13/2/07 - English Literature - Webster: The Duchess of Malfi

Firstly we will consider The Duchess of Malfi in terms of Jacobean tragedy. But what is a Jacobean tragedy and how useful is the term? Secondly we will compare the play to Hamlet and to Shakespeare's tragedies more generally. lastly we will consider the duchess as a female tragic heroine with a public role (which is unusual); her power is a reason for tragic consequences. Is she a wanton widow? There was a play prior to this one in which there was a 'wanton widow'.

The setting in the beginning is an anti-Catholic trope, suggesting corruption. There is an ambivalence about Catholicism - it is exciting as well as corrupt, implication that Catholics are better at killing than non-Catholics, that Catholicism is glamorous.

The Jacobean comes from 'Jacobus' or James, i.e. King James I (reigned 1603-25). This is how Wymer defines Jacobean tragedy:

"For the general reader or theatre-goer . . . Jacobean [tragedy signifies] a theatrically sophisticated and self-conscious preoccupation with extreme situations and motivations, accompanied by a melancholic and satiric brooding upon death, sexuality, and court corruption."
[Rowland Wymer, Webster and Ford (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 16]

He mentions self-conscious, extreme situations and motivations, such as cruelty, melancholic brooding on death, corruption and sexuality. Webster was seen as a quintessential Jacobean tragedian, but Jacobean tragedy takes its cue from Shakespearean tragedy, especially Titus Andronicus, Hamlet and Othello. There had been distinctive developments in tragedy in Elizabeth's reign; 1599 was more significant than 1603 (when both Julius Caesar and Hamlet were staged).

"Many of the distinctive features of Jacobean drama derive from developments in the last few years of Elizabeth’s reign. It was under Elizabeth that Jonson wrote his first comedies and under Elizabeth that Shakespeare embarked on his sequence of tragedies. In fact, if one is looking for the date that inaugurated a new phase in the history of the theatre, then 1599 seems more significant than 1603."
[Wymer, Webster and Ford, p. 18]

So Jacobean tragedy came about at the end of Elizabeth's reign.

"A number of characteristically ‘Jacobean’ political tragedies are in fact Elizabethan. . . . Since these late Elizabethan plays were particularly influential on Jacobean tragedy, one obvious possible conclusion is that the drama may exist in a real but perpetually displaced relation to social and political events. Plays written in the context of a disillusion with the last years of Elizabeth’s reign – years of war, inflation, bitter factionalism at court, and increasingly erratic and autocratic behaviour by the ageing Queen – were artistically powerful enough to generate their own theatrical momentum, provoking a succession of imitations lasting for several years into James’s reign. Such an argument acknowledges that the primary influence on literature is always previous literature, without trying to seal off drama altogether from society."
[Wymer, Webster and Ford, p. 31]

Disillusion and the milieus that Wymer lists are explored in Jacobean tragedy as reflections of the end of Elizabeth's reign, when she grew old and began to fall apart. These plays are so powerful that despite ensuing success to the throne, playwrights continued to be influenced by Elizabeth's reign.

Now we move on to the second part of the discussion, comparing The Duchess of Malfi to Hamlet (although other tragedies are key also). Bosola finds an equivalent in Iago. Edmund and Iago are both free thinkers, and both sceptical. There is morbid humour, not festive or joyful but macabre and resigned, and related to death. There is philosophical and political doubt. These lead to reflections on the meaning of life (or meaninglessness therein) and scepticism. Bosola and Hamlet discuss these things outside of the action. Human and political corruption are major themes in both. The social and political milieus are the same - court setting, paranoia, surveillance, spying, tyranny and corruption. Each has a self-conscious theatricality, using the courts as theatre because the courts are likely to be overlooked by others, so theatricality and seeming are actively practised at court. There is conflict between public roles and private feelings, particularly in Hamlet and the Duchess. There is the conflict between bodies and minds.

Jacobean tragedy tends to polarise critical opinion.

