Commentaries on Plays by Shakespeare’s Contemporaries
Webster, John. The Duchess of Malfi. Methuen Drama / New Mermaids 5th ed., 2021. ISBN-13: 978-1474295673.
Of Interest: RSC Resources | ISE Resources | S-O Sources | 1623 Folio 619-48 (Folger) | Amendola, B. The Mystery of the Duchess of Malfi, 2002 (Amazon.com) | Complete Works of John Webster, Vol. 2., ed. F. L. Lucas 1927 (Archive.org) | Bandello’s Novelle, Vol. 2, Pt. 1, 24th Story, 41-55 (Villon Soc. 1890/HathiTrust) | Bandello’s Novelle (Italiano), Vol. Primo, Novella XXVI, pg. 346 (HathiTrust) | W. Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure, “The Duchess …” (Gutenberg, Vol. 3) | The Mysterious Mr. Webster—BBC Arts at the Globe 2023 (YouTube Video)
Biographical Introduction to John Webster
Following are introductory comments on the life of John Webster, drawn partly from F. L Lucas’s The Complete Works of John Webster, London: Chatto & Windus, 1927.
Brief Biography. The 1927 collection’s learned editor Frank L. Lucas (famous for his caustic criticism of Eliot’s The Waste Land—he thought the work too dependent of quotations, and too incoherent) begins his biography with a tag line from Horace’s Ode XVII: “Natus moriensque fefellit”: his birth and death passed unknown. (The whole line is a bit more hopeful, and runs, “nec vixit male, qui natus moriensque fefellit.”) Lucas says Webster, by his own statement, was “born free of the Merchant Taylors’ Company. All else is surmise” (51). This means his father was a member of the Company, so the son inherited the right to belong to this guild-like organization.
John was born between 1570-80, and seems to have died before 1634. He was admitted to the lawyers’ training establishment the Middle Temple in 1598. Lucas offers one very interesting bit of information drawn from Webster’s prefaces: unlike many of his contemporaries he doesn’t deign to flatter those he names as his patrons.
Lucas covers Webster’s penchant for copying, as dealt with by R. W. Dent and others over the years. He no doubt kept a commonplace book, as many others did, and in particular, he adapted the language of Sir Philip Sidney and Michel de Montaigne. Lucas is right to suggest that there was nothing wrong with that. After all, “Bad writers plagiarize. Great minds steal outright.” Consider, too, this famous Oscar Wilde anecdote: Oscar heard James McNeill Whistler say something witty, and blurted out, “I wish I had said that!” Whistler came back with, “Don’t worry, Oscar—you will!”
The New Mermaids biography of Webster tells us that his father was a carter by trade and that he belonged to the Merchant Taylors’ Company. They list his birth as taking place between 1578-80, and say he was admitted to the Middle Temple on August 1st, 1598. (We have no evidence of Webster’s ever becoming a barrister, though.)
By 1602, we can say that he was working with Henslowe’s company the Admiral’s Men, and contributed to a lost play called Caesar’s Fall. He collaborated with Thomas Dekker and others on some plays, including ones for the boy actors of the Children of St. Paul’s Company. John married Sara Peniall, the daughter of a saddler, in 1606. They had a son soon after the marriage, and lived in St. Sepulchre’s Parish, straddling the City of London. Today, that covers Smithfield, Farringdon and Clerkenwell.
In 1612, Webster wrote The White Devil, a female-centered tragedy. It was put on by Queen Anne’s Men at the Red Bull in Clerkenwell, and was not well received. But as the editors say, it opened a path for the timely revenge tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, produced in 1613-14. In 1612, Webster wrote an elegy for Prince Henry, King James I’s heir. After The Duchess of Malfi, put on by The King’s Men at Blackfriars and then at the Globe in 1613-14, Webster collaborated with other playwrights, worked on a pageant called Monuments of Honour, and died in the mid-to-late 1630s.
Since Webster actually produced work for the King’s Men, which was Shakespeare’s company, we would like to know if the older and younger man knew each other. There doesn’t appear to be any hard evidence of this, though their paths could have crossed. The thing is, Shakespeare retired to Stratford in or around 1613. The Globe burned down at the end of June 1613, which may have provided the impetus for him to return home to attend to family and business. So just as Webster enjoyed his biggest success, Shakespeare may have retired only months earlier.
Historical Source Introduction
Following are introductory comments on the historical persons and events underlying Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi: the tragic tale of Giovanna d’Aragona and Antonio Bologna.
In what follows, I rely mainly on Frank L. Lucas’s historical introduction to Webster’s main characters Duchess in his collection The Complete Works of John Webster, Vol. II. London: Chatto & Windus, 1927.
John Webster’s Jacobean revenge masterpiece is fairly close to “ripped from the headlines.” Well, the story underlying the fiction wasn’t that current, but it dated back only to November 1510, when the real-life Duchess of Amalfi, Giovanna d’Aragona (who lived from 1478-1510), disappeared. She was the granddaughter of the Aragonese King Ferdinand (or Ferrante) I of Naples. Lucas writes of this grandfather that “His enemies indeed asserted that he was really no true scion of Aragon, but his mother’s bastard by a Moor of Valentia” (7).
Well, by his mistress Diana Guardati of Sorrento, grandfather Ferrante fathered a son, Enrico d’Aragona, half-brother of King Alfonso of Naples. Enrico married Polissena Centelles in 1465, and in 1473 was made Marchese di Gerace. He died in 1478, having fathered the children who make up the key part of Webster’s dramatis personae: Lodovico (our Cardinal), Carlo (our Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria), and Giovanna (our future Duchess of Malfi). He had another daughter named Caterina, but she doesn’t figure in Webster’s play.
Webster’s Antonio was Antonio Bologna (of the Beccadelli family), who came of distinguished but apparently not royal stock. He had served Federico, the Aragonese King of Naples, who, after a difficult stretch politically, died at Tours, France in 1504. Federico’s last title was Duke of Anjou, which was given him by his enemy Louis XII of France.
Not long after Federico’s death in 1504, Antonio Bologna made his way to Naples, where the Duchess of Amalfi offered him the position of major-domo, a place of high responsibility and regard. We might use the term “steward,” or “estate manager.” They fell in love and married secretly. That wouldn’t be an easy thing to do in a treacherous court environment.
As for the Duchess Giovanna d’Aragona herself, she was a young widow since, in 1498, her first husband, Alfonso I Piccolomini, Duke of Malfi, had died, supposedly from a stab wound inflicted by his enemy the Count of Celano, leaving her with a baby son, Alfonso II, for whom she ruled Amalfi as regent. Giovanna had married the Duke in 1490, when she would have been only around ten or twelve years old.
