The Duchess of Malfi Read online

The structure of the piece is classical, with the proper opening, development, catastrophe, and conclusion. Despite its affinity with popular speech, the language of the play is often classically derived. In the opening scene Volpone’s speech about his love of gold draws on an ode of the Greek poet Pindar, but it can be perfectly well understood without that information; an overwrought speech in praise of gold was exactly what the moment required, and Pindar offered a perfect precedent. One of the skills of a poet, according to Jonson, is “Invention”—finding and if possible overgoing the best models. Perhaps grandeur of theme calls for a lofty style; perhaps a passage might, on the other hand, call for a low style. We need “height as well as humbleness,” said Jonson, and he could provide both. For the most part the mood of Volpone is close to that of the Latin satirists, especially Juvenal and Martial, who commented on the corruptions of Rome.

  “Language most shows a man: speak, that I may see thee.” So Jonson, advising poets. He set great store by language and the importance of saving it from corruption, for he held the view that language reflects the condition of the social order: “it imitates the public riot.” Where men are corrupt, so will their language be.

  He thought a person’s speech reflected the speaker’s spirit—“speak, that I may see thee”—an excellent credo for a dramatist. We know what we need to know about Volpone by the false grandeur of his opening lines and the splendor of his talk when he attempts to seduce Celia, but also by the “humbleness” of his conversation with Mosca and his unnatural family of entertainers. Lady Politick is a joke, but her part is so written that we sympathize with the suffering of Volpone under the barrage of her conversation. Her scene in court is delightful because even the judges cannot shut her up. Sir Politick is a caricature of a type Jonson found especially ridiculous: the projector, peddling his absurd ideas, obsessed with secrets of state. Even the judges themselves are at once grave and corrupt—witness their attentiveness to Mosca when they believe him to have become rich, even a possible husband for one of their daughters. The fate of the criminals is harsh, but the depiction of vice and its consequences for the vicious is a proper part of the dramatist’s job, as Jonson explains at length in the prefatory letter to “The Two Famous universities.” The writing of that epistle, to those addressees, is further evidence of Jonson’s confidence in his own powers, and in the correctness of his practice. We may also reflect that this play was performed at The Globe, on the south bank of the Thames, where it stood among the inns, brothels, and bear pits, as well as at the universities. The popular theater could handle learned comedy, at least as long as it had a lively plot, energetic language, and some good jokes.

  The Revenger’s Tragedy was published as a cheap quarto in 1607–08. Its authorship has been the subject of protracted scholarly argument: CYRIL TOURNEUR (1575–1626) or Thomas Middleton? The argument is best conducted in terms of what is known of the metrical and lexical habits of each writer, and the prevailing opinion of the learned seems to favor Middleton. It is true that in the early years of the century he was mostly occupied with comedies, often in collaboration with other playwrights, but he is celebrated for his versatility and productiveness, and there is no external evidence against his authorship. On the other hand, there is no such evidence in favor of it. Tourneur, a much more obscure figure, is known as the author of one other play, The Atheist’s Tragedy, and The Revenger’s Tragedy was ascribed to him only in 1656, forty years after his death. My own sense of the matter is that Middleton did not write the play. Its language and syntax are more bizarre than Middleton’s, and its treatment of aristocratic corruption even more gloatingly comical.

  As an admittedly subjective test, consider the two most famous passages in The Revenger’s Tragedy and The Changeling, both of which were made famous by T. S. Eliot. This, from the former:

  Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours

  For thee? For thee does she undo herself?

  Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships,

  For the poor benefit of a bewitching minute?

  Why does yon fellow falsify highways,

  And put his life between the judge’s lips,

  To refine such a thing—keeps horse and men

  To beat their valors for her?

  This from the latter:

  O, come not near me, sir, I shall defile you!

