The Duchess of Malfi Read online

  2005 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Introduction and editorial commentary copyright © 2005 by Frank Kermode

  Compilation copyright © 2005 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76968-8

  Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION by Frank Kermode

  SEVEN MASTERPIECES OF JACOBEAN DRAMA

  A WOMAN KILLED WITH KINDNESS, Thomas Heywood

  VOLPONE, OR THE FOX, Ben Jonson

  THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY, Cyril Tourneur

  THE MAID’S TRAGEDY, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

  A CHASTE MAID IN CHEAPSIDE, Thomas Middleton

  THE DUCHESS OF MALFI, John Webster

  THE CHANGELING, Thomas Middleton with William Rowley

  About the Editor

  INTRODUCTION

  Frank Kermode

  All the plays in this collection were written and first performed during the reign of King James I of England and VI of Scotland. Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, and in that year James arrived in London to claim the throne. One of his earliest acts was to change the name of Shakespeare’s company from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, as they had been called in the later years of Elizabeth, to The King’s Men, a gesture that enhanced the status of the theaters and the players.

  Shakespeare’s company, performing at The Globe but frequently also at court, staged within the first decade of the reign an extraordinary series of masterpieces by Shakespeare himself, including Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Coriolanus. But Shakespeare, despite what the playwright Webster called his “copious industry,” could not provide all the material that was needed. Of the plays in this anthology, the following were produced by his company at The Globe or, after 1609, in the indoor Blackfriars Theatre: The Revenger’s Tragedy, Volpone, The Maid’s Tragedy, and The Duchess of Malfi. The third and fourth of these may also have been performed at The Blackfriars, a very successful investment by The King’s Men. It proved so profitable that in the future, no more open-air theaters were built. Among rival indoor playhouses, the most celebrated was The Phoenix; one play in this collection, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, was performed there.

  Older open-air theaters nevertheless continued to exist—one of them, The Rose, close to The Globe, was the venue of A Woman Killed with Kindness. The older, larger playhouses provided cheaper and generally cruder entertainment than The Globe and The Blackfriars, but still made a substantial contribution to the various and lively Jacobean theatrical scene. More plays have been lost than survive, but the evidence is still conclusive: The reign of James I was the great age of English drama. Patrons of The Globe in the early years of the reign could have seen, in repertory at various times, King Lear, Macbeth, Volpone, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and Antony and Cleopatra, as well as many plays by other authors.

  The plays included in this anthology represent, as far as seven plays can, the variety and quality of the non-Shakespearean works presented during this period. With great regret I have had to omit plays by such important dramatists as John Marston, George Chapman, Philip Massinger, John Ford, and others. Thomas Middleton has claimed what might seem a disproportionate share of my space, the reason being that he excelled in city comedy as well as in tragedy.

  It used to be argued that there was a catastrophic change in the national mood about this time—a shift from Elizabethan to Jacobean, from a merry to a more melancholy, disillusioned England, from a society that had not yet quite lost touch with the religion and the customs so violently assailed by the reformers during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI to one in which doubts and anxieties—economic, political, even metaphysical—took firmer hold. In fact, the last years of Queen Elizabeth were not very serene. She was aging and increasingly difficult; she had to suffer the treasonable conduct of her favorite Essex; there were bad harvests, inflation, severe visitations of the plague, and continuing foreign threats. The world was changing fast as the queen’s health failed. The question as to who should succeed her was made harder by her refusal to discuss it.

  The arrival of James was a relief, but only until his own troubles imposed themselves. James prided himself on being a king by divine right, an absolutist claim that was to prove fatal to his son Charles I. James, with some justice, regarded himself a man of peace, though his relationship with his parliaments was anything but peaceful. Those who had welcomed him became disillusioned in their turn; there were manifold reasons for discontent, as there are under most governments. There were certainly grounds for it under so complex a monarch, with his pretensions to absolute power, his favorites, his passions for hunting and theology, and his unpopular way of encouraging the immigration into England of yet more alien Scotsmen.

  When James changed the name of Shakespeare’s company to The King’s Men, the poet and his fellows became royal servants and had thereafter a valuable, though relatively humble, connection with the court, where they performed more than all the other companies put together. They had most of the best actors, and the best theaters. They kept on good terms with the Master of the Revels, the official in the Lord Chamberlain’s office who was responsible for licensing plays.

  In the early days of the Elizabethan theater, many plays were thrown together by several writers, piecework done for the likes of the impresario Philip Henslowe. The days when actors were strolling players in the tradition of medieval entertainers, and liable to be treated as vagabonds, were still not so far away, but the case was different with independent, well-established companies, of which The King’s Men was the most powerful. The actors were now professionals, men of talent and experience. The “sharers” who held stock in the company and its theater, Shakespeare among them, grew rich. Shakespeare sued successfully for a grant of arms to his father, thus making himself a gentleman in an age when you could tell a gentleman from a yeoman or tradesman by the way he dressed. To support this social promotion, Shakespeare acquired a good deal of property, mostly in the Stratford area. But there were dramatists, contemporaries of Shakespeare, who did not prosper as he did, and they continued to collaborate in many hastily written plays to satisfy what seems to have been the virtually insatiable appetite of the playgoing public.