Antonio and the Duchess had a son, and managed to conceal the fact, but then a daughter was born, and the Cardinal and Frederick seem to have got wind of this event, and attached spies to the couple. In fear, Antonio left with his two children for Ancona, 170 miles northeast of Rome, along the Adriatic sea.
The Duchess, in an advanced stage of pregnancy with their third child, made a show of heading for the Shrine of San Francesco at Loreto, but actually traveled with a great retinue to Ancona to be with Antonio and their children. At Ancona, the Duchess, writes Lucas, “threw off the mask before her astonished household. She would renounce her rank, she said, and henceforth live quietly with her husband in a private station” (9). Apparently, a servant informed on them to the Cardinal of Aragon.
Antonio, realizing that a sentence of expulsion from Ancona would soon be pronounced by Cardinal Gonzaga, Ancona’s Legate for Pope Julius II, made his way by mid-1511 to Siena along with the Duchess and the children. Predictably, they ended up being pressured out of Siena, and in 1512 they turned towards Venice for safety. They never made it there, but were instead caught at Forli by armed horsemen.
The Duchess convinced Antonio to escape from this trap, which he did, making his way successfully to Milan with the couple’s eldest son. The Duchess herself, however, was forcibly escorted with the other two kids and her waiting woman (our Cariola) to a castle in Amalfi. No one ever saw any of them again. Lucas has the date of disappearance sometime in 1512.
As an aside, the town of Amalfi, on the southwest coast of Italy in the modern province of Salerno, was founded around the 4th century CE and, after growing to be the powerful Duchy or Republic of Amalfi during the 10th-11th centuries CE, by the Duchess’s time it was part of the Kingdom of Naples. By 1504, this kingdom was controlled by the Spanish King Ferdinand II, of the famous ruling duo “Ferdinand and Isabella.”
With regard to Antonio, he lived on until October 1513. Although forewarned by a captain who had been commissioned to assassinate him, he was cut down on his way to Mass at the Church of S. Francesco. He was killed by none other than “Daniel da Bozolo,” along with three other accomplices. The murderers escaped from Milan. Lucas points out that Delio, who is said to have actually heard the ruckus made by the attack against Antonio, was none other than our novelist Matteo Bandello, who also took this name of “Delio” in his sonnets.
Lucas caps off the story with the following astonishing passage:
“It throws, we may add, an ironic light on the standards of the day to find Bandello a few pages later (the separate novelle were of course only collected and published years afterwards) dedicating another of his tales with every expression of gratitude and esteem to the murderer, Lodovico Cardinal of Aragon” (11).
For the history in this section, I have mainly relied on The Complete Works of John Webster, edited by F. L. Lucas. London: Chatto & Windus, 1927. Lucas himself relies for his historical material mainly on Bandello and on Domenico Morellini’s Giovanna d’Aragona, Duchessa D’Amalfi. Cesena, 1906.
ACT 1
Act 1, Scene 1
“A prince’s court / Is like a common fountain”: Antonio, just returning from the court of the French King Louis XII, tells Delio how impressed he is with that ruler’s reparation of his political environment.
At the beginning of the play, in Act 1, Scene 1, Antonio tells his friend Delio that he considers the French Court a model to emulate. Secrecy and sycophants have been banished from King Louis XII’s routine (1498-1515), and his court, says Antonio, is like “a common fountain, whence should flow / Pure silver drops in general” (9, 1.1.12-13). Honesty, that is, should flow down to the entire population, and Louis is trying to ensure that that is how his palace affects his country. Conversely, Antonio insists, if the fountain is corrupted at its source, the entire society will suffer.
The Methuen / New Mermaids editor points out that here Webster may be echoing the English writer Thomas Elyot, who also used this common “fountain” metaphor to describe courtly environments.
Webster is careful to establish the values of his main characters early because that helps us later in the play when we must judge the actions they take in context. Webster would have us understand right away that Antonio is at heart a decent man, who values honesty and good order in society.
“I have done you / Better service than to be slighted thus”: Daniel de Bosola, one of the play’s most complicated, sinister characters, assails the Cardinal about the difficulty of his circumstances.
Still in Act 1, Scene 1, Daniel de Bosola is another kind of man, one as ancient, really, as Homer’s Thersites (or as modern as Shakespeare’s). Antonio labels him to Delio “The only court-gall” (23, 1.1.23.). Bosola, then, is a sour presence, a scold, a servant with a sense of injured merit. He insists—correctly—that he has made himself useful to the Cardinal, even getting himself condemned to the galleys for a murder he supposedly committed at the Cardinal’s behest, but now he’s been hung out to dry. “I have done you / Better service than to be slighted thus,” he tells the Cardinal (1.1.29-30).
Bosola has little regard for either the Cardinal or Ferdinand, saying subsequently to Antonio, “He and his brother are like plum trees that grow crooked over standing pools. They are rich and o’erladen with fruit, but none / But crows, pies and caterpillars feed on them” (11, 1.1.48-50). What does a lowly character like himself get for helping them? No more than the crutches that the wounded soldier gets for his country’s thanks: “a kind of geometry is his last / for supportation” (12, 1.1.58-59).
Antonio remarks to Delio when Bosola leaves that “’Tis great pity / He should be thus neglected” (13, 1.1.70-71). He instantly recognizes the strength of Bosola’s character, his virtù (spelling), if not his virtue in the moral sense, and he realizes that such a man is dangerous if not given his due.
Bosola should have some office to assuage his feelings and fill his time productively: Antonio says, “want of action / Breeds all black malcontents, and their close rearing, / Like moths in cloth, do hurt for want of wearing” (13, 1.1.76-78). That is, as the New Mermaids editor’s note suggests, such men do harm because they stay hidden and no one notices them until it’s too late, and the damage is already done.
It is clear by now that Bosola is more complex, more multi-dimensional than a stage villain or stock “court-gall”: he professes himself unable to wield flattery, but as for using secrecy to serve himself and other wicked men, that turns out to be another matter. Bosola will become a key actor in a drama of which he by no means approves.
Act 1, Scene 2
“Let all sweet ladies break their flattering glasses / And dress themselves in her”: After giving Delio a strongly negative description of the Cardinal and Frederick, Antonio offers Delio a glowing portrait of the Duchess.
In Act 1, Scene 2, after taking part in a cheerful dialogue with several characters that sounds like something straight out of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, Antonio gets down to offering Delio his own perspective on the Cardinal and Frederick. The Cardinal, says he, is a complex man, but deep down, he believes him to be “a melancholy churchman” (17, 1.2.68). He employs spies and sets traps for his enemies with the best of the Machiavels, and lost his shot at the papacy by playing the game too well. Antonio balances this scorching view with the summation, “Some good he / Hath done” (18, 1.2.76-77).
