Friday, July 01, 2005
The Meanings of 'The Duchess of Malfi'
John Webster’s The Tragedy of the Duchess of Malfi was first staged around 1613-14. Nowadays usually identified as “a revenge tragedy”, its plot, set in Italy, centres on the transgressive action of the widowed Duchess in secretly taking a second husband, her steward Antonio. Enraged by her marriage, her two powerful brothers, one a Duke, the other a Cardinal, conspire to have her strangled. The brothers hire a mercenary malcontent named Bosola to do their dirty work. Bosola eventually turns against them and the play ends on a stage littered with their three corpses.
The play has two distinctive features compared with other tragedies of its era. Firstly, the tragic protagonist is a woman. Secondly, the tragic protagonist dies in the fourth act.
Any examination of the critical history of the play quickly establishes that the play is one which has traditionally aroused a great deal of anxiety and hostility among scholars and cultural commentators. The Duchess of Malfi was evidently popular in Jacobean England but has subsequently become grudgingly acknowledged as a classic with many troubling features.
George Saintsbury was typical of generations of critics in objecting to Webster’s characterisation, remarking (in 1887) “we cannot sympathise with the duchess, despite her misfortunes…She is neither quite a virtuous woman (for in that case she would not have resorted to so much concealment) nor a frank professor of ‘All for Love.’ ” He added, “By common consent, even of the greatest admirers of the play, the fifth act is a kind of gratuitous appendix of horrors stuck on without art or reason.”
What this basically amounts to is a whine that Webster failed adequately to represent bourgeois notions of correct behaviour and that his stage practise did not match bookish, scholarly preconceptions of good theatre and good taste. The critic’s narrow subjective assessment of the play is buttressed by the citation of hegemonic values: “we” all agree on how a woman must behave in order to elicit our sympathy, and what “art” and “reason” amount to is agreed “by common consent”.
The reality is that Webster was an accomplished professional who enjoyed a successful career as a dramatist. Records exist of his collaborative work with other dramatists - Munday, Drayton, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, Chettle - and in 1604 he supplied additional material for John Marston’s The Malcontent. The Tragedy of The Duchess of Malfi was performed by the King’s Servants, who were one of the leading theatrical troupes of the period, and, of course, the one that Shakespeare was involved with. The part of the evil, deranged Duke was played by Richard Burbage, who is often described as the leading actor of the age. The wicked, hypocritical Cardinal was played by Henry Condell, who later co-authored the dedication and address to the reader in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s collected plays. (The actor who first played the Duchess, incidentally, was my distinguished ancestor, Richard Sharp.)
“Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin”, wrote T.S. Eliot in ‘Whispers of Immortality’. No, he wasn’t. Webster was producing a commercial product in a competitive market, and grisly representations of killing and corpses proved profitable. Rather than consult Freud to understand what Webster was up to, it makes more sense to look at the history of contemporary theatre. One of the most popular of all plays staged in London (towards the end of the 1580s) was Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. It was a rip-roaring success with London audiences. Kyd’s innovation was to put conflict, violence and corpses on to the stage, rather than have actors come onstage and make long speeches about fights and deaths which had happened out of view of the audience. He set his play in Spain, which as every red-blooded Englishman knew was a hot place full of filthy, depraved, passionate, treacherous, violent foreigners. He also threw in a ghost and a bloodcurdling figure named “Revenge”. But best of all was the violence. As the ghost explains at the end, for the benefit of anyone who might have nodded off after their liquid lunch or still be a bit fuddled by the plot, what the play had showed was:
Horatio murdered in his father’s bower,
Vile Serberine by Pedringano slain,
False Perdingano hanged by quaint device,
Fair Isabella by herself misdone,
Prince Balthazar by Bel-imperia stabbed,
The Duke of Castile and his wicked son
Both done to death by old Hieronimo,
My Bel-imperia fall’n as Dido fell,
And good Hieronimo slain by himself.
That’s nine deliciously violent deaths. Kyd had written the Elizabethan equivalent of the first slasher movie, and the success of the play inspired a rash of imitations. This genre drama we now dignify by the name of “revenge tragedy”. The best known example of the genre is, of course, Shakespeare’s Hamlet (which may be an adaptation and rewriting of a lost play of the same name by Kyd).
