Have you been reading much lately? Stephen McEwen certainly has. In ‘The Book I Read’, he tells you which classic tomes you should be turning your attention to in lieu of watching The X Factor – less Gamu, more Camus, if you will. This week’s mind-expander – The Duchess Of Malfi.
‘The misery of us that are born great,
We are forced to woo because none dare woo us’
Violence, incest, revenge, sex, royalty, love, and all on the Amalfi coast – John Webster’s ‘The Duchess of Malfi’, the quintessential Jacobean drama, quite literally has it all. When held up to his contemporaries, Webster, the size of whose oeuvre does pale in comparison with his ever-admired peer Shakespeare, is often criticised for being over-sensationalist, for bombarding the audience and reader with an overwhelming amount of violence and terror. Nobody is going to deny that very few of his characters do leave the stage with their existence intact, TS Eliot did not famously remark that ‘Webster was much possessed by death/And saw the skull beneath the skin’ for no reason. Yet we must not forget the gut-wrenching gore of Shakespeare’s ‘Titus Andronicus’, and that even the burgeoning form of the city comedy in the 16th and 17th century is often just as exaggerated in its attempts to make us laugh, as Webster is in his tragedy.
In the play, we find ourselves in the court of Malfi in the early 16th century; the widowed Duchess rules alongside her overbearing brothers Ferdinand and the Cardinal, and soon comes to cross them as she falls in love with a man out of her class (Antonio), thus threatening their inheritance, masculinity and general sensibilities. During a botched attempt to flee to northern Italy with her husband and three children, the Duchess enacts her second hamartia in confiding to the malcontent Bosola (a stock character in drama of the period) who is a spy for Ferdinand, resulting in the escape of Antonio and one child, and the Duchess and two of her children being imprisoned in Malfi. What so grippingly follows is a series of deaths which culminates in the very agents of revenge meeting their just ends, the hopeful re-establishment of the dynastic line with the survival of Antonio and one of his children, and in her noble death, the Duchess becoming one of the most admired figures on the English stage.
The text is undeniably very much of its time. Its setting and religiosity is meant to make a newly Protestant English audience feel comfortably smug that such horrors do not occur on our emerald isle, instead taking place in the abundantly corrupt courts of the Mediterranean which still pledge allegiance to the old faith. Its anti-Catholicism reaches heights of the ridiculous when one character is killed by the Cardinal by being forced to kiss a poisoned Bible, and the character of Bosola with his grotesquely rich language which describes corruption at court, introduces elements of satire which may not necessarily mean to be symptomatic of the Italianate ruling families.
Yet despite its violent senstationalism, its oozing satire in the form of Bosola, and its rampant anti-Catholicism, what stands out most in the text are the characters of the Duchess, and Bosola. The Duchess divides opinion, with some viewing her death as a result of foolish actions, others seeing her pursuit of love as admirably noble – either way, the unsparing stoicism with which she meets her end, defiantly proclaiming ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’, solidifies her reputation as one of our great tragic figures. Through his odd relationship with the Duchess – aiding her downfall, and then avenging it – Bosola comes to represent the malcontent of the era. Yet he is not all blood, murder and misogyny, the almost tender relationship he develops with the Duchess results in his own redemption, as he seeks to revenge the very woman whose execution he oversaw. Bloody it is, but through this, not despite this, we come to see the courage and nobility of the Duchess and Bosola, two individuals trapped and tormented in roles from which they desperately try to escape, and, being unable to do so, who meet their tragic ends in ways which mark high points in our tragic tradition.