As for Duke Frederick of Calabria, Antonio has little good to say about him, either. He calls the man “A most perverse and turbulent nature” (18, 1.2.79). Like the Cardinal, he is a man who attends to the intelligence that his spies gather and deals harshly with his foes. A good summation of Antonio’s guided tour of these men’s souls would be that both are typical of their station and class—warped by power, Ferdinand perhaps somewhat more, even, than his brother the Cardinal. These are not people we would cross lightly.
Antonio describes the illustrious Duchess of Malfi in a more wholesome way. He suggests that she is of a very different temper than her two devious brothers. In her countenance, he says, “There speaketh so divine a continence / As cuts off all lascivious and vain hope” (1.2.109-110). She is the paragon, he insists, of a good and noble woman: “Let all sweet ladies break their flattering glasses / And dress themselves in her” (19, 1.2.114-115). His summation of her is the lovely line, “She stains the time past, lights the time to come” (20, 1.2.119).
Without meaning to undercut Antonio—for the Duchess is a wonderful and admirable character—we may as well note here that the she is not the angel that Antonio takes her for. As we will soon see, she is not interested in playing the role of sanctified lady. She is strong, “like a man” (pardon the Renaissance sexism for a moment), and she will follow her own desires whatever the consequences. She is not a pale Madonna.
The Duchess’s tragedy stems from the brutal fact that in tragedy, strong women like the Duchess, or like Clytemnaestra in The Oresteia, for that matter, are often forced to resort to subterfuge to attain their ends, and then they are castigated for doing so and punished with lethal force.
So there is more to this great Lady than the dazzling exterior that meets the eye and the decorum that she, as a ruler, observes. No less a sovereign than King James I had as his personal motto, “Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare”—whoever doesn’t know how to dissimulate, also doesn’t know how to govern. Queen Elizabeth I, too, passed that test with ease: she kept her counsel close, for decades cleverly maintained a “Cult of the Virgin Queen,” and in her dress and makeup regimen, she kept up the façade of youth to the very end of her life of 69 years.
“Whose throat must I cut?” Ferdinand and the Cardinal provide the bitter, disillusioned ex-con Bosola with respectable employment and, at the same time, rope him into spying on his new employer: the Duchess.
Still in Act 1, Scene 2, Ferdinand and the Cardinal are busying themselves with reinforcing the “surveillance state” that it seems already existed in Malfi. Ferdinand drops in to visit the Duchess and requests that she offer the ex-con Bosola the important post of provisorship of her horses, and she immediately accepts. She knows who the fellow is, but apparently doesn’t suspect her brothers of “planting” him as a spy in her midst.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what they are both doing. Ferdinand makes sure, at the Cardinal’s prompting, to hire Bosola as a spy answerable to him as well. Bosola is to watch over the Duchess and, if possible, find out which men she favors. The Duke does not want his sister to remarry and produce an heir since that would eliminate the possibility of his inheriting her lands. He tells Bosola bluntly, “She’s a young widow; / I would not have her marry again” (22, 1.2.164-165).
As for Bosola, his question to Ferdinand, “Whose throat must I cut?” says much for his complexity (22, 1.2.158). He knows what he’s 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. In his essay “Of Great Place,” Sir Francis Bacon wrote, “by indignities, men come to dignities.” True, no doubt. Still, it must burn Bosola that when more nobly born men engage in knavery, they rise to great heights, while his scope for improvement is much narrower, no matter what wicked deeds he does for such men.
Bosola deeply resents the sense of obligation he feels when these same men—the Cardinal and Ferdinand in particular—toss some humble bone of status his way: “Oh, that to avoid ingratitude / For the good deed you have done me, I must do / All the ill man can invent” (23, 1.2.183-185). He says bitterly to Bosola, “Say then my corruption / Grew out of horse dung—I am your creature” (24, 1.2.196-197).
“Will you hear me? / I’ll never marry”: When Ferdinand and the Cardinal visit the Duchess to lay down the law with her about remarriage, she flatly lies to them. The moment they depart, she woos and wins Antonio for her husband.
Still in Act 1, Scene 2, with Bosola duly trapped and in place as useful to the brothers, Ferdinand and the Cardinal visit the Duchess and warn her not to remarry, in the end casting her as a “lusty widow” who ought not trust her own predilections or impulses, and bidding her carefully look to her honor (27, 1.2.248). Along the way, Ferdinand assails her with some prime hypocrisy, saying, “women like that part which, like the lamprey, / Hath ne’er a bone in it” (27, 1.2.244-245). Fie, Ferdinand, fie!
To Ferdinand and the Cardinal, in truth, their sister’s personal morality is obviously not their true reason for posturing as they do. As Ferdinand has already admitted, it has everything to do with the possibility of getting her lands. In fee simple, both men want to control their powerful sister, not make her a saint.
It doesn’t work: to their faces, she mocks them with “I think this speech between you both was studied; / It came so roundly off” (26, 1.2.237-238). She has already promised them with a straight face, “Will you hear me? / I’ll never marry” (25, 1.2.210-211). The moment they leave, she muses, “If all my royal kindred / Lay in my way unto this marriage / I’d make them my low footsteps” (25, 1.2.249-251). And she concludes with, “Let old wives report / I winked and chose a husband” (25, 1.2.256-257).
The Duchess may link herself to the common women of her realm by using such proverbs, but this is also the beginning of her troubles: whatever the true motives of her slippery brothers, the Duchess’s position as a ruler demands that she set an example as a wise prince. She must not seem merely to be a headstrong private individual—that would be scandalous, and put her in danger. It almost goes without saying that there’s a strong element of sexism in this formulation: would a man be held to exactly the same standard? Probably not.
It’s hard to deny that the Duchess engages in conduct that even her faithful servant Cariola, at the scene’s end, describes as “fearful madness” (35, 1.2.412). The Duchess makes it plain in speaking to Cariola that she understands exactly how risky to her reputation and control of the duchy her present actions are (28, 1.2.257-259).
The part of Act 1, Scene 2 in which the Duchess woos and wins her steward Antonio is the example to which Cariola refers as “fearful madness.” Her magnificent and successful effort is anxiety-provoking for Antonio as well, who, at first, doesn’t know how to take his sovereign’s strangely playful, almost deceptive suit to him. 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” (1.2.353-356).