By the time Webster wrote The Duchess of Malfi the genre had been around for a quarter of a century. It wasn’t enough just to have someone bloodily revenging an injustice. The genre needed something new. Webster revitalised it in this play in various ways. Some simply consisted of new visual spectacles for a jaded audience: a severed hand, which the heroine is tricked into kissing, waxwork effigies of her husband and children, used to torment her mind. Webster pulled out all the stops to make his play a dazzling sequence of spectacles. The first thing to say about The Duchess of Malfi is that it is, before anything else, intensely theatrical. It begins in the immediate aftermath of a costly royal entertainment, which included the wearing of masks. Lavish visual display leads on to scenes of almost complete darkness, a “dumb show”, a kind of anti-masque involving a troupe of madmen, the strangulation of the Duchess, the killing of her maid, the reappearance of the Duchess as a ghost, and a frenzied split-level climax with courtiers on a balcony overhearing the final murderous confrontation between the Cardinal and the malcontent Bosola on the main stage. And much else, including songs and, almost certainly, musical interludes.
The title page of the first published edition (1623) states that the play was “Presented privately, at the Blackfriars; and publicly at the Globe, by the King’s Majesty’s Servants.” The overwhelming probability is that the play was specifically written for the Blackfriars theatre, which was much a smaller theatre, holding some 500 people (the Globe held 3,000). Webster’s previous tragedy The White Devil (published 1612) had been put on at the open air Red Bull Theatre, where it had not been well received. Webster blamed the kind of people who went to the Red Bull, remarking “since that time I have noted, most of the people who come to that playhouse resemble those ignorant asses (who, visiting stationers’ shops, their use is not to inquire for good books, but new books)” – adding that they were also smelly.
The Blackfriars Theatre was important in two ways. Firstly it was for an altogether more exclusive clientele than attended the Red Bull or the Globe. Those two theatres catered to the groundlings (or “stinkards”). You could get into the Globe for a penny, and it was in a famously sleazy area, along with brothels and populist entertainment like bear baiting. The Blackfriars Theatre was not on the south bank but situated a short distance from St Paul’s Cathedral, south of what is now Ludgate Hill; I assume that the modern day Playhouse Yard, EC4 is located at or near the site of this theatre. Entrance to the Blackfriars Theatre started at sixpence. It was a theatre for London’s affluent elite.
One enigmatic aspect of Tudor and Jacobean drama is audience response. Hamlet’s complaint about Polonius – “he’s for a jig or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps” (II.ii.475-6) – perhaps indicates what ‘Sun’ readers in the audience were there for. Particularly problematic was the question of young male actors dressed up as women for the women’s parts (something which obsessed Puritans, who were in no doubt that men dressing up as women was inherently perverted and that plays generally were sinful and ungodly). The Duchess of Malfi includes a tender bedroom scene between the Duchess and her secret husband, Antonio, with affectionate badinage and kissing. My guess is that at a place like the Red Lion some sections of the audience would have sniggered, ruining the mood. Perhaps at the Blackfriars Theatre the audience was better behaved, respecting the tone of the play. But this can only ever be speculative.
Secondly, what is definitely known about the Blackfriars Theatre is that it was a more productive venue for theatrical effects than the Globe, with scope for superior forms of visual spectacle. Nobody knows what the theatre was like in its design but we do know that it was an indoors theatre, which put on both afternoon and evening performances. It was ideally suited to drama set at night, in a way that the open air Globe was not. And The Duchess of Malfi is a play with many night-time scenes, the drama and suspense of which depend upon lighting effects and periods of almost complete darkness. The echo scene in Act Five in which the Duchess speaks from her tomb almost certainly involved a piece of stage machinery used in an earlier play, in which a tomb flies open to reveal a woman in white surrounded by “a great light”. The stage directions of The Duchess of Malfi indicate a theatre designed to accommodate split-level scenes (main stage and balcony), as well as secondary stage areas either at the rear or side of the main stage.