  THOMAS HEYWOOD (1574?–1641) was an actor and the author of a well-known and informative book about his trade called An Apology for Actors (1612), in which he claimed to have had a hand in 220 plays, of which only a handful survive. He wrote many other books, including a long poem called Troia Britannica about Troy and its fabled connection with English history, and a curious work of mystical theology called The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels. Readers of A Woman Killed with Kindness may detect in it a pious strain consistent with his religious interests.

  Heywood had a contract with the entrepreneur Philip Henslowe, who owned The Rose. He may have served both as actor and dramatist for this playhouse, which was smaller and less grand than The Globe, its younger Bankside neighbor. Yielding to the competition, Henslowe abandoned The Rose and the Bankside in 1600, and built a larger theater, The Fortune, in another part of the town. Henslowe often employed more than one playwright on a single play, and The Rose, like another popular playhouse, The Red Bull, catered primarily to a citizen audience, lacking the stronger middle- and upper-class connections of The Globe. Nevertheless, at least in th
e open-air theaters, there would still be a good mixture of social classes, citizens, apprentices, law students from the Inns of Court, gentlemen, and, somewhat to the surprise of foreign visitors, women.

  It was for what might be called a bourgeois audience, united for the moment by their common interests and ethical assumptions, that Heywood wrote A Woman Killed with Kindness, by far the best known of his plays. It contains the lines of his that are most often quoted, namely Frankford’s lament:

  O God! O God! That it were possible

  To undo things done; to call back yesterday;

  That Time could turn up his swift sandy glass,

  To untell the days, and to redeem these hours!

  Doubtless the note of genuine grief in these lines lifts the play above its more usual level of moralistic sentiment. A modern reader may find some cause for ridicule in the conduct of the story. Mistress Anne Frankford, a model of domestic virtue, needs only a few impassioned speeches by Wendoll to persuade her to disastrous adultery. And Acton suddenly and implausibly abandons a position of venomous retaliation and becomes a generous benefactor.

  We are accustomed to rapid changes of attitude in the drama of the period. Time, in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, does not simulate real time. The action of Heywood’s play stretches over several years, from the heroine’s wedding to her death, by which time she is the mother of two children. Events far apart can be crowded onto one another —think, for instance, of the speed with which Othello capitulates to Iago. Here it may seem merely a matter of substituting one pose for another, but we are expected to understand that the lapse of time between events and attitudes is for us to take into account. The time between the desire to retaliate and the readiness to forgive may seem too brief only if the audience does not supply that understanding.

  We must also, of course, allow for the very different social conventions of the time—the upper-class insistence on personal and family honor, which demands the unconditional obedience of wives and endorses the notion that children are besmirched by the dishonorable acts of their mothers. It hardly needs adding that there was a general interest in questions relating to marriage and adultery—handbooks on marriage were numerous at the time. Divorce was unavailable to anybody who was not a grandee. Meanwhile, the honor of a woman was simply her chastity, and her husband’s honor also depended on that quality. It might have been thought by some auditors that it was by sparing his wife the proper punishment for her crime that Frankford could be said to have killed her with kindness.

  The main points of both the main plot and the Mountford subplot are those at which the affected character gives way to lamentation and self-reproach:

  My God, what have I done? What have I done?

  My rage hath plunged me into a sea of blood,

  In which my soul lies drowned.…

  Frankford is dangerously certain of his happiness (2.1) and later equally sure of his misery. Wendoll is “melancholy” and full of self-condemnation before he seduces Anne. He blames his guilt on his passion, just as Mountford blames his rage, not himself, for committing murder, and can still feel, despite that crime, that he will inherit “Th’ immortal birthright which my Saviour keeps” (2.2). Anne’s deathbed scene is sentimental in the highest degree, and although moral warnings are frequently issued, the principals seem more conscious of their unhappiness than of their ruinous faults.

  The subplot ends in improbable happiness: The heroine beautifully starves herself to death and is reconciled at the last moment with her wronged husband. The play is hardly a domestic tragedy; it is domestic but hardly tragic, for all except the false friends and usurers achieve the ending they desire; so it departs from Shakespeare’s concept of tragedy and by an even greater degree from the classically oriented doctrine of Ben Jonson. Yet it has a vitality absent from much later domestic drama, and that is in large part due to the liveliness of the minor characters and their sprightly allusions to falconry and card games.