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 little heed to the consequences for her as the chief officer of her state. It’s one thing to practice “secrecy” for the State’s benefit, 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. As mentioned before in these notes, there is also the matter of a woman’s being forced to resort to secrecy and dissimulation, and then being punished for it when a man might actually be rewarded.
As for Antonio, he understands that the appeal is partly to his desire for advancement from the position of steward. When she offers him her ring, he sees that “a saucy and ambitious devil / Is dancing in this circle” (31, 1.2.318-319). He also says that if ambition is “a great man’s madness,” it is much, much worse in a man of his ordinary stature: it is “lunatic beyond all cure” (31-32, 1.2.328, 332).
But the Duchess of Malfi will have the man she wants. Her final “pitch” is all but irresistible. She declares herself to Antonio, “This is flesh and blood, sir. / ‘Tis not the figure cut in alabaster / Kneels at my husband’s tomb. Awake, awake, man!” (33, 1.2.361-367 inclusive). The rest of the thought is equally masterful. Antonio can do no other but accept, which he wants to do anyway. He will marry this woman who will later say as a tragic death befalls her, “I am Duchess of Malfi still” (112, 4.2.134). Her insistence on marrying the man she loves flows from who she is, not who the powerful men in her life want her to be.
ACT 2
Act 2, Scene 1
“I have bought some apricots. / The first our spring yields”: after a darkly comic conversation with an Old Lady, Bosola unfolds his device for determining the cause of the Duchess’s weight gain and change in dress.
In Act 2, Scene 1, Bosola assails an Old Lady on the issue of her face-painting, her makeup Bosola’s regimen. This is seemingly a common theme in early modern plays, and we may recall Hamlet’s remark about a lady trying to use makeup to banish the thought of death: “Now get you to my / lady’s table and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this / favor she must come” (Norton Shakespeare Tragedies 435, 5.1.173-175). In Webster’s tragedy, this motif may be intended to prepare us for the decidedly macabre turn the play will later take.
Bosola is quite rough with the Old Lady, saying, “though continually we bear about us / A rotten and dead body, we delight / To hide it in rich tissue. All our fear — / Nay, all our terror — is lest our physician / Should put us in the ground to be made sweet” (38-39, 2.1.56-60). There is of course the usual reference to venereal diseases, when Bosola refers to “you whose sin of your youth is the very patrimony of the physician …” (38, 2.1.40-41). On the whole, Bosola’s exchange with the Old Lady allows him to describe an economy fueled by vanity, luxury, disease, and denial of death.
As Ferdinand’s spy, Bosola has noted physical changes in the Duchess, and he wants to verify the obvious possibility that she might be pregnant. His device? Apricots. After his edgy conversation with Antonio is over, he says in soliloquy, “I have bought some apricots. / The first our spring yields” (39, 2.1.71-72). His plan is simply to offer her some of these fruits, and see how they affect her. Since they are unripe, apparently they may — and do, in this instance — cause stomach upset and induce early labor. This leaves Antonio and Delio to deal with the resultant emergency. Time is of the essence.
Bosola has found it easy to discover the Duchess’s predicament because he understands how susceptible princes are to their private desires. 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. There’s the same hand to them, / the like passions sway them …” (41, 2.1.102-105). It’s appropriate to recall what Ernest Hemingway said about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s insistence in his early story “The Rich Boy” that the very wealthy “are different from you and me.” In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway writes, “Yes, they have more money.”
Just before the Duchess becomes ill, she and Bosola bandy words over the metaphor of “grafting.” This common metaphor is worth attending to. Grafting, in husbandry, implies the splicing together of two different kinds of plant to produce new fruit. Under the management of a wise gardener, the results can be excellent, but the implication here—the mingling of the merely respectable steward Antonio with the royal Duchess—is that the fruit will not be worthwhile, or at least not optimal.
Act 2, Scene 2
“Sir, you are the happy father of a son”: the Duchess gives birth to a son by Antonio.
By Act 2, Scene 2, Bosola is certain that his suspicions are true. The Duchess’s “tetchiness and most / vulturous eating of the apricots are apparent signs of breeding …” (45, 2.2.1-2). More witty and somewhat obscene bantering with the Old Lady follows. She calls him out on his abusive attitude towards women, but her criticism has no real effect upon him, as he responds with more banter: “If we have the same golden showers that rained in the time of Jupiter the Thunderer, you have the same Danaes still to hold up their laps to receive them” (46, 2.2.17-19).
In any case, the Duchess and Antonio soon have their first child together, a son, as Cariola announces (49, 2.2.79).
Act 2, Scene 3
“The great are like the base—nay, they are the same— / When they seek shameful ways to avoid shame”: Bosola knows that the Duchess and Antonio have a newborn son, and makes it his next mission to find out who the father is.
In Act 2, Scene 3, while Bosola knows about the birth of the Duchess’s child, he doesn’t yet know who the father is, so is next moves will be directed towards nailing down that information. Antonio strongly insinuates to Bosola’s face that he fears the latter man has poisoned the Duchess: “You gave the Duchess apricots today. / Pray heaven they were not poisoned!” (51, 2.3.31-32). In return, Bosola impugns Antonio’s integrity as a steward.
Antonio refuses to allow Bosola to enter the Duchess’s quarters until, he says, the man has shown himself to be innocent of poisoning her. Antonio sites to Bosola a proverb: ‘The great are like the base — nay, they are the same — / When they seek shameful ways to avoid shame’ (52, 2.3.53-54). As soon as Antonio is gone, Bosola picks up a piece of paper that Antonio dropped on his way out. It turns out to be evidence of “A child’s nativity calculated” (53, 2.3.57). Bosola surmises that Antonio must be a go-between for the Duchess and whoever the father is. To find out the man will be his next mission.
Bosola learns, too, how he is to be imprisoned on suspicion of poisoning the Duchess to hide the truth of her lying-in period. All the same, Bosola is delighted at having discovered an extremely valuable piece of information for 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” (53, 2.3.76-77).
At this point, Bosola, always an interesting character, seems entirely wrapped up in his role as a spy for Ferdinand and the Cardinal. There is little affect in his words and reactions, other than a self-satisfied chuckle, perhaps, when his suppositions turn out to be true. It is part of this character’s complexity that his reactions and language will change as the plot becomes more violent and depraved.
Act 2, Scene 4
“Thou art my best of wishes”: the Cardinal dallies with his lovely mistress Julia, who is married to Castruccio.