To understand the meaning of the play it’s therefore crucial first of all to consider the theatricality of the play in the context of the material conditions of its original performance. However, we cannot ever fully know what contemporary audiences actually saw and heard at the Blackfriars Theatre since the only text we have is the one published in 1623, which specifies that it includes “diverse things printed that the length of the play would not bear in the presentment”. It was too long and it was cut in performance. Where those cuts were made is not known.
As what is arguably the last great revenge play of the era, The Duchess of Malfi recycled all the properties of the genre and added some new horrors. But it was also radically different in one outstanding way, namely in making a woman the tragic protagonist. This was truly revolutionary. It’s also very clear that the play (unlike, say, Hamlet) is a satire on the times. Jacobean revenge tragedy is sometimes seen as anticipating the English civil war, by showing a ruling class which is both corrupt and divided. This seems to me a plausible interpretation. The Duchess of Malfi begins with a conversation between a courtier, Delio, and the steward of the Duchess’s household, Antonio. Antonio is just back from the French court, which he describes as an ideal one:
I admire it -
In seeking to reduce both state and people
To a fixed order, their judicious king
Begins at home: quits first his royal palace
Of flatt’ring sycophants, of dissolute
And infamous persons (I.i.4-9)
The contrast with the court of James I could hardly be more glaring. James I was a notoriously sleazy king, who would occasionally appear drunk, formed scandalous homosexual attachments to handsome young male courtiers and turned a blind eye to public corruption on a massive scale. By 1610 the Crown debt was £280,000 but annual expenditure was £511,000. Parliament, however, was resistant to giving the Crown the money it wanted. Thomas Wentworth MP asked “what purpose it is for as to drawe a silver streame out of the country into the royall cisterne, if it shall dayly runne out thence by private cocks.” That last word meant then what it still means today, and Wentworth’s sneer at James for handing out gifts and titles to those young men who caught his fancy seems echoed in Antonio’s comparison of “a prince’s court” to “a common fountain”, easily polluted if “Some cursed example poison ‘t near the head.”
Society in Webster’s play is rotten to the core, corrupted by both secular and ecclesiastical authority, which are each dishonest, hypocritical and unjust. But though ostensibly set in Malfi at the start of the sixteenth century, this world is all too clearly set a century later, in contemporary London. There are various references to the glass-making business near the Blackfriars Theatre, and to the “Barber-Chirugeons’ Hall” in Monkswell Street, where dissected and preserved corpses were on public display.
This society is evoked by clusters of imagery which evoke a landscape of stagnation, winter and darkness. As the fourth madman remarks, “I have made a soap-boiler costive – it was my masterpiece.” This is a joke about constipation: the last person to suffer should be a soap-maker, since soap was used in suppositories.
The problem, in short, was one of blockage. What the Duchess represents is revolutionary change, in a rigid society. Her crime is choosing a husband not from the ruling class but from the upwardly mobile middle class (using the term very slackly). The ruling class, in the shape of Duke Ferdinand and the Cardinal, resist the idea of a woman making a free choice, especially when that choice transgresses class strata. It is necessary for her to be eliminated in order to maintain the status quo. In the case of the Duke an obsession with blood, breeding and pedigree tips over into murkily incestuous desire, a rage to control his sister’s sexuality and eventual madness.
What the play gives voice to in its satire is the demand for social mobility and reform within early Jacobean society. Here it is helpful to look at Webster’s own class background. He was born in 1578/9, the eldest son of a maker of coaches and wagons. The family business made basic carts but diversified into luxury coaches for the ruling class. It also hired out transport. Webster’s father styled himself “gentleman” and was a member of the Company of Merchant Taylors. Webster thus personally represented emergent capitalism and those trading/business interests which articulated their demands in parliament. It was precisely that aspect of his class status that led to him being mocked in 1617 as “The play-wright, cart-wright”. But Webster’s writing appealed to the radical concerns of the business class and he was commissioned by the Merchant Taylors to write a pageant in 1624 to celebrate the election of their member John Gore as Lord Mayor. In 1632 The Duchess of Malfi was still a popular play and Webster was again mocked as a dramatist with trade associations. It was still being performed in 1640, not long before the outbreak of civil war.