  These, which must have fascinated the original audience, are likely to be obscure to modern readers, who may need to imagine how they would enjoy a serious play that contained arcane references to football or baseball, pleasantly recognizable to them but obscure to strangers. The account of the falconry wager and quarrel contains many technical terms that would have been familiar to the first audiences, and a knowledge of several card games now obsolete would have afforded them the different kind of pleasure to be had from a series of sexual double meanings. Most of the technical terms, whether relating to falconry or cards, can be provided with learned explanations, but the labor of following them distracts attention from the play. It is enough for the modern reader to have a general understanding of what is going on, without going deeply into all the details.

  With its mixture of sentimental propriety and adultery, its background of county sports, dances, and cards, A Woman Killed with Kindness has deserved its success in the minor league of Jacobean drama. In the years immediately following its production, London was to see plays much darker, more complex—as one might say, more modern.

  The achievement of BEN JONSON (1572–1637) is of quite another order, for he was a major poet, master of all the genres of contemporary verse except epic. A Londoner, he attended Westminster School, where he acquired his mastery of the classical languages. His career was adventurous; when fighting in Flanders he killed an enemy in single combat, and later he killed another actor in a duel, for which he was branded a felon. His contribution to the lost play The Isle of Dogs, deemed seditious, also won him a spell in prison. Eastward Ho!, another play to which he contributed, got him into trouble about the time he wrote Volpone, and he was again in prison. In 1618–19 he walked from London to Scotland, where William Drummond of Hawthornden kept a fascinating record of the great man’s conversation.

  In 1597 he had begun to work for Henslowe, but his first play of importance, Everyman in His Humor, was written for Shakespeare’s company and performed in 1597 with Shakespeare in the cast. Jonson, as he himself remarked, was a follower of the ancients, but he treated them as “guides, not commanders,” and his comedies illustrate an independence and willingness to experiment that bears out that claim. They differ greatly from Shakespeare’s comedies, and may nowadays seem at times to be overloaded with learned allusions, but Jonson was also a master of the complex, fast-moving plot. Coleridge rated his play The Alchemist (1610) as one of the three best plots in the world, the others being Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Fielding’s Tom Jones. Among Jonson’s other admired comedies are Epicene, or the Silent Woman (1609) and the long, splendid Bartholemew Fair (1614) with its vivid scenes of London life in its carnival phase.

  He was less successful in his tragedies, partly because a pedantic fidelity to their Latin sources makes them heavy and dull, especially when compared with the brilliance of Shakespeare’s less scholarly Roman plays. For the Jacobean court he wrote learned, ingenious masques, adorned with scenery and costumes by the great architect Inigo Jones. Their sophistication brought what had been a relatively simple ceremonious form to such a remarkable degree of refinement that it is only in recent years that scholars have come close to explaining their detail.

  As a writer of lyrics and epigrams, Jonson became the model for a generation of excellent minor poets. He also wrote strong, effective prose. He was virtually the first poet laureate, and was awarded a pension by King James. He was teased for his presumption in publishing his collected Works in 1616, being the first dramatist to do so, and he saw the book through the press himself. Seven years later the First Folio of Shakespeare’s collected works, published posthumously by the poet’s friends and colleagues, followed Jonson’s example. Jonson admired Shakespeare “this side idolatry”—“There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.” He spoke deprecatingly of his friend’s “small Latin and less Greek,” but the verses he contributed to the Folio of 1623 reflect the genuine character of his admiration. The reputations of the two friends and rivals were long sub
ject to comparison, Jonson escaping censure by critics who shared a revived interest in the rules of classical dramaturgy, Shakespeare proving more attractive to poets.

  According to Jonson himself, Volpone was written in five weeks, and certainly it belongs to the period when he was close to the height of his powers. In giving the dramatis personae allegorical names—Fox, Fly, Vulture, Crow, Raven—he establishes the moralistic character of his fable while at the same time seizing on possibilities of caricature.

  The ingenuity of the structure of the play makes up for the two-dimensional nature of characters involved in what G. K. Hunter, in modern terminology, calls the series of “scams” that make up the plot. Jonson accepted the classical requirement that poetry should instruct while it delighted. He was by nature a satirist in an age when satire was so popular, and thought so dangerous, that in 1598 it was banned, whereupon it was, for a time, to be found only on the stage, and principally in Jonson’s plays.

  His later works—which Dryden unkindly called his “dotages”— were mostly failures, partly because his blend of caricature and didacticism no longer pleased. It succeeds in Volpone because of the richness of the language and the skillful presentation of the metropolitan setting. The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair are celebrated because of the density of allusion to London life, especially low life—the thieves, pimps, and prostitutes, the con men, the bustle of the fair and the streets of the city. Volpone, though set in Venice, has its share of such detail, and Jonson is careful, as Shakespeare never would be, to sketch the topography of this city, probably to English audiences the most famous outside their own country, and to give realistic attention to its canals and gondolas, its hospitals and magistrates and policemen, as well as to such gullible tourists as Sir Politick Would-be and his lady.