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength must pull down heaven upon me.”  That is dignity, grace under pressure.  But when they come for her maidservant, Cariola (quite understandably) panics and bawls objections to her death.  She claims she is engaged to a young gentleman, that she can reveal treason to the duke, that she hasn’t received the last rites, that she is pregnant.  Her death lacks the stoic dignity of her mistress’s, a contrast intended to elevate both the pathetic horror of her own murder and the nobility of the Duchess.

Or look at Julia, the paramour of both Cardinal and the spy Bosola, a woman caught between her own ambition and the treachery of the men who claimed to advance it.  Such ambition, in contrasting ways, too, animate the actions of Antonio and Bosola, who approach the moral quandaries predicated on their social positions in radically different fashions.  All these contribute to a carefully crafted literary experience, a meditation on themes of human integrity, the corruption of power, the Machiavellian deployment of deceit.  

Attention should be paid to Webster’s use of the ring as a symbol as well.  The word appears repeatedly as a piece of military training apparatus, as a vulgar pun on female genitals, as a token of love and commitment, as an archetype of eternity, as a hangman’s noose.  Each use of the word ring carries with it not only its proximal meaning – what the speaker actually intends at the time – but also all the other associations and connotations that have preceded or will follow it.  Its definition snowballs as the tragedy reaches its climax.  

Furthermore, we can see something of John Donne’s metaphysical conceit in Bosola’s use of the word “geometry.”  The spy has spent years as a slave in the galleys for a murder he committed at the Cardinal’s behest and has been denied restitution or reward for his suffering and service.  He grumbles that “There are rewards for hawks and dogs when they have  done us service; but for a soldier that hazards his limbs in a  battle, nothing but a kind of geometry is his last supportation.”  What does he mean by that, asks Delio.  Bosola explains, “to hang in a fair pair of slings, take his latter swing  in the world upon an honourable pair of crutches, from hospital  to hospital.”  The Duchess, in fact, echoes this conceit just before her death, claiming that “I know death hath ten thousand several doors for men to take their exits; and 'tis found they go on such strange geometrical hinges, you may open them both ways.”  Such use of metaphor indicates an aesthetic and thematic intent on the part of the author, and the fact that Bosola speaks in a frustrated prose while the Duchess does so in a stately pentameter underscores the artistic construction of the text in ways that simply do not obtain in non-literary forms of expression.

Sometimes, students will ask me something like, “If Macbeth is just about how ambition corrupts people, then why didn’t Shakespeare just say that?”  My quick answer is usually, “Would you remember it if he had?”  What I mean by that is a glib proverb goes in easily, but goes out just as easily.  You’re only required to agree with it, then you move on with your life.  You don’t need to chew it over because it's already been digested for you.  

The less quick answer is that the notion that ambition corrupts people is not, in fact, what the play is about.  As far as social commentary goes, Shakespeare’s plays are not about anything – there is no glib proverb that sums up the organic complexity and unity of his work.  If anything can be said about what separates great art, enduring art, from more ephemeral art, it’s that great art provides not answers or arguments, but experiences.  The critical and thoughtful observer notes the quality of experience as it may be revealed in the artist’s intentions and execution, in the conventions of the particular art form (or the absence of them), and the position of the audience.  That experience then becomes a locus for contemplation, for reflection, for exploration, and these have no endpoint – they are perpetually fruitful and subject to re-evaluation and recombination.

John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi was performed in the Blackfriars Theatre, England’s first purpose-built indoor playhouse.  Because performances were indoors, the environment could be controlled – lighting effects, especially, could be used to enhance the performance in ways impossible in open air venues like the Globe.  Webster wrote with this in mind – he had a vision for the audience’s experience of this shadowy, mysterious, looming story.  To me, the play portrays an experience of frustration, of watching people grasp for something just beyond the limits of possibility, however that possibility is delineated, by sex, or class, or frailty, or ignorance.  The Duchess’ grasping for true love and human dignity, her brothers’ for a power no longer guaranteed them in a changing world, Bosola’s for respect and recognition in that world’s amoral structure.  Webster, unlike the authors of his sources, makes no neat and tidy statement about frustration, offers no advice.  He artfully presents it so that we, too, can subject our experience of it to the meditative examination.  And that’s why, I think, The Duchess of Malfi still draws audiences, while the works of Bandello and Belleforest and Painter have receded from the popular imagination.

Thus endeth the lesson.  I hope you found this experience both entertaining and edifying.  If you did, please take a couple minutes to post a 5 star review of the poddie on your favorite podcast platform so more listeners can be made aware of it.  That, and telling anyone you know how much you enjoy the sterling work done here at the Classic English Literature Podcast, is the best way for us to grow.  If you’re in a giving mood, too, consider clicking the support the show button and making a financial gift: it’s absolutely non-tax deductible but it would help immensely to keep the show going.  Thank you very much for all your kind support.

TTFN – ta ta for now!  Until next time, keep yourself marvellously well.  Bye, now!

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