  I am that of your blood was taken from you

  For your better health; look no more upon’t,

  But cast it to the ground regardlessly,

  Let the common sewer take it from distinction.…

  In Tourneur’s lines we notice first a contraction of focus: Rich clothes are reduced to the silk laboriously produced by the silkworm from its yellow cocoon. From the idea of the silkworm undoing itself, we move to that of great men undoing themselves by squandering their estates (“lordships”) on women in return for what in the end is a “poor benefit,” the pleasure of sex (“a bewitching minute”—not, as Eliot thought, “a bewildering minute,” though that may be thought even finer). The rest is a development of the idea, showing that the same folly besets men lower in the social scale: The highwayman risks his life for the same moment of pleasure, and the horses and men, in their version of the labors of the silkworm, “beat their valors” for her (there is a move from the sexual act to the woman who provides it). Now there is great strength and activity in these lines. It is astonishing to the modern ear that such complex verse can play a part in a drama; it not only expresses Vendice’s contempt for riches and for women, part of his character, but also forces the auditor to make an intellectual effort that mimics the labors of lord, highwayman, and silkworm. Yet there are oddities in the diction that strike me as pointing to a difference in tone and manner from Middleton. “Falsify” is a strange word in the context; the commentators are not able to find a comparable use of the word elsewhere. “To beat their valors” is equally strange. These expressions seem to be well over the margin of normal Jacobean English, though they do enhance the speech and increase its already great distance from the commonplace.

  Middleton’s lines, on the other hand, follow out, with great ingenuity, the metaphor with which Beatrice-Joanna begins. Her family is her “blood.” She presents herself as blood let by a surgeon to help cure a disease for which she is responsible. Her departure by bloodletting purifies the family’s body, and, since her blood is base, it should be disposed of basely: “Let the common sewer take it from distinction.” The discarded blood flows into the common sewer and away from—“distinction.” This word is strange and surprising but absolutely just; its abstractness allows it first to mean “the distinguished blood of my family,” but it then associates that idea with a much larger notion of distinction, of civility and honor, of a purity that is distinct from anything to be called “common.”

  It would be wrong, I think, to say that one of these famous passages excels the other. Both are fine, both show us the strange world of Jacobean revenge tragedy at its most splendid, yet they seem to come not from one but from two different talents working in the same tradition.

  Whoever wrote it, the peculiar greatness of The Revenger’s Tragedy has been widely acknowledged since the late Victorians put it into circulation and T. S. Eliot, who undertook but never finished a book on the drama of the period, gave it canonical sanction in an early essay on Thomas Middleton. The celebrity of this, and other, bloody Italianate tragedies has never waned, though they are sometimes subjected to ridicule and parody, of which hilarious examples occur in Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) and Nigel Dennis’s Cards of Identity (1955). As John Kerrigan remarks in his book Revenge Tragedy, there is a natural affinity between revenge tragedy and the ridiculous. But we may think of these parodies as tributes as well as satires.

  Tourneur’s play, like Middleton’s The Changeling, is a sophisticated development of a well-established genre, the revenge play. The vogue began with Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and the lost Hamlet of the 1580s. Later exa
mples include plays by Shakespeare, Marston, and Chapman. A favorite way to bring the drama to its climax was to stage a play or a masque or a banquet in the course of which the wicked are ingeniously slaughtered and the revengers themselves punished, as they are in Tourneur’s play and as they were in The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet.

  Tourneur gives his characters allegorical names—Vendice, the Revenger; Lussurioso, the libertine lecher; Spurio, the Bastard; Ambitioso; and so on. Vendice’s motives arise from the total corruption of the court. Though himself a malcontent, he has ethical standards, no doubt perverted; he enjoys all the “quaint” tricks by which he brings the royal family to grief, and is in any case a murderer himself. Readers of this play, and those of Middleton and others of the period, cannot help being struck by the omnipresence of the word “honor” and its derivatives. Everybody has it, seeks it, must hold on to it and, if possible, augment it. It is not a simple ideal. Women’s honor may seem simple, since it calls only for virginity and marital fidelity, but it is intricately entangled with men’s honor (brothers must, in the cause of honor, avenge dishonored sisters) because their blood is the blood of the family, and the loss of female honor affects all the kin. Honor has only the most tenuous connection with virtuous behavior. One is reminded of the Sicilian Mafia, “men of honor” whose compliance with the standards of conduct required of them has nothing whatever to do with virtue, and insists on the same immediate recourse to violence that we find in the Jacobean plays. Omertà is virtuous only among “men of honor.”

