The Duchess of Malfi

by Frank Kermode

  The remainder of the play is the work of a similarly practiced hand, and one sees why Fletcher (and his collaborators) were successful, and even why The King’s Men picked him to take over from Shakespeare as their principal dramatist. His reputation continued to flourish, and in the judgment of later-seventeenth-century commentators his name stood with those of Jonson and Shakespeare. The Folio of his works of 1647 was followed by a second Folio in 1679, containing fifty-two plays in all. No doubt his work had made that of older contemporaries seem old-fashioned, but to the modern eye it suffers by the comparison, which exposes its rhetorical habit—a relative thinness of language, inferior rhetorical resource, and a consequent artificiality of characterization. The critic Clifford Leech argues that his comedies and tragicomedies “far from being mere pieces of entertainment, are at their best capable of disturbing us and of setting our intelligences working. The main trouble, perhaps, is that he has written no masterpiece.” This seems a just appraisal.

  THOMAS MIDDLETON (1580–1627) left Oxford without a degree and even before he was twenty was trying to earn a living as a writer, but—failing in that attempt—he took what we now see was the usual solution: He was, by 1602, on the payroll of Philip Henslowe. A number of plays in which he then had a hand are lost. Later, with Thomas Dekker, he wrote satirical comedies for the boys’ companies of St. Paul’s and The Blackfriars, where they played before The King’s Men were able to move in. His first important city comedy, A Mad World, My Masters, was written, c. 1604, for boys, but their companies collapsed in 1607 and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, perhaps the most remarkable of all such comedies, was performed by an adult company at the Swan Theater on Bankside.

  Comedies involving the London citizenry were not a novelty; for example, Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), though set in fifteenth-century London, is remembered for the way it chronicles the rise of Simon Eyre from shoemaker to Lord Mayor, offering a distinctly modern commentary on the life of the artisan class and on contemporary economic conditions. Middleton had written several other citizen comedies, played by boys’ companies, before producing this masterpiece of the genre. G. K. Hunter plausibly suggests that it was this change from boy to adult actors that was “responsible for the increased complexity of the characters.”

  Middleton’s conception lacks the slightly fairy-tale aspect of Dekker’s play and is unrelentingly though coolly satirical. The characters range from licentious knights to immoral goldsmiths, from men of disastrous sexual potency to men who forgo sex and prostitute their willing wives in order to live in comfort. The cast includes a great variety of figures—a stupid Cambridge student, a Welsh whore, “promoters,” and so on. All are more or less involved in a complex intrigue about sex and money. In the opening scene a mother, Mistress Yellowhammer, is cross with her daughter for omitting to acquire the graces that will attract a husband from the class above her, and they await the return of Mistress Yellowhammer’s son from Cambridge so that they can marry him to the Welsh woman wrongly supposed to be Sir Walter Whore-hound’s “landed niece,” not his whore. The scene is remarkable for the diligence with which Middleton establishes the themes of money and of sex as convertible to money, and his rendering of the intercourse between social classes. It ends with the business of the ring ordered from Yellowhammer by Touchwood junior, who is in love with the goldsmith’s daughter, a passage punctuated by risky and risqué innuendos. Perhaps the most remarkable speech of the first act is the soliloquy in which Allwit (= wittol, a complaisant cuckold) congratulates himself on the arrangement whereby Sir Walter enjoys the favors of Allwit’s wife in return for bearing all his domestic expenses and sparing him the troubles of housekeeping:

  I thank him, has maintained my house this ten years,

  Not only keeps my wife, but ’a keeps me

  And all my family: I’m at his table:

  He gets me all my children, and pays the nurse

  Monthly or weekly; puts me to nothing, rent,

  Nor church-duties, not so much as the scavenger:

  The happiest state that ever man was born to!…

  And so on, for forty-odd lines, demonstrating the reversal of values by which money perverts normal human relationships in a paradox neatly summed up in the very idea of the willing cuckold. Allwit even addresses his sons as “whoresons,” which, of course, they are.