This does not mean that Webster necessarily personally shared the political demands of the mercantile class, but he was certainly aware of them and he used them to add a satirical dimension to what was by then a hackneyed genre. No interpretation of The Duchess of Malfi makes much sense, then, if it sidesteps the material foundations of Webster’s revitalisation of the revenge tragedy, both theatrical and satirical.
The play has two distinctive features compared with other tragedies of its era. Firstly, the tragic protagonist is a woman. Secondly, the tragic protagonist dies in the fourth act.
Any examination of the critical history of the play quickly establishes that the play is one which has traditionally aroused a great deal of anxiety and hostility among scholars and cultural commentators. The Duchess of Malfi was evidently popular in Jacobean England but has subsequently become grudgingly acknowledged as a classic with many troubling features.
George Saintsbury was typical of generations of critics in objecting to Webster’s characterisation, remarking (in 1887) “we cannot sympathise with the duchess, despite her misfortunes…She is neither quite a virtuous woman (for in that case she would not have resorted to so much concealment) nor a frank professor of ‘All for Love.’ ” He added, “By common consent, even of the greatest admirers of the play, the fifth act is a kind of gratuitous appendix of horrors stuck on without art or reason.”
What this basically amounts to is a whine that Webster failed adequately to represent bourgeois notions of correct behaviour and that his stage practise did not match bookish, scholarly preconceptions of good theatre and good taste. The critic’s narrow subjective assessment of the play is buttressed by the citation of hegemonic values: “we” all agree on how a woman must behave in order to elicit our sympathy, and what “art” and “reason” amount to is agreed “by common consent”.
The reality is that Webster was an accomplished professional who enjoyed a successful career as a dramatist. Records exist of his collaborative work with other dramatists - Munday, Drayton, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, Chettle - and in 1604 he supplied additional material for John Marston’s The Malcontent. The Tragedy of The Duchess of Malfi was performed by the King’s Servants, who were one of the leading theatrical troupes of the period, and, of course, the one that Shakespeare was involved with. The part of the evil, deranged Duke was played by Richard Burbage, who is often described as the leading actor of the age. The wicked, hypocritical Cardinal was played by Henry Condell, who later co-authored the dedication and address to the reader in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s collected plays. (The actor who first played the Duchess, incidentally, was my distinguished ancestor, Richard Sharp.)
“Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin”, wrote T.S. Eliot in ‘Whispers of Immortality’. No, he wasn’t. Webster was producing a commercial product in a competitive market, and grisly representations of killing and corpses proved profitable. Rather than consult Freud to understand what Webster was up to, it makes more sense to look at the history of contemporary theatre. One of the most popular of all plays staged in London (towards the end of the 1580s) was Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. It was a rip-roaring success with London audiences. Kyd’s innovation was to put conflict, violence and corpses on to the stage, rather than have actors come onstage and make long speeches about fights and deaths which had happened out of view of the audience. He set his play in Spain, which as every red-blooded Englishman knew was a hot place full of filthy, depraved, passionate, treacherous, violent foreigners. He also threw in a ghost and a bloodcurdling figure named “Revenge”. But best of all was the violence. As the ghost explains at the end, for the benefit of anyone who might have nodded off after their liquid lunch or still be a bit fuddled by the plot, what the play had showed was:
Horatio murdered in his father’s bower,
Vile Serberine by Pedringano slain,
False Perdingano hanged by quaint device,
Fair Isabella by herself misdone,
Prince Balthazar by Bel-imperia stabbed,
The Duke of Castile and his wicked son
Both done to death by old Hieronimo,
My Bel-imperia fall’n as Dido fell,
And good Hieronimo slain by himself.
That’s nine deliciously violent deaths. Kyd had written the Elizabethan equivalent of the first slasher movie, and the success of the play inspired a rash of imitations. This genre drama we now dignify by the name of “revenge tragedy”. The best known example of the genre is, of course, Shakespeare’s Hamlet (which may be an adaptation and rewriting of a lost play of the same name by Kyd).