• An aesthetic dead end – it increasingly relies on sensation and a capacity to shock for its emotional and artistic effect. Spectacle a substitute for emotional engagement. Elevates cruelty to an art form – energies directed at devising ever more lurid and gruesome deaths for its protagonists.
• 
  A genuinely transgressive form of theatre that exposes the hypocrisy of the powerful, bringing to light the self-interested motives underlying their actions. Emotionally and psychologically unsettling and politically destabilising.

The Duchess of Malfi lacks philosophy of the human condition and its speeches are short in comparison with Hamlet's. In Hamlet, the speeches build momentum; The Duchess of Malfi lacks this also. The shock of spectacle is more dramatic in Webster than in Shakespeare. It is transgressive theatre.

There is plenty of morbidity in the play:

Bosola Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best, but a salvatory of green mummy. What’s this flesh? A little cruded milk; fantastical puff paste; our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in – more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth worms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body; the world is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o’er our heads like her looking-glass, only given as a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison.
[Duchess of Malfi, Act IV, Scene II, Lines 118-126]

Notice the word 'contemptible.'

Hamlet focuses on the mutability of the flesh.

King Now Hamlet, where’s Polonius?
Hamlet At supper?
King At supper! Where?
Hamlet Not where he eats but where ‘a is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean begger is but variable service, two dishes at one table. That’s the end.
King Alas, alas.
Hamlet A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
[Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 3, Lines 16-27]

Hamlet states that all people are subject to the processes of decay, so king and beggar are equal. The Duchess of Malfi takes morbidity of death from Hamlet.

Courtly milieu is also taken from Hamlet. Why were such plays set in courts? Due to their self-conscious theatricality. Courts were the extended households of the king, or since the Tudors, the seat of government. They attracted powerful and ambitious people, and tragedy involves power and ambition.

Antonio
Consid’ring duly that a prince’s court
Is like a common fountain, where should flow
Pure silver drops in general, but if chance
Some cursed example poison’t near the head,
Death and disease through the whole land spread.
And what is’t makes the blessed government
But a most provident council, who dare freely
Inform him the corruption of the times?
Though some o’th court hold it presumption
To instruct princes what they ought to do,
It is a noble duty to inform them.
[The Duchess of Malfi, Act I, Scene I, Lines 11-21]

Antonio speaks of what a court should be like. Compare this to Bosola's speech on what a court is really like.

Basola
He and his brother are like 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. Could I be one of their flatt’ring panders, I would hang on their ears like a horse-leech till I were full, and then drop off.
[The Duchess of Malfi, Act I, Scene I, Lines 48-53 ]

Bosola uses the language of parasites and rottenness, which is taken from Hamlet.

Hamlet
‘tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely [completely]
[Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2, Lines 135-137]

Marcellus Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
[Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4, Line 90]

The theme of spying is presented through Bosola, who is an intelligencer, a spy. Here is the implication that honesty is incompatible to serve a nobleman; one must be dishonest.

There is the association between court and theatre where the courts are centres of theatre, a source of entertainment. But the court is also a public place where one has a role to be performed. This idea is integrated into both plays.

To move on to the last point, is the Duchess of Malfi a wanton widow? The phrase 'tragic heroine' is a bit of an oxymoron because women tend to be victims rather than agents, to be passive and marginal in tragedy. So the Duchess of Malfi is counter-generic; the duchess is often condemned because she takes control. Webster takes a different view to the norm. Her description in the character list is defined by her relation to other men, never simply herself: "Duchess of Malfi, a young widow, later Antonio’s wife, and the twin sister of Ferdinand and sister of the Cardinal." As a sovereign, she encounters the problem of choosing a husband.

Antonio I must lie here.
Duchess Must? You are a Lord of Misrule.
Antonio Indeed, my rule is only in the night.
[The Duchess of Malfi, Act III, Scene II, Lines 7-8]

Notice that conventional courtly roles have been switched. In tradition, the woman is powerful only during the wooing stage, and when she marries her husband becomes her lord. The Duchess of Malfi however is a category error because Antonio must conceal his identity as her husband. So he becomes a 'Lord of Misrule', the opposite to the natural order.