  In a comic variation on the sexual theme, the impossibly fertile Touchwood senior, as a desperate measure of birth control, has to leave the loving wife with whom he produces “every year a child, and some years two,” in addition to those he begets on “country wenches.” For contrast, Sir Oliver Kix and his wife quarrel because he cannot make her conceive, though a very costly “water” will remedy the situation, while possibly ruining Sir Oliver’s fortune. The interplay of money and flesh continues; christenings, betrothals, partings are all animated by it. The vivacity of the plotting, the lively dialogue, the satirical characterization—for instance, of the Puritans and “promoters”—and the complex denouement make this probably the greatest of city comedies. It ends conventionally enough with marriages and feasting, but all is colored by Middleton’s calm but grim understanding of life in a city dominated by money. This understanding never relaxes its hold on the play, however fantastic and funny it may be on the surface. And, unlike most comedies of the period, it is firmly set in the city where the playhouse stands, and is intensely topical: For example, the “promoters” and their tricks were a much-hated aspect of life during the fasting time of Lent, when citizens who sought to augment their diet with black-market meat were stopped and searched and reported to the authorities, the promoter having his share of the fine. The satire on the Puritan women is equally pointed and topical.

  JOHN WEBSTER was born about 1578 and died about 1634. He may have studied law, but by 1602 he was working, as actor and writer, for the impresario Henslowe. His first major play, The White Devil, was performed at The Red Bull playhouse in 1612, but, as he remarked in a preface to the published version, it was “acted in so dull a time of winter, presented in so open and black a theater,” that, lacking “a full and understanding auditory,” it failed.

  The Duchess of Malfi, which has a rather similar theme, had better luck, having been presented by Shakespeare’s company, The King’s Men, at both of their theaters, the open-air Globe and the private indoor Blackfriars. It seems to have done rather better than its predecessor, and was published in 1623, with a dedication to a nobleman and commendatory verses by fellow playwrights Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, and John Ford, with all of whom he had worked on collaborative dramatic ventures. Another play, The Devil’s Law-Case (1619), is usually included in editions of Webster, but his fame depends on the two Italianate tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. Of the two, the latter seems to me the greater achievement.

  Webster was a strong poet, with a taste for the sexual macabre that especially pleased the critics of the late nineteenth century, but there is much more to him than praise of that kind suggests. He probably wrote more memorable lines than any of the other dramatists except Shakespeare. As a rough guide, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations lists twenty-five quotations for Webster and eleven for Middleton, five of which are, in my view, by Tourneur. (Shakespeare has more than eighteen hundred, about twenty per play.)

  Italy was still remote, and tales of Italian wickedness from a country of fabulously cruel, rich, and ostentatious princes and prelates, of pistols and subtle poisons, of great women, courtesans, malcontents, and adulterers, were fascinating to readers and playgoers. Webster’s interest is obvious but also distinctive. Twice he chose to write about eminent women, each belonging to the historical record, and each suffering from the cruelty of men. Yet his most remarkable creation is the penniless, educated hanger-on, who has served a sentence in the galleys and makes himself wicked while knowing what it would be to be virtuous. Comparable characters in Shakespeare are relatively straightforward. Aaron in Titus Andronicus makes no s
ecret of his evil nature, lago in Othello is a devotee of wickedness and lies, Iachimo in Cymbeline is conscienceless in his desire to cheat Posthumus. Yet none has the ambiguous fascination of Bosola. We are told that he was educated at the great university in Padua and is described as “a fantastical scholar,” sourly witty and ironical. Connected as he is with the main characters—Ferdinand, the Cardinal, the Duchess and her husband—it is largely by his comments that the tone of the play is established. He himself acts with cruelty yet without wholly sacrificing his conscience; he is a malcontent but can judge the corruption of the court (demonstrated at the beginning of the play by the contrast with the good government of the French). He has nothing of the mad fury of the two brothers, Ferdinand and the Cardinal; nothing of the naïveté and nothing of the magnanimity of the Duchess, who, despite the certainty that her marriage, once made known, would be condemned, is too confident of her natural dignity to escape forever the vengeful strategies of her brothers. Bosola acts as their “intelligencer” or spy, and finally as her executioner.