By the time Webster wrote The Duchess of Malfi the genre had been around for a quarter of a century. It wasn’t enough just to have someone bloodily revenging an injustice. The genre needed something new. Webster revitalised it in this play in various ways. Some simply consisted of new visual spectacles for a jaded audience: a severed hand, which the heroine is tricked into kissing, waxwork effigies of her husband and children, used to torment her mind. Webster pulled out all the stops to make his play a dazzling sequence of spectacles. The first thing to say about The Duchess of Malfi is that it is, before anything else, intensely theatrical. It begins in the immediate aftermath of a costly royal entertainment, which included the wearing of masks. Lavish visual display leads on to scenes of almost complete darkness, a “dumb show”, a kind of anti-masque involving a troupe of madmen, the strangulation of the Duchess, the killing of her maid, the reappearance of the Duchess as a ghost, and a frenzied split-level climax with courtiers on a balcony overhearing the final murderous confrontation between the Cardinal and the malcontent Bosola on the main stage. And much else, including songs and, almost certainly, musical interludes.
The title page of the first published edition (1623) states that the play was “Presented privately, at the Blackfriars; and publicly at the Globe, by the King’s Majesty’s Servants.” The overwhelming probability is that the play was specifically written for the Blackfriars theatre, which was much a smaller theatre, holding some 500 people (the Globe held 3,000). Webster’s previous tragedy The White Devil (published 1612) had been put on at the open air Red Bull Theatre, where it had not been well received. Webster blamed the kind of people who went to the Red Bull, remarking “since that time I have noted, most of the people who come to that playhouse resemble those ignorant asses (who, visiting stationers’ shops, their use is not to inquire for good books, but new books)” – adding that they were also smelly.
The Blackfriars Theatre was important in two ways. Firstly it was for an altogether more exclusive clientele than attended the Red Bull or the Globe. Those two theatres catered to the groundlings (or “stinkards”). You could get into the Globe for a penny, and it was in a famously sleazy area, along with brothels and populist entertainment like bear baiting. The Blackfriars Theatre was not on the south bank but situated a short distance from St Paul’s Cathedral, south of what is now Ludgate Hill; I assume that the modern day Playhouse Yard, EC4 is located at or near the site of this theatre. Entrance to the Blackfriars Theatre started at sixpence. It was a theatre for London’s affluent elite.
One enigmatic aspect of Tudor and Jacobean drama is audience response. Hamlet’s complaint about Polonius – “he’s for a jig or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps” (II.ii.475-6) – perhaps indicates what ‘Sun’ readers in the audience were there for. Particularly problematic was the question of young male actors dressed up as women for the women’s parts (something which obsessed Puritans, who were in no doubt that men dressing up as women was inherently perverted and that plays generally were sinful and ungodly). The Duchess of Malfi includes a tender bedroom scene between the Duchess and her secret husband, Antonio, with affectionate badinage and kissing. My guess is that at a place like the Red Lion some sections of the audience would have sniggered, ruining the mood. Perhaps at the Blackfriars Theatre the audience was better behaved, respecting the tone of the play. But this can only ever be speculative.
Secondly, what is definitely known about the Blackfriars Theatre is that it was a more productive venue for theatrical effects than the Globe, with scope for superior forms of visual spectacle. Nobody knows what the theatre was like in its design but we do know that it was an indoors theatre, which put on both afternoon and evening performances. It was ideally suited to drama set at night, in a way that the open air Globe was not. And The Duchess of Malfi is a play with many night-time scenes, the drama and suspense of which depend upon lighting effects and periods of almost complete darkness. The echo scene in Act Five in which the Duchess speaks from her tomb almost certainly involved a piece of stage machinery used in an earlier play, in which a tomb flies open to reveal a woman in white surrounded by “a great light”. The stage directions of The Duchess of Malfi indicate a theatre designed to accommodate split-level scenes (main stage and balcony), as well as secondary stage areas either at the rear or side of the main stage.
To understand the meaning of the play it’s therefore crucial first of all to consider the theatricality of the play in the context of the material conditions of its original performance. However, we cannot ever fully know what contemporary audiences actually saw and heard at the Blackfriars Theatre since the only text we have is the one published in 1623, which specifies that it includes “diverse things printed that the length of the play would not bear in the presentment”. It was too long and it was cut in performance. Where those cuts were made is not known.
