Duchess of Malfi

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Duchess of Malfi: A Revenge Tragedy

The revenge tragedy is a tragic play in which the tragedy results from the
revenge that is taken for some wrong or wrongs, either by the person wronged
himself or by someone else on his behalf. In fact, the revenge tradition keeps
back into the classical antiquity. The earliest recorded trilogy in Greek drama
has a core of revenge and many of the plays of Sophocles and Euripides deal
with the theme of revenge. From Hippolytus and Media to Hecuba have a strong
revenge motif. However in their tragedies there was nothing of that horror
element which soon came to be associated with the revenge play and which is a
marked feature of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy. It was Seneca, the great
tragic dramatist of ancient Rome, who introduced the element of horror in the
revenge play. In the Senecan tragedy, revenge is taken as a duty for the murder
of some close relative or friend. The fact of murder is revealed by the ghost of
the murdered person who enjoins someone close to himself to take revenge, and
to regard that revenge as a sacred duty. As the avenger proceeds to perform his
duty, horror is piled upon horror and in the end the stage is left littered with
dead bodies.
Throughout the golden age of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama from about 1587
to the closure of theatres the revenge drama predominated the place produced
during the period.
The Senecan revenge tragedy was the paradigm on which the Elizabethan
drama was modelled. The earliest writers of tragedy in the English language,
Thomas Sackville, and Thomas Norton, fastened on a story of revenge for their
Gorboduc, first produced in 1561. Since then, for another sixty years revenge
continued to be one of the popular themes for dramatic representation.
Gorboduc was significant in its day, not merely for its political overtones but
also, perhaps chiefly, for breaking fresh ground in dramaturgy. The play,
however, did not serve as a model for later writers of revenge plays. The authors
of Gorboduc were familiar with the translations of Seneca’s plays but they did
not induct into English drama all the conventions of Senecan Tragedy.
The influence of Seneca passed into the Elizabethan theatre through Thomas
Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Kyd was deeply influenced by Seneca and so he
provided a model of Senecan revenge tragedy to the English audience through
The Spanish Tragedy (1596). Since his days the features of revenge tragedy
came to be recognised as the following.
a) A shocking murder has been committed and it cries out for revenge.
b) Some person or persons take up revenge as a sacred duty.
c) The ghost of the murdered person stalks about asking for revenge or
providing the stimulus for revenge, alternatively there are omens and
presentiments.
d) There is a Machiavellian villain who, acting on his own behalf or for others,
causes widespread bloodshed.
e) The objects of revenge are often better than the so called avengers.
f) New-fangled tortures and horrors are introduced.
g) Some characters grow mad or feign madness.
h) There is a play within a play which often mirrors the core of the main
action.
i) And the imagery and language employed often suit the violence of the
action.