  What may strike the modern reader as most extraordinary about The Revenger’s Tragedy is its obvious relish for the horrible, for gut-wrenching surprises. Such moments are part of the popular heritage of the Elizabethan theater—witness the amputations, murders, and cannibalism of Shakespeare’s early Titus Andronicus and, later, the dead man’s hand in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. Yet Tourneur contrives to be more shocking than any of the others. Moreover, the hatred expressed by some of the characters for women, as the targets of lust and themselves lustful, probably exceeds what is to be found elsewhere. The reader, or auditor, has a growing sense that this is a fantasy world, where murder plots and seductions have a far more striking place in the life of courts than might be expected, even by audiences accustomed to thinking of courts as sinks of corruption rather than the sources of just rule, as the French court is said to be in the opening lines of The Duchess of Malfi. The function of those lines is to provide a contrast with the wickedness of rulers in the rest of the play. The fantasy world, with its refined cruelties, poisons, and tortures, was identified primarily with Italy, though it might be Spain or even ancient Rome. Certainly the fantasy was exotic. Not that Elizabeth’s court was without its moral monsters, but it lacked most of those exciting refinements.

  JOHN FLETCHER (1579–1625) was Shakespeare’s successor as chief playwright for The King’s Men. His background was very different from Shakespeare’s, for his father was a bishop (the poets Giles and Phineas Fletcher were his cousins) and he was educated at Cambridge. He was fifteen years younger than Shakespeare, and although they collaborated on Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the lost play Cardenio, they had little in common as playwrights and poets.

  Fletcher’s first known collaborator was FRANCIS BEAUMONT (1584–1616). Both had done some work for the theater before establishing themselves as co-authors. Fifteen or sixteen plays are attributed to them jointly, though they were produced in a short span of time, and other hands might also have been involved. Beaumont and Fletcher were highly valued, and only they, apart from Jonson and Shakespeare, were honored with a Folio edition, which appeared in 1647, long after their deaths and five years after Parliament closed the theaters.

  Fletcher was a highly skilled dramatist, and evidently had a strong rapport with the Blackfriars audience. He had a distinctive blank-verse style, and most people feel that they can distinguish between his hand and Shakespeare’s in their collaborations, though arguments about their respective contributions still go on. Fletcher worked not only with Beaumont and Shakespeare but also with other dramatists, and it is not really possible to list definitively the plays he wrote alone. In this respect his career was more characteristic of the theater of the period than Shakespeare’s, though even he, with his steady employment as playwright for the premier company, may have had more collaborators than we normally choose to think.

  The Maid’s Tragedy is often listed as a “Beaumont and Fletcher” play, one of the products of the relatively brief period during which the two writers shared a house as well as an occupation, yet it may be Fletcher’s alone. The two young men were alike of good family and entered the theatrical profession after studies at Oxford and Cambridge. Beaumont abandoned the theater in 1613, but Fletcher continued in it until his death of the plague in 1625, the year also of King James’s death. Their works are associated with the private rather than the public playhouse, but are nevertheless remarkably varied, including the lively and sometimes farcical comedy The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) and tragicomedies such as Philaster (1609) and A King and No King (1611): “A tragicomedy,” wrote Fletcher “is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy.…”

  Fletcher and his collaborators could claim proficiency in all three departments—comedy, tragicomedy, tragedy. As its title suggests, the play here included belongs to the third category, but it still has something in common with tragicomedy, and it stands apart from the plays Shakespeare wrote around the same time. The last of his tragedies, Coriolanus, is usually dated 1608, and The Winter’s Tale a year or two later, so they were virtually contemporaneous with The Maid’s Tragedy, which bears little or no resemblance to either. The Winter’s Tale can be thought of as a tragicomedy, though not in accordance with Fletcher’s definition, since the king’s son Mamilius dies; and in any case it is quite unlike Fletcher’s writing in that genre.

