Week 08, John Webster

Notes on John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi

Act 1, Scene 1

Antonio considers the French Court to a model to emulate; secrecy and sycophants have been banished from King Louis XII’s (1498-1515) routine, and his court is like a “common fountain” from which honesty flows; conversely, if the fountain be corrupted, the entire society will suffer. Webster is careful to set up Bosola as the classic servant with a sense of injured merit—he insists that he has done good service for the Cardinal, even getting himself condemned to the galleys for a murder, but now he’s been hung out to dry. Antonio instantly recognizes the strength of Bosola’s character, his virtù, if not his virtue in the moral sense, and realizes that such a man is dangerous if not given his due. Already, Bosola is something more complex and three-dimensional than a stock villain—he professes himself unable to wield flattery, and I suppose he’s correct on that point, but as for using secrecy to serve himself and other wicked men, that turns out to be another matter. He will become a key actor in a drama of which he by no means approves.

Act 1, Scene 2

Antonio would have Delio believe that the Duchess of Malfi is of altogether another “temper” than her two devious brothers the Cardinal and Duke Ferdinand of Calabria. He claims that in her countenance, “There speaketh so divine a continence / As cuts off all lascivious and vain hope” (107-08). His metallurgical metaphor (character is like a stamp impressed on metal) implies that character is set in stone, but it seems like he has either misapprehended the Duchess, or she’s a more changeable person than he had thought. She is surely not the angel he takes her for; as we’ll see, she is not interested in playing the role of sanctified lady, and she insists on following her own desires no matter what the consequences. She is a strong character, not a pale Madonna. And when Ferdinand drops in and requests that she offer Bosola, a known criminal, the important post of provisorship of her horses, she immediately accepts, even though she admits to knowing who he is. Ferdinand makes sure, at the Cardinal’s prompting, to hire Bosola as a spy as well: he is to watch over the Duchess and, if possible, find out which men she favors. The Duke does not want his sister to remarry since that would remove the possibility of his inheriting her lands. As for Bosola, his question to Ferdinand, “Whose throat must I cut?” (155) says much for his complexity. He knows what he’s probably getting into, genuinely disapproves of it, and will do it anyway: he’s trapped by his need to go through corrupt men to earn himself a secure place. See also his comments from 180-84: “Oh, that to avoid ingratitude / For the good deed you have done me, I must do / All the ill man can invent!” and so forth.

Act 1, Scene 3

Duke Ferdinand and the Cardinal warn the Duchess not to remarry, casting her as a “lusty widow” (47) and bidding her guard her honor. This is pretty obviously not their reason, which has (as Ferdinand will later admit) everything to do with the possibility of getting her lands and nothing to do with concern for her moral virtue. The Duchess bravely refashions their figures of virtue: “Diamonds are of most value, / They say, that have passed through most jewelers’ hands” (7-8), but of course this effort has no effect upon them. She is determined, nonetheless, to follow her own plan and not theirs: “Let old wives report / I winked and chose a husband” (55-56). She links herself to the common women of her duchy at such times, but this is the beginning of her troubles: her position as a ruler demands that she set an example not as a headstrong private individual but rather as a wise prince. This cannot happen when she engages in conduct that even her faithful servant Cariola describes as “fearful madness” (205): the scene in which she woos and wins her steward Antonio is the example to which Cariola refers, and it is indeed anxiety-provoking for Antonio, who doesn’t at first know quite how to take the Great Woman’s strangely playful, almost deceptive suit. The Duchess herself proclaims the misery of the great, who are “forced 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” (148-51). The Duchess is, as she admits, straying from the path of simple virtue where direct correspondence between seeming and being is the command; she woos like a Machiavel, and pays no heed to the consequences for her as the chief officer of her State. It’s one thing to practice “secrecy” at the behest of the State, but another to employ it for one’s private ends. To act as she does entails the risk of losing respect and control as a prince.

Act 2, Scenes 1-3

Bosola understands well how susceptible are princes to their private desires; as he says to Antonio, “Some / would think the souls of princes were brought forth by some more weighty / cause than those of meaner persons: they are deceived” (2.1.91-93).