In Act 2, Scene 4, the Cardinal shows his true colors, and they’re something other than the pure, beautiful splash of red in the traditional religious garb a Cardinal wears. We see and hear him interacting with his adulterous mistress, Julia, who is married to one Castruccio. Their conversation opens with what sounds like sincere admiration on the Cardinal’s part for Julia’s cleverness: “Sit. Thou art my best of wishes. Prithee tell me / What trick didst thou invent to come to Rome / Without thy husband?” (54, 2.4.1-3)
What follows is a witty, possibly mock–misogynistic exchange in which, among other things, the Cardinal says that to find a woman who remains true, we would need to borrow Galileo’s telescope and study the moon (54-55, 2.4.17-20). We may be reminded of John Donne’s ungenerous lines in “Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star,” to the effect that his experience-seeking addressee should return from his travels “And swear, / No where, / Lives a woman true, and fair.”
But Delio informs Julia that her husband has come to Rome, and a bit later a servant says Castruccio has brought to Rome a letter that has all but deranged Ferdinand—as Bosola indicated at the end of Act 2, Scene 3, this was the horoscope that had been calculated for the child about to be born. Alone, Delio fears that “Antonio is betrayed” (58, 2.4.82).
The overall effect of Act 2, Scene 4 is to place the Cardinal in a bad light, as a man of the cloth who is enjoying his adulterous union with a beautiful young woman. It seems a tribute to Webster’s handling of his female protagonist in The Duchess of Malfi that he sets up the Cardinal this way, neatly undermining the unkind things this not particularly holy man of the Church says about his sister, the Duchess. After all, she isn’t committing adultery—she is remarrying, even if below her exalted station. But that is not a crime, it’s a choice she has the right to make.
Act 2, Scene 5
“I’ll find scorpions to string my whips, / And fix her in a general eclipse”: Ferdinand begins to show signs of instability when he learns that the Duchess has deceived him.
In Act 2, Scene 5, we soon find out just how true Bosola’s supposition about the import of his discovery is when Ferdinand speaks so wildly that the Cardinal must try to calm him down. It’s true that the Cardinal is himself upset, saying “Shall our blood — / The royal blood of Aragon and Castile — / Be thus attainted?” (59, 2.5.23-25). But the violence of Ferdinand’s imagination is shocking, and characteristic of Webster’s style. Once again, the playwright apparently aims to undermine much or all of what Ferdinand says about the Duchess, and of course to condemn what he will do to her later in the play.
Webster’s handling of the Duke here brings out a certain tortured, overdetermined quality to his raving: among other things, he says this gem: “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” (62, 2.5.77-79). Would Ferdinand become so agitated if all he wanted was property? He is already a privileged man. Perhaps incestuous jealousy for his twin sister lies at the bottom of his fury. He admits as much, worrying, as he says, that “my imagination will carry me / To see her in the shameful act of sin” (60, 2.5.40-41).
ACT 3
Act 3, Scene 1
“This night / I will force confession from her”: Ferdinand expresses to Bosola his determination to find out who is the father of his sister’s three children.
In Act 3, Scene 1, by the time Delio again visits the court in Malfi, the Duchess has had three children by Antonio, and as he admits, “The common rabble do directly say / She is a strumpet” (64, 3.1.25-26). Yet it is still a secret that Antonio is the father of these children.
This moment, in turn, is followed by the surprise entrance of Ferdinand, who says that he has found a proper husband for the Duchess — none other than Count Malateste. The Duchess seems to recoil at the mention of this name, and calls him “a mere stick of sugar candy …” (65, 3.1.42). When Bosola suggests to Ferdinand that “there hath been some sorcery / Used on the Duchess, he waves away the notion, saying “The witchcraft lies in her rank blood. This night / I will force confession from her” (66, 3.1.62-63 and 78-79). The scene ends with Ferdinand thanking Bosola for not flattering his grandiose self-regard.
Act 3, Scene 2
“Why should only I, / Of all the other princes of the world, / Be cased up, like a holy relic? The Duchess defends her honor against Ferdinand’s scorn after he hears her speaking with the man who must be her children’s father.
In Act 3, Scene 2, Webster begins with a charming exchange of domestic happiness between Antonio and the Duchess. She muses “That noble men shall come with cap and knee / To purchase a night’s lodging of their wives” (68, 3.2.5-6). The playwright shows exquisite timing in that just before Ferdinand enters and shatters the couple’s happiness, the Duchess is fondly imagining a future time: “When I wax grey I shall have all the court / Powder their hair with arras to be like me” (70, 3.2.58-59).
Ferdinand is hiding in the background, and he hears the Duchess conversing with a man who is not visible to her or to Ferdinand. As soon as she catches sight of her brother, the Duchess strikes a heroic pose: “’Tis welcome: / For know, whether I am doomed to live or die, / I can do both like a prince” (71, 3.2.68-70).
The Duchess finally admits that she is in fact married, and sets about defending her decision to be so: “Why might not I marry? / I have not gone about in this to create / Any new world or custom” (73, 3.2.108-110). Ferdinand lashes her with “Thou art undone …” and proceeds to cudgel her with a mini-sermon on the precariousness of reputation (73, 3.2.110). Once it is lost, he insists, it will never return.
The Duchess’s response is heartrending and eloquent, but it has no chance of changing Ferdinand’s mind: “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 a great deal of sympathy for the Duchess—she is, after all, being treated like a valuable object by the Cardinal and Ferdinand—but at the same time realizing that we can’t simply ignore all the warnings we have heard about what happens when the great stoop to base stratagems to hide their folly.
There’s something admirable about the Duchess’s 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 at least in part brought disarray to her State, a fact that even the despicable behavior of Ferdinand and the Cardinal in their desire to control her can’t entirely erase. Ferdinand leaves the Duchess with a poniard, apparently itself a suggestion that she should use it to end her life.
“A politician is the devil’s quilted anvil”: Bosola skillfully deploys his rhetoric of virtue and wins the confidence of the Duchess, who tells him Antonio is her husband and entrusts him with their affairs.
Still in Act 3, Scene 2, Bosola enters, and remarks to the Duchess that he saw Ferdinand departing on horseback in great haste for Rome. Realizing that Ferdinand did not have time to relate to Bosola the entirety of what he had learned, the Duchess comes up with a serviceable lie: Frederick, she says, was in such haste because he needed to set right Antonio’s corrupt financial dealings with “Neapolitan Jews” (75, 3.2.1 67).
Alone for a moment with Antonio when he enters, the Duchess tells him that he must make his way to Ancona and rent a house, and she will send money and jewelry after him to sustain the family (76, 3.2.172-179 inclusive). She must also, she tells him, cook up a Magnanima mensogna or “noble lie” to the effect that he, Antonio, has cozened her out of a great sum of money and is therefore a corrupt steward. If that’s the case, obviously he must be booted out of court.