  We first meet him soliciting an appointment of the Cardinal, then achieving, via Ferdinand, a post in the Duchess’s household. In dealing with these great men he goes beyond candor into contempt, which is taken to be part of his character, his “humor.” It is his trick with the apricots that reveals to him the pregnancy of the Duchess, and it is he who finds the child’s horoscope. Still supposing that Antonio, the father, is merely a bawd or go-between, he sees through the Duchess’s scheme to dismiss Antonio and send him away for his safety, and, by praising her husband, induces the Duchess to confess her marriage to him. There follows his act of betrayal, and it is he who arrests her, taking a hand in her torments and finally in her death.

  These passages—the dead man’s hand, the dancing lunatics, the horrible waxworks, and the execution—are the high point of Webster’s achievement. Everybody remembers Bosola’s reply to the Duchess when she says she could curse the stars: “Look you, the stars shine still.” Her suffering will not affect the universe. The raving of the madmen is followed by Bosola’s characterization, in deadly prose, of the doomed Duchess, when she asks him, “Am I not thy duchess?”:

  Thou art some great woman, sure, for riot begins to sit on thy forehead (clad in grey hairs) twenty years sooner than on a merry milk-maid’s … a little infant that breeds its teeth, should it lie with thee, would cry out, as if thou wert the more unquiet bedfellow.

  His calm but cruel view of the world cannot include a true understanding of this great lady. When he expects her to be terrified by the executioner’s cord, she memorably replies:

  What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut

  With diamonds? or to be smothered

  With cassia? or to be shot to death with pearls?

  I know death hath ten thousand several doors

  For men to take their exits; and ’tis found

  They go on such strange geometric hinges,

  You may open them both ways.…

  Observations of this kind reflect an acceptance of the educated amorality of Webster’s world. They are not confined to two characters. Ferdinand—brutal, jealous, mad for revenge—is given the most famous line of all: “Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.”

  Scholars remark, rightly, on the descent of this dark Jacobean tragedy from earlier dramas of revenge, some of which, like Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, were still being revived almost a generation after they were written. But Webster’s characters have an inwardness, a complexity, almost a modernity, quite lacking in the old plays. He knew his Shakespeare and acknowledged a debt; yet the tone of his great tragedies, written when the older poet was at the end of his career, is quite different. Jacobean tragedy, though it might be played along with Shakespeare’s at The Globe and The Blackfriars, is a new, subtler, darker world.

  In the pages above I have treated the plays of Heywood, Jonson, Tourneur, Fletcher/Beaumont, Middleton, and Webster in chronological order, an arrangement that involved splitting Middleton’s comedy from his tragedy. After A Chaste Maid, Middleton indeed wrote several more comedies, but in the second decade of the century he turned to tragicomedy, and then to tragedy. Women Beware Women and The Changeling (in which he had William Rowley as his collaborator) were produced about 1621 and 1622, and together may represent the finest dramatic works of the later Jacobean period.

  Nathaniel Richards, in commendatory verses written for an edition of 1647, says that Middleton, “knew the rage, / Madness of women cross’d” and their “hell-bred malice”—which is not an exactly adequate account of Middleton’s treatment of his subject.