Bosola’s exchange with an Old Lady about makeup is noteworthy; he describes an economy fueled by vanity, luxury, disease, and denial of death; the Old Lady, he says, is desperate to cover up her rotten soul by painting over her decaying body. The speech also bears some tint of misogyny: “I do wonder you do not loathe yourselves” (38-39). What chance has goodness or charity in this sordid economy? Bosola’s plan to expose the Duchess’ pregnancy is to get her some early spring apricots; her health is changeable and she has taken to wearing loose-fitting maternity clothes, so the spy suspects correctly. The apricots give her a dreadful case of bloating, and Antonio’s convinced that she is going into labor early. But Bosola is confirmed in his supposition by the Duchess’ “most vulturous eating of the apricots” (2.2.1-2). The metaphor of “grafting” is worth attending to since it implies the splicing together of two different kinds of plant to produce new fruit; in the management of a wise gardener, the results can be excellent, but the implication here—the mingling of the steward Antonio with the great Duchess—is that the fruit will not be worthwhile. The Duchess and Antonio now have their first child together, a son, as Cariola announces at 2.2.71. Antonio’s lament about the couple’s enforced secrecy is revealing: “The great are like the base, nay, they are the same, / When they seek shameful ways to avoid shame” (51-52). That remark describes the Duchess’ dilemma to the letter: she is behaving as a private person, not as a ruler should.

By Scene 3, Bosola has discovered the secret of the child’s birth, even though he doesn’t yet know who the father is. He sees, too, how he is to be imprisoned on suspicion of poisoning the Duchess to hide the truth of her “lying-in” period, but is nonetheless delighted at having discovered a piece of information most valuable to his employer Ferdinand—characteristically, we see Bosola’s mixed motives here, too, since he knows the information will scarcely bring happiness to Ferdinand or the Cardinal. His intelligence will, he says, “make her brothers’ galls / O’erflow their livers” (72-73).

Act 2, Scene 5

We soon find out just how true this supposition is when, in the fourth scene, Ferdinand speaks so wildly that the Cardinal must try to calm him down. Webster’s handling of the Duke here brings out a certain “overdetermined” quality to his raving: “Till I know who leaps my sister, I’ll not stir: / That known, I’ll find scorpions to string my whips, / And fix her in a general eclipse” (78-80). Would he get so worked up if all he wanted was to inherit property? Perhaps incestuous jealousy for his twin sister lies at the bottom of Ferdinand’s sadistic fury.

Act 3, Scenes 1-2

By this time, the Duchess has had three children by Antonio, and as he admits, “The common people do directly say / She is a strumpet” (25-26), yet still the secret of his being the father is safe. The people think he is stealing from her treasury, but suspect nothing about the secret marriage. Bosola promises to help Ferdinand get to the bottom of the father mystery, and their scheming in Scene 1 is following in Scene 2 by a touchingly private, slightly bawdy intimate conversation between Antonio and the Duchess, in which he half-complains to Cariola that the Duchess’ sexual demands are wearing him out: “Laboring men / Count the clock oftenest, Cariola, / Are glad when their task’s ended” (18-20). This moment, in turn, is followed by the surprise entrance of Ferdinand, who denounces the Duchess and hands her a poniard (sword) with which he evidently expects her to commit suicide. She must abruptly strike up a heroic pose: “For know, whether I am doomed to live or die, / I can do both like a prince” (3.2.67-68). The Duchess’ self-defense against her brother’s bromides about the absoluteness of virtue (and the impossibility of regaining it when it’s lost) is stirring, but perhaps more moving than ultimately convincing: “Why should only I, / Of all the other princes of the world, / Be cased up, like a holy relic? I have youth / And a little beauty” (134-37). This kind of remark puts us in the uncomfortable position of feeling much sympathy for the Duchess—she is, after all, being treated like a valuable object by the Cardinal and Ferdinand—but at the same time, all the warnings we have heard about what happens when the great stoop to base stratagems to hide their folly ring too true to ignore. There’s something admirable about the Duchess’ forcefulness of character, and we know she acts as she does only because a woman in her era was hardly free to pursue her desires openly, the way a noble man sometimes could.

However, the Duchess’ private desires have brought disarray to her State, a fact that even the baseness of Ferdinand and the Cardinal in their desire to control her can’t alleviate. And soon after her confrontation with Ferdinand, the Duchess is indeed forced to resort to yet another stratagem: she declares that she will take flight to Ancona, and then agrees to Bosola’s refinement on the scheme—she should make a religious pilgrimage to the Madonna’s Shrine at Loreto so as to keep her trip from looking like a precipitous flight. And soon, the Duchess is in the clutches of Bosola, who wins her confidence not only with his Lareto scheme but also with his praise of Antonio’s honesty at line 232. Now, of course, he knows that Antonio is the Duchess’ husband since she has told him so directly. What Bosola has just done, he names the art of “a politician,” who is, he says, “the devil’s quilted anvil” (301) because he deadens the warning noise that should accompany the devil’s hammering out of new sins. And as usual, Webster’s genius for the oddly complex stage villain comes to the fore: Bosola says, “Oh, this base quality / Of intelligencer! Why, every quality i’ th’ world / Prefers but gain or commendation…” (305-07). Somehow, this kind of remark makes Bosola both more evil and more human than the average stock villain: we sense that we are dealing with a primal energy that might, depending on circumstances, be turned to great good or great evil.


To be continued as/if time permitteth...