Soon after this discussion with Antonio, the Duchess gives a fine performance in which she openly berates him in front of Bosola and his officers. Bosola promptly lays a trap for the Duchess by skillfully defending Antonio’s honor in his absence. He suggests that the steward is by no means corrupt but that he has been falsely accused by others. This rhetoric of virtue succeeds at once with the Duchess, probably because she was not expecting it from Bosola. She admits earnestly if unwisely, “This good one that you speak of is my husband” (80, 3.2.270). She confesses as well that Antonio is the father of her three children.
When Bosola swears that he will keep the Duchess’s secret, she tells him to take her wealth and send it after Antonio at Ancona (81, 3.2.298-300). Bosola offers a refinement on the scheme—she should make a religious pilgrimage to the Madonna’s Shrine at Loreto so as to make her trip seem like a stately and holy progress instead of a precipitous flight from danger.
Just like that, the Duchess is in the grip of Bosola. 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” (82, 3.2.318). Why? Because he deadens the warning noise that should accompany the devil’s hammering out of new sins.
In Bosola’s scene-ending soliloquy, we may be able to detect a hint of the moral change that will overtake him in the fourth act. He seems to be filled with self-disgust even as some of his words come across as chortling over a wicked success: “Oh, this base quality / Of intelligencer! Why, every quality i’ th’ world / Prefers but gain or commendation” (82, 3.2.322-324). At such a moment, Webster’s genius for the oddly complex, ambivalent villain comes to the fore. This kind of remark makes Bosola both more evil and more human than the average stage or stock villain: we sense that we are dealing with a primal energy that might, depending on circumstances, be turned to good or evil.
Act 3, Scene 3
“I will instantly solicit the state of Ancona / To have them banished”: while Ferdinand caustically condemns the Duchess and her less-than-exalted husband Antonio, the Cardinal plans to have them both kicked out of Ancona along with their children.
In the very brief Act 3, Scene 3, we see the Cardinal, Ferdinand, and Delio crack jokes at the expense of the unmartial Count Malateste, but talk soon comes round to the demerits of Antonio and the Duchess. As usual, Ferdinand is the most vituperous. He says of the Duchess, “Methinks her fault and beauty, / Blended together, show like leprosy— / The whiter, the fouler” (85-86, 3.3.60-62). As for Antonio, Ferdinand all but spits, “A slave that only smelled of ink and counters, / And never in’s life looked like a gentleman / But in the audit time” (86, 3.3.70-72). Tell us what you really think, Ferdinand!
Well, the Cardinal’s plan is simple with regard to Antonio and the Duchess. Himself about to turn soldier temporarily instead of remaining a churchman, he will “instantly solicit the state of Ancona / To have them banished” (86, 3.3.64-65). The two will end up on the run, which is hardly a respectable way for a Duchess and her husband to live.
Act 3, Scene 4
“Yet the Cardinal / Bears himself much too cruel”: pilgrims to the shrine at Loreto behold a dumbshow in which the Cardinal exchanges his religious authority for a military role, and the Duchess and her family are stripped of power and exiled from Ancona.
In Act 3, Scene 4, Webster represents the Cardinal’s resignation of his religious authority and acceptance of a military position. The Duchess is symbolically stripped of her power when the Cardinal takes her ring away, and the family is exiled from Ancona.
Webster’s choice of representational mode is interesting here since, after all, he could have played this scene as consisting of ordinary dialogue and action. But he chooses a “dumb show.” Most likely, this is because he wants the audience to feel the weight and symbolism of the moment, and a ceremony is the best way to generate such an effect. In particular, we see that the Duchess is prevented from resisting the power that is being wielded against her. The Pope is involved, and there is no discourse that will serve her turn — a point that is nicely underscored by the silence of the ceremony. Realism isn’t always a playwright’s best friend.
The perspective offered in this scene comes mainly from two pilgrims who have come to pay their respects at the shrine. The first pilgrim says, “I have not seen a goodlier shrine than this” (87, 3.4.1). But when they see the ceremony, both are distressed. The first pilgrim understands that the Duchess may have blundered in marrying Antonio, but says all the same, “Yet the Cardinal / Bears himself much too cruel” (88, 3.4.25-26). From the second pilgrim, we learn that “the Pope, forehearing of her looseness, / Hath seized into the protection of the church / The dukedom, which she held as dowager” (89, 3.4.30-32).
Act 3, Scene 5
“I am armed ’gainst misery”: the Duchess advises Antonio to take the couple’s eldest son and hurry to Milan, and she confronts the cynical Bosola, who has come with a party of soldiers to arrest her, with stoic and Christian dignity.
In Act 3, Scene 5, Antonio and the Duchess spend a little time musing about the turn of events that has come their way, with the Duchess expressing a wish to be like the wild birds who live happy, natural lives (90, 3.5.17-20 inclusive). The Duchess counsels Antonio to take their eldest son and make his escape to Milan, which he consents to do (92, 3.5.54-58 inclusive).
Just then, Bosola enters bearing a letter from Ferdinand, which threatens Antonio by means of equivocal clichés that lend themselves to much darker interpretation. The Duchess has no trouble seeing through Ferdinand’s literary gambit. It isn’t hard to figure out what he really means by “Send Antonio to me. I want his head in a business” and “I had rather have his heart than his money” (91, 3.5.27, 34).
Webster may have picked up from Shakespeare the understanding that a major distinction between good people and bad ones lies in the latter group’s propensity for turning figurative horror and abuse into literal.
It soon becomes plain that Bosola has not come simply to play the role of postman — he has come to surround and capture the Duchess and Antonio. The Duchess is correct that the two are being ambushed, not simply encountered (92, 3.5.54). Bosola’s announcement to the Duchess, “Your brothers mean you safety and pity” meets with contempt (95, 3.5.107). When Bosola dismisses Antonio as “One of no birth,” and counters the Duchess’s defense of the man’s virtue with the cruel putdown “A barren, beggarly virtue” (95, 3.5.116, 119). It is impossible to forget that he won the Duchess’s confidence earlier by saying precisely the opposite.
The Duchess is supposedly going to be escorted back to her Palace in Amalfi with her remaining children and Cariola. How does she process this sad turn of events? She tells Bosola a story about a salmon and a dogfish or shark in which the salmon explains the true way of making distinctions of quality between two beings. She closes with the proverbial thought, “I am armed gainst misery, / Bent to all sways of the oppressor’s will: / There’s no deep valley, but near some great hill” (96, 3.5.139-141).