The Elizabethan and Jacobean writers employed as many of these features as


their plots allowed and freely made variations in them.
The Spanish Tragedy exhibits only a few of these features. After Kyd the
revenge type can be traced in a number of plays, e. g. in Shakespeare's Hamlet,
Marston’s Antonio's Revenge and Malcontent, Tourneur’s Revenger’s Tragedy
and Atheist's Tragedy and Webster's tragic masterpieces. They attempted plays
of this type with their variations of dramatic technique. In making the avenger a
virtuous, sensitive and scholarly person, Shakespeare raised his revenge tragedy
Hamlet, to a high intellectual and philosophical level. Tourneur exploited the
morbid and melodramatic aspects of revenge tragedy and heaped horrors on
horror’s head in the Revenger's Tragedy and the Atheist's Tragedy.
John Webster, starting after the revenge tragic writers, great and small, showed
his originality basically in reversing the moral positions of the avengers and the
victim. In The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi the victims of the so called
revenge are heroic women and the avengers are blood-thirsty villains. While
tortures are there aplenty for the entertainment of the groundlings, the two plays
raise the question of degree and dignity of high places and in fact make them
the springs of action: this has been done to satisfy the nobility and the educated
among the audience.
Webster uses the common devices of the revenge tragedy but in the process
transforms them into something rich and strange. The revenge tragedy was apt
to place the scene in Italy which had come to symbolize the corruption of later
Renaissance.
The Duchess of Malfi is the triumph of the revenge play transformed into
tragedy of grand proportions. Never has there been a more perfect fusion of
pure drama, which is an effect of representing character and passions, and
melodrama, which is based on the horror of physical impression and on
spectacular strangeness. The theme is persecuted virtue, a variant on the popular
one of revenge. There is a spectacle of vengeance accomplished by strange
means. The avengers are, however, moved by blind, unreasoning considerations,
as far instance, fury at a misalliance, or they have low motives like the desire to
get possession of their victim’s fortune. The victim, the Duchess of Malfi, has
all goodness and innocence and is driven to madness and death by her brothers
because she has secretly married her steward, the virtuous Antonio.
Webster uses every device in his search for the pathos inherent in situation and
even in material effects. It is this search which is proper to melodrama. Webster
has a strange power of evoking shudders. His means are sometimes more
effective for their simplicity. The duchess, compelled by fear of her brothers to
keep her marriage secret, is discovered in her chamber conversing with her
husband Antonio, her heart filled with joy and love. Antonio leaves her without
her knowledge, she continues to speak thinking he hears her, but her listener is
now one of the brothers she fears to whom she thus betrays herself. Whoever
watches the play feels a catch at his heart as he perceives her error while she is
still unaware of it. The impulse is to cry out to her to beware. Some of
Webster’s devices are, however, much less innocent than this one. The avenging
brothers reveal in macabre inventions to torture their poor victim, one of them
feigning to give her his hand leaves a severed hand in her grasp; she is shown
wax figures of her husband and children, the inmates of a madhouse are let
loose in her palace.
Charles Lamb has pointed out the supreme dramatic effectiveness of the devices
used by Webster. He says:
To move a horror skillfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear
as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop and
then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit; this only
Webster can do. Writers of an inferior genius may upon horror’s head
horrors accumulate, but they cannot do this. They mistake quantity for
quality, they ‘terrify babes with painted devils’, but they know not how a
soul is capable of being moved, their terrors want dignity, their
affrightments are without decorum.
In Webster’s The White Devil the revenge motive is weak. It is non-existent in
The Duchess of Malfi. The brothers of the Duchess say that they have been
disgraced by the Duchess marrying her steward, and proceed to take action. But
after the murder of the Duchess comes Ferdinand's strange confession:
“What was the meanness of her match to me,
Only I must confess I had a hope
Had she continued widow, to have gained
An infinite mass of treasure by her death”.
The more Machiavellian of the brothers the Cardinal does not make any such
confession, but his motif might have been the same as Ferdinand’s. So the
motive appears to be avarice and not revenge.
Webster refined the material and motives of the earlier tragedies of blood,
gloom and wrought all that he took into something much richer, much more
subtly wonderful. He has, in a word, converted melodrama into tragedy. In The
Duchess of Malfi revenge is seen in its ugliest form. It is entirely desertable and
inexcusable. The revengeful brothers are both villains who carry their villainy to
the farthest verge of human depravity. They are the victims of insensate fury
that blinds the eyes, maddens the brain, and poisons the springs of pity, a fury
that, in more violent choleric temper of Ferdinand, leads to a maddening
remorse, and, in the more studiedly treacherous soul of the Cardinal, to a
callousness and inhumanity that strikes one cold. The piteous sufferings of their
victim evokes a passionate sympathy even from the hard hearted Bosola.
In The Duchess of Malfi, revenge is a nominal theme and it is again twisted so
as to show its double aspect. Hazlitt says, “up to the end of the fourth act the
revenge is for an alleged outrage on the insensate pride of family, combined
with avarice; later it takes an altogether different turn when the instruments of
all the atrocities turns to be the avenger of the wrongs which he himself had
perpetrated, under the pressure of the necessity”. Ferdinand and Cardinal take
revenge on the Duchess for marrying against their wishes. Bosola, the
instrument of the revenge, takes his own revenge on the Cardinal for being
ungrateful to him and incidentally Ferdinand is killed. That is the revenge motif
in the play. But Webster makes the revenge not a repugnant, horrible affair but
invests it with a moral tone. The whole of the last act is devoted to the nemesis
which falls upon the avengers. Thus by introducing the tone of moral justice at
the end, Webster raises the original crude theme of revenge to a high plane.
The absence of the revenge motive allows Webster to focus on the moral issues.
It has been said that outside Shakespeare Webster is the most moral of the
Elizabethan dramatist. He was a true poet. He symbolizes the triumph of
melodrama raised to the level of true poetry.