  The principal differences from Shakespeare should be sought in the tone of the verse and the social mood of the play. Shakespeare has no character resembling Evadne, the king’s cynical mistress, who mocks and torments her titular husband, Amintor, before being driven to repentance and death. It is noteworthy that the most famous lines in the play are spoken by Evadne when her newly married husband arrives in the bridal chamber and mentions her maidenhead: “A maidenhead, Amintor, / At my years!” she replies, and goes on to say that she will never lie with him: “ ’tis not for a night / Or two that I forbear thy bed, but ever.”

  It is typical of Fletcher that this scene makes the most of the salacious possibilities of the situation. They echo, in another key, all the jokes about bridal nights, marriage beds, and maidenheads made by the other characters, including Evadne’s female attendants. Evadne, having forfeited her woman’s honor, can be called a whore. Amintor’s situation is such that he has been tricked into forfeiting his male honor and is a cuckold. Melantius needs to exact vengeance for the loss of his soldier’s honor, besmirched by the whoredom of his sister. Callanax, incapable of honor, becomes the butt of Melantius and a traitor to his king; he is described in the dramatis personae as “an old humorous lord,” humorous in the contemporary sense, being comically the victim of his own temperament. He therefore acts as a foil to the attitudinizing of the principal characters, and is involved also as the father of Aspatia, the maid whose tragedy we are witnessing. Aspatia is sometimes thought to have more time than she should have been granted to express her woes, and there is certainly an artificial air about her speeches; but this raises a difficult political issue.

  Several times in the play we are reminded that it is sacrilege to kill a king, even when an offense like his, if committed by a less godlike person, would require reprisal. The idea of the divine right of kings, with the obvious corollary that one must not, on any account, kill them, was not new; it is obvious, for example, that Shakespeare’s Richard II subscribed t
o it, and on the other side of the argument there were those who believed and wrote in defense of the view that if kings became tyrants one had the right to be rid of them. However, the Stuarts embraced the doctrine with a new fervency, and one may guess that much of the interest of this play, for the kind of audience it probably had at The Blackfriars, would lie in the conflict between honor—male, female, soldierly, whatever—and the prohibition, whether political or divine, of revenge against the man who had caused all the trouble. In the end it is Evadne, the fallen woman restored to virtue, who overcomes her scruple about regicide. “I am any thing / That knows not pity,” she remarks, having tied the monarch to the bed as the first of the vengeful “love-tricks” she then plays upon him.

  That scene (5.1) demonstrates, as well as any, Fletcher’s strengths. Brooding over the sleeping king, Evadne decides to wake him up before killing him, in a speech reminiscent of Hamlet’s over King Claudius at prayer. At first he tries to take her threats as sexual solicitations, but of this misapprehension she lengthily disabuses him. As a woman Evadne is liable to all the charges Fletcher, in the mood of his times, would bring against her sex. Nor can she escape male coarseness: When, after Evadne’s departure, the king’s attendants enter, they are joking about her as “a fine wench.” “We’ll have a snap at her one of these nights, as she goes from him.” As attendants of the bedchamber they know her status and joke about her as if she were a whore indeed. A poignant little dialogue, and a trick probably learned from Shakespeare, who liked to give such characters as murderers their right to comment on the great events they were employed to bring about; they may have little to say, but their words are enriching and memorable, as when Banquo’s remark “It will be rain tonight” is followed by a murderer’s “Let it come down,” which richly completes the blank-verse line.

  Fletcher was fashionable. At the time he was writing, the Jacobean court staged many sophisticated masques, in some of which The King’s Men participated, and it was modish to include one, or part of one, in plays, as, for instance, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. When Fletcher writes a quite elaborate masque for the marriage of Amintor and Evadne at the beginning of his play, he means to please his audience with an upper-class entertainment, but not at the expense of the play’s construction, for the masque is quite relevant to the business of the plot and serves to emphasize the cruelty of the deception practiced on Amintor, revealed only when the supposed lovers meet in the bridal chamber.