At the midway point in Webster’s play, we enter a phase in which the Duchess will undergo what critics sometimes call a “tragedy of suffering,” but the play as a whole is certainly well described as a proper revenge tragedy.
ACT 4
Act 4, Scene 1
“Faith! End here / And go no further in your cruelty”: Ferdinand torments his sister the Duchess in a twisted effort to drive her to despair and damnation. Bosola pleads with him to stop the madness, but to no avail.
In Act 4, Scene 1, the play turns macabre in preparation for the lethal second scene that will see the demise of the Duchess, two of her children, and Cariola.
Ferdinand uses gruesome props—he tricks the Duchess into kissing a dead man’s amputated hand in the dark, and Bosola, doing Ferdinand’s bidding, serves up a dimly lit wax tableau of her supposedly slain family. The Duchess understands the diabolical cruelty underwriting Bosola’s encouragement, “Come. You must live” (101, 4.1.67). To this she responds, “That’s the greatest torture souls feel in hell— / In hell!—that they must live and cannot die” (101, 4.1.68-69).
These dreadful pranks are worthy of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, that barbaric diamond in the rough, with all its “lopped limbs,” ridiculous jokes about severed hands and heads, as in Titus’s immortal line, “O, handle not the theme, to talk of hands ….” And who can forget Marcus Andronicus’s plea to Titus in Act 1, Scene 1 to accept the empery and “help to set a head on headless Rome”? (3.2.23, Folger Library, which includes the Folio’s 3.2 “Fly scene”; for second quotation, see the Norton Shakespeare, Tragedies, Titus Andronicus, 150, 1.1.189).
But they are more dangerous than schoolboyish “pranks.” When Bosola questions Ferdinand why he is doing such things to his own sister, the young man admits that he is doing them to the Duchess “To bring her to despair” (103, 4.1.113). As the Methuen/New Mermaids editor points out in an earlier note for lines 72-73, this is strongly against Christian doctrine since “despair” leads to damnation. Essentially, Ferdinand is trying to ensure that his sister spends eternity in hell.
Beholding Ferdinand’s menacing and possibly blasphemous actions, Bosola at last begins to be seriously troubled in his conscience, and pleads with the Duke, “Faith! End here / And go no further in your cruelty” (103, 4.1.113-114). At least he has a conscience, which is more than we could be certain of before this scene. Yet, as we’ll see, Bosola allows himself to serve as the executor of Ferdinand’s depraved murders in the next scene. He actually has to go through with the violence, he has to see it, before it cures him of any further allegiance to Ferdinand.
Act 4, Scene 2
“Necessity makes me suffer constantly”: the Duchess speaks with Cariola about enduring her travails, and Ferdinand brings in a troupe of madmen to entertain her, if that’s what we should call it.
At the beginning of Act 4, Scene 2, the Duchess turns philosophical in her conversation with Cariola. At the beginning of the scene, she may remind us a little of Shakespeare’s Richard II, except without that ill-fated sovereign’s persistent self-pity. She says, “Necessity makes me suffer constantly, / And custom makes it easy,” apparently meaning “continually and in a consistent or ‘constant’ spirit” (106, 4.2.29-30).
Ferdinand carries on with his “theater of cruelty” campaign. How ironic that he brings in a troupe of madmen to entertain the Duchess since he himself is rapidly losing his sanity, and by the scene’s end he’ll be talking nonsense about hunting badgers. It’s certainly to be hoped that “no badgers were harmed in any stagings of this play.” We don’t know which madman sings the song on tap, but it begins with a howl and ends with a touching wish that “We’ll sing like swans to welcome death, / And die in love and rest” (108, 4.2.71-72). Considering Ferdinand’s upcoming bout of lycanthropia, the howling accompaniment seems particularly appropriate.
“I am Duchess of Malfi still”: the Duchess bravely endures an interrogation of sorts by Bosola, who seems determined to play the keen observer and psychologist even as he does Ferdinand’s depraved bidding.
Still in Act 4, Scene 2, a madmen’s dance follows, and the dancers depart. Then, in comes Bosola, and he begins to take us on a roller-coaster ride with regard to his own emotions and (to some extent) our perception of him. At first, he disguises himself as he had told Ferdinand he would, and while in the costume of an old man, he plays the observant philosopher and psychologist. When the Duchess asks him, “Who am I?” Bosola answers not as an obedient servant, “the Duchess,” but says instead, “Thou art a box of wormseed—at best, but a salvatory of / green mummy. What’s this flesh? A little curded milk, fantas- / tical puff-paste” (111, 4.2.117-119).
This strange and mortifying response, and one more like it, soon call forth one of the play’s most eloquent and admirable lines: “I am Duchess of Malfi still” (112, 4.2.134). But even this doesn’t stop the cascade of Bosola’s insulting responses. Bosola is a perambulating memento mori throughout this scene, and at this point, with his remark that “’Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright / But looked to near have neither heat nor light’,” he borrows a thought from Webster’s own play The White Devil. (112, 4.2.136-137).
Webster seems to have borrowed for that reference as well, from William Alexander, Earl of Stirling’s Alexandrean Tragedy, Act 5, Scene 3. (This latter borrowing is noted by R. W. Dent in an article titled “John Webster’s Debt to William Alexander.” Modern Language Notes, Vol. 65, No. 2, Feb. 1950, pp. 73-82).
A little below, when the Duchess asks him why he has brought up the subject of fashion, Bosola answers, “Princes’ images on their tombs do not lie / as they were wont …. / They are not carved with their eyes fixed upon / the stars, but as their minds were wholly bent upon the / world the selfsame way they seem to turn their faces” (112-113, 4.2.147-48, 150-152).
What Bosola says may remind some of us of the reflections of Victorian poet Robert Browning’s great poem, “The Bishop orders his tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” in which a dying old prelate, surrounded by his faithless illegitimate sons, gives increasingly desperate instructions for the materials and location of his tomb in the church. This Renaissance churchman entertains the fond hope that he can perch forevermore in a niche and “hear the blessed mutter of the mass, / And see God made and eaten all day long.”
The Bishop’s sensibilities are at once utterly materialistic and genuinely reflective of his Catholic faith and belief in the afterlife. The poet thereby captures something essential to the Bishop’s era, which is Bosola’s, too. Paradoxically, in that era one could be both worldly and otherworldly at the same time.
“I know death hath ten thousand several doors / For men to take their exits”: the Duchess maintains her dignity even as death approaches and overtakes her in the form of strangulation by Ferdinand and Bosola’s henchmen.