  Like Middleton’s earlier tragedy Women Beware Women, The Changeling has a double plot, but the two elements are apparently less well integrated, a discrepancy often explained by the supposition that Rowley wrote the subplot and Middleton the main plot. The relationship between the two plots is defended in a famous chapter of William Empson’s book Some Versions of Pastoral (1935). Empson argues that we now fail to understand the Elizabethan view of lunatics as funny, though possibly also possessed by evil spirits; the madhouse scenes in the play can be shown to be far from irrelevant, and the connection between plot and subplot is not merely that the fake madmen as absentees from the court belong to the main plot, indeed become murder suspects. Despite the differences of tone, the two plots are similar, having as heroines women forced into unwelcome marriages and liable to take revenge by being, in their different ways, unfaithful to their husbands. To give another example, there is a parallel between De Flores and the keeper Lollio, who demands his sexual “share” from Isabella as De Flores does from Beatrice-Joanna. Empson traces other subtle links, and, though brief, these pages in his essay on double plots are probably the most interesting of critical comments on the play.

  Despite this validation of the double plot, the focus of our interest is bound to be the relationship of Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores. Its perverse pathology seizes the attention: The woman remains unaware of the immorality of her decision to have her betrothed murdered until its cost is violently represented to her by the man she thought to use without cost. The ugly De Flores is an inferior she has no obvious need to fear; yet she does fear him, though her loathing disguises her fear. She hates him as if his deformity were something that threatened her own beauty—“As much as youth and beauty hates a sepulcher.” The violence of her reaction to him as he stalks her conceals a sexual and mortal terror. A comparable overreaction prompts De Flores to haunt her and suffer her insults as if they were tokens of affection. The play was written for a private, indoor theater, and in the scenes between these two it has a quiet, sick intensity that suits well with that more intimate setting.

  The scene (2.2) in which Beatrice pretends to change her attitude and flatters De Flores in order to have him kill her betrothed, Alonzo de Piracquo, is particularly fine, especially when she speaks of the reward he shall have, and he ambiguously says what it must be:

  BEATRICE: … Thy reward shall be precious.

  DE FLORES: That I’ve thought on;

  I have assured myself of that beforehand,

  And know it will be precious; the thought ravishes!

  He is already rejoicing in the prospect of a reward of which Beatrice has no conscious notion. In 3.4 he reports the murder, and again the conversation turns on his reward. It must surely be higher than the value of the ring from Alonzo’s finger; so far they agree. She proposes “three thousand golden florins” and doubles it when he indignantly rejects the offer. Finally he has to explain to Beatrice, who has behaved like a moral idiot, that she is as guilty as he is and that a financial reward, a quietus made possible by her wealth, is not relevant to their situation. When he tries to kiss her, she tells him to “take heed … of forgetfulness.” He replies that it is she who has grown forgetful. We may recall a line from Women Beware Women: “Lust and forgetfulness have been amongst us.” Here Beatrice means De Flores’s forgetfulness of security—his forward conduct
will give away their secret—or perhaps his forgetfulness is of his inferior social position. But in his reply De Flores means the moral forgetfulness that causes individuals to sin without thought of the cost, as Beatrice sins to be rid of an unwanted husband by murder. Base as he is, De Flores here has all the best lines: “Justice,” he says rather magnificently, “invites your blood to understand me.” He insists on his price, which is her honor, her virginity. Beatrice is still trapped in the illusion that she has lost nothing by her deed, certainly not her honor, to the security of which she cannot regard a mere murder as a plausible threat, though De Flores is about to teach her otherwise:

  BEATRICE: Why, ’tis impossible thou canst be so wicked,

  Or shelter such a cunning cruelty,

  To make his death the murderer of my honor!

  Thy language is so bold and vicious,

  I cannot see which way I can forgive it

  With any modesty.

  DE FLORES: Pish! you forget yourself;

  A woman dipped in blood, and talk of modesty!

  And, memorably, he tells her she is not now what she originally was but what the act has made her; she is henceforth “the deed’s creature.” If she will not yield to him he will confess all and ruin her along with himself. “Can you weep Fate from its determined purpose? / So soon may you weep me.” This finely executed dialogue is worth all the praise that has been lavished on it.