As what is arguably the last great revenge play of the era, The Duchess of Malfi recycled all the properties of the genre and added some new horrors. But it was also radically different in one outstanding way, namely in making a woman the tragic protagonist. This was truly revolutionary. It’s also very clear that the play (unlike, say, Hamlet) is a satire on the times. Jacobean revenge tragedy is sometimes seen as anticipating the English civil war, by showing a ruling class which is both corrupt and divided. This seems to me a plausible interpretation. The Duchess of Malfi begins with a conversation between a courtier, Delio, and the steward of the Duchess’s household, Antonio. Antonio is just back from the French court, which he describes as an ideal one:
I admire it -
In seeking to reduce both state and people
To a fixed order, their judicious king
Begins at home: quits first his royal palace
Of flatt’ring sycophants, of dissolute
And infamous persons (I.i.4-9)
The contrast with the court of James I could hardly be more glaring. James I was a notoriously sleazy king, who would occasionally appear drunk, formed scandalous homosexual attachments to handsome young male courtiers and turned a blind eye to public corruption on a massive scale. By 1610 the Crown debt was £280,000 but annual expenditure was £511,000. Parliament, however, was resistant to giving the Crown the money it wanted. Thomas Wentworth MP asked “what purpose it is for as to drawe a silver streame out of the country into the royall cisterne, if it shall dayly runne out thence by private cocks.” That last word meant then what it still means today, and Wentworth’s sneer at James for handing out gifts and titles to those young men who caught his fancy seems echoed in Antonio’s comparison of “a prince’s court” to “a common fountain”, easily polluted if “Some cursed example poison ‘t near the head.”
Society in Webster’s play is rotten to the core, corrupted by both secular and ecclesiastical authority, which are each dishonest, hypocritical and unjust. But though ostensibly set in Malfi at the start of the sixteenth century, this world is all too clearly set a century later, in contemporary London. There are various references to the glass-making business near the Blackfriars Theatre, and to the “Barber-Chirugeons’ Hall” in Monkswell Street, where dissected and preserved corpses were on public display.
This society is evoked by clusters of imagery which evoke a landscape of stagnation, winter and darkness. As the fourth madman remarks, “I have made a soap-boiler costive – it was my masterpiece.” This is a joke about constipation: the last person to suffer should be a soap-maker, since soap was used in suppositories.
The problem, in short, was one of blockage. What the Duchess represents is revolutionary change, in a rigid society. Her crime is choosing a husband not from the ruling class but from the upwardly mobile middle class (using the term very slackly). The ruling class, in the shape of Duke Ferdinand and the Cardinal, resist the idea of a woman making a free choice, especially when that choice transgresses class strata. It is necessary for her to be eliminated in order to maintain the status quo. In the case of the Duke an obsession with blood, breeding and pedigree tips over into murkily incestuous desire, a rage to control his sister’s sexuality and eventual madness.
What the play gives voice to in its satire is the demand for social mobility and reform within early Jacobean society. Here it is helpful to look at Webster’s own class background. He was born in 1578/9, the eldest son of a maker of coaches and wagons. The family business made basic carts but diversified into luxury coaches for the ruling class. It also hired out transport. Webster’s father styled himself “gentleman” and was a member of the Company of Merchant Taylors. Webster thus personally represented emergent capitalism and those trading/business interests which articulated their demands in parliament. It was precisely that aspect of his class status that led to him being mocked in 1617 as “The play-wright, cart-wright”. But Webster’s writing appealed to the radical concerns of the business class and he was commissioned by the Merchant Taylors to write a pageant in 1624 to celebrate the election of their member John Gore as Lord Mayor. In 1632 The Duchess of Malfi was still a popular play and Webster was again mocked as a dramatist with trade associations. It was still being performed in 1640, not long before the outbreak of civil war.
This does not mean that Webster necessarily personally shared the political demands of the mercantile class, but he was certainly aware of them and he used them to add a satirical dimension to what was by then a hackneyed genre. No interpretation of The Duchess of Malfi makes much sense, then, if it sidesteps the material foundations of Webster’s revitalisation of the revenge tragedy, both theatrical and satirical.
# posted by Ellis : 7:24 AM