Webster’s Moral Vision


Webster’s vision is a moral one. He sees life as a struggle between right and
wrong. He conceived morality in religious terms. An act to him was wrong, not
because it interfered with the happiness of man in this world, but because it was
a sin; a breach of the eternal laws established by the God who created man.
Moreover it was a voluntary breach. Men to him are not the helpless sport of an
indifferent fate as they were to the Greeks. Possessed of free will, his villains
sin deliberately. These evil voluntary acts are the cause of human tragedy.
Webster envisages evil in its most extreme form. The world as seen by him is,
of its nature, incurably corrupt. To be involved in it is to be inescapably
involved in evil: all its apparent beauties are a snare and a delusion. There is a
couplet of his, expressing what to him must have been a very important truth:
for it occurs in both his plays,
Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright,
But looked to near, have neither heat nor light.
Ambition, pleasure, beauty, passion, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life – to
look to these for happiness is to be certain of disappointment and
disillusionment. In monarchical seventeenth century England, the Court was the
chief home of these specious mortal splendours. Webster makes it his symbol
for them. Again and again, and with passion, he makes his characters warn
mankind against the lure of the Court. ‘Let my son fly the courts of Princes’
cries the virtuous Antonio with his last breath.
Nor are the glories of this world merely a source of disillusionment: they are
also dangerous to the soul. They seduce, they corrupt; to obtain them, man is led
into sin. That breach of the Divine Law which for Webster is the cause of
tragedy comes always from too violent a desire to win this world’s prizes. The
wicked commit their crimes because their treasure is not laid up in heaven,
because their hearts are set on those glories of our blood and state which are
shadows and not substantial things.
Webster’s melancholic view of life is reflected in the order he imposes upon
human nature. His characters are ranged in moral divisions; there are the good
and there are the bad and the bad are active and dynamic. They are of two types.
The first – Ferdinand and the Cardinal - are the creatures of some ruling
passion; lust or ambition or avarice or hatred. Possessed by an insatiate desire to
satisfy it, they break every law, shut their eyes to every scruple. The second
group is actuated less by passion, than by cynicism. Bosola is not blinded by the
violence of his desires. On the contrary he is cold and calculating. He has a
Machiavellian disbelief in human virtue. Mankind to him is made up of fools
and knaves all equally struggling for their own ends. The only solid goods are
material wealth and success: and, deliberately rejecting every moral
consideration, he sets to work to get them. Opposed to this two types of villain,
stand the good characters; Antonio and the Duchess, noble, pitiful and
courageous. In contrast to the bad, however they are passive: they cannot
identify themselves with the activities of the sin tainted world. Once she has
married Antonio, the Duchess initiates no action. Helpless victims, both are
swept into the turmoil set up by the furious energy of the wicked. In the end,
more often than not, they are destroyed by them.
But Webster does believe in the ultimate victory of virtue. The good are only
defeated on the material plane. Morally they triumph. No amount of suffering
corrupts or breaks their courage: On the contrary their virtues shine even
brighter for the blood-stained darkness that gathers about them. Furthermore,
though they may be destroyed, so also – and far more dreadfully – are there
enemies. The evil-doer is caught in the net he has woven for others. Before the
wickedest characters of Webster die they are forced to recognise the supremacy
of the Divine Law, against which they have offended.
Aptness of Act V
• Act V has been criticized as providing a kind of anti-climax to Act IV.
• In Act IV Webster has been able to put into the character of the Duchess all
the charm and dignity of womanhood along with all the courage and stoic
endurance that are usually associated with great warriors.
• Such a noble piece of creation dies with the word ‘mercy’ on her lips.
• Aesthetically and logically the play should end here. But the dramatist goes
on and shows the agents of evil perish.
• Had Webster been a mere dramatist, that is dramatist without a moral sense
or a purpose, he would have stopped with Act IV.
• But the moralist in him was a little more dominant than the dramatist in
him.
• His sense of justice would not let him rest until he had made his villains go
down ingloriously.
• His good characters win all our admiration and sympathy. Until the very
moment of death, in the face of all the horrors the Duchess is subjected to,
she maintains her dignity, nobility and composure. Antonio is killed by
accident. But the villains die fighting like mad dogs
• Lord David Cecil says that the fifth Act may be justified from the moral
point of view. It is in this Act that all the evil-doers get due punishment. Yet
from the purely structural point of view the fifth Act cannot be justified.
• There is no denying the fact that the tragedy would have gained in intensity
if the play had ended with the strangling of the Duchess.
• Act V, which has been criticised as providing a kind of anti-climax to Act
IV, has been found necessary by Webster to project his moral vision in its
entirety.
• Thus, Act V has satisfied the moral sense of Webster and has projected his
moral vision.
Melodrama raised to the level of pure tragedy

• In Melodrama, the horrors are introduced for their own sake. The
protagonist is absolutely good, and the villains are absolutely evil.
• Horrors have a symbolical significance, and the villain Bosola finally turns
into an instrument of moral triumph.
• Many critics are of the view that horrors in the play serve no useful
purpose.
• Horrors are introduced only to please the contemporary audience. They are
mechanical and brutal.
• But it is not true. Webster’s handling of these scenes is superb.
• Our attention is drawn not to the horrors but to the Duchess’s reaction to
them.
• Bosola helps the Duchess to overcome her womanly fears. He arouses the
spirit of greatness in her.
• His words – “the stars shine still” symbolize hope and moral triumph of the
Duchess.
• Charles Lamb has pointed out the supreme dramatic effectiveness of the
scene. He says,
“To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as
much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop ‘and
then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit; this only

Webster can do. Writers of an inferior genius may upon horror’s head
horrors accumulate, but they cannot do this. They mistake quantity for
quality, they ‘terrify babes with painted devils’, but they know not how a
soul is capable of being moved: their terrors want dignity, their
affrightments are without decorum.”
• There is a further point in which Webster scores over all the other writers of
revenge plays. And that is in his moral vision.

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