Still in Act 4, Scene 2, Bosola seems genuinely voyeuristic in bearing witness to the cruel deaths of the Duchess, two of her children, and Cariola. The questions he asks are certainly of interest, but in consideration of the circumstances, also depraved. “Doth not death fright you?” he asks the Duchess. But he receives not remarks that a person might pity, but instead wise statements such as, “I know death hath ten thousand several doors / For men to take their exits, and ‘tis found / They go on such strange geometrical hinges / You may open them both ways …” (115-116, 4.2.209-212).
As an aside, Webster may well have borrowed this thought from Montaigne, who writes that there are “a hundred thousand exits” to depart this life. (See his Essay “A Custom of the Island of Cea,” noted in the blog TheSpectacledAvenger.blogspot.com, 04/2009, see the blog entry titled ”Death’s Thousand Doors.”)
The Duchess goes to her death bravely, telling her executioners, “Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength / Must pull down heaven upon me …” (116, 4.2.220-221). She kneels as she considers appropriate, and the deed is quickly done. Bosola then calls for Cariola to be brought in since she, too, is to be strangled. His treatment of her is diabolical: her anguished pleas that she has not gone to confession recently but also that she is pregnant elicit only cruel taunts, and soon she, too, is dead.
The two children remaining with the Duchess have been strangled, too. Bosola manages a weak exclamation, “Alas, how have these offended?” only to have Ferdinand intone, “The death / Of young wolves is never to be pitied” (118, 4.2.248-249).
“I stand like one / That long hath ta’en a sweet and golden dream”: Bosola undergoes his final disillusionment with Ferdinand, who blames him for the Duchess’s murder, and refuses to compensate him for his services.
Still in Act 4, Scene 2, Bosola’s final disillusionment is characteristically mixed as to its source. Part of this source is revealed when he sees how Ferdinand reacts to the Duchess’s death: an almost aesthetic remark, “Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle! She died young,” gives way to the Duke’s predictable attempt to blame Bosola himself (118, 4.2.254). He also refuses to pay Bosola, which has been a problem throughout the play. Bosola feels, quite rightly, that he is tasked with doing other men’s dirty work and then is not compensated adequately or respected for his service. Bosola, then, seems genuinely outraged at Ferdinand’s depravity, but he’s also upset about the money owed him.
Bosola’s words of awakening are hardly convincing if the aim is to purify our understanding of his character, but they are startling in their own right. He declares to Ferdinand, “I stand like one / That long hath ta’en a sweet and golden dream: I am angry with myself now that I wake” (121, 4.2.313-315). By this time, Ferdinand has moved much closer to violent insanity, for one of his accusations against the Duke is, “The wolf shall find her grave and scrape it up, / Not to devour the corpse, but to discover / The horrid murder” (120, 4.2.297-300). And then, “I’ll go hunt the badger by owl-light: / ‘Tis a deed of darkness” (121, 4.2.324-325).
When the Duchess reawakens for a moment, Bosola has just long enough for him to tell her a “noble lie” about Antonio’s chances of reconciling with the Cardinal. The Duchess dies happy to hear this news. At the same time, Bosola may be considering his prospects of attaining revenge or committing suicide: “I’ll post to Milan, / Where somewhat I will speedily enact / Worth my dejection” (123, 4.2.363-365). As the Methuen / New Mermaids editor suggests, this could refer to revenge or suicide. As yet, the audience can’t know which it will be, if either.
ACT 5
Act 5, Scene 1
“It were not fit / I should bestow so main a piece of wrong / Upon my friend”: Pescara shows unexpected integrity, and Antonio plans to seek reconciliation with the Cardinal.
In Act 5, Scene 1, a serious question arises: is there any hope for the relatively uncorrupted in the world that Webster describes? Pescara shows surprising integrity when Delio makes trial of him. Delio asks if Pescara will give him Antonio’s lands, and the man answers, “You are my friend, but this is such a suit, / Nor fit for me to give nor you to take” (125, 5.1.22-23). After he gives the same lands to Julia, Pescara explains to Delio, “It were not fit / I should bestow so main a piece of wrong / Upon my friend” (126, 5.2.44-47).
Furthermore, Antonio means to appeal to the better angels of the Cardinal’s nature and try for a reconciliation. He will at first sneak into his chamber and put a scare into him, but then show that he is of good will. But does the Cardinal have any better angels? Did he ever?
Act 5, Scene 2
“What a fatal judgement / Hath fallen upon this Ferdinand”: the Duke suffers from lycanthropia, and Bosola, Pescara, Malateste, and the Cardinal are taken aback at his behavior.
At the outset of Act 5, Scene 2, Ferdinand has gone wolf-mad for a time. Apparently, he suffers from an unusual condition called lycanthropia. As his doctor explains, sometimes those who are afflicted with severe melancholy “imagine / Themselves to be transformed into wolves, / Steal forth to churchyards in the dead of night / And dig dead bodies up…” (128, 5.2.9-12).
Even in Webster’s time, wolves were considered a severe threat to human beings: they were seen as fearsome, ravenous creatures, hungry for slaughter. Here in Webster’s play, we are to imagine Ferdinand’s nocturnal wanderings, his digging-up and re-presencing of the dead. Perhaps this is Webster’s way of surfacing Ferdinand’s guilty conscience for us.
It’s clear that Ferdinand has not yet recovered his wits since he is literally afraid of his own shadow. Pescara, Malateste, Bosola, and the Cardinal are shocked at Ferdinand’s bizarre behavior, and his doctor seems quite unable to help him. Bosola’s response is, “Mercy upon me. What a fatal judgement / Hath fallen upon this Ferdinand” (131, 5.2.81-82).
“Now, you’ll say / I am wanton!” The Cardinal is determined to keep his role in the Duchess’s death a secret, but Bosola seizes on the opportunity that Julia’s attraction to him presents to find out the cause of the churchman’s melancholy state.
Still in Act 5, Scene 2, the Cardinal goes into full coverup mode, and tells Bosola that he has one further favor to ask of him. We might have guessed that that favor is to kill Antonio. Privately, to himself, the Cardinal is determined to keep Bosola from finding out that he himself was just as responsible as Ferdinand for the death of the Duchess.
When this conversation is over, Julia enters with a pistol, and declares her attraction directly to Bosola, telling him that she fell in love with him at Malfi. He kisses her, and she speaks derisively of that highly prized quality of Renaissance women, chastity: “Now, you’ll say / I am wanton! This nice modesty in ladies / Is but a troublesome familiar / That haunts them” (135, 5.2.162-165).
Bosola, ever the Machiavellian opportunist, sees in Julia’s lust for him just the sort of contingency a revenger must take advantage of. He says to himself, “I have it! I will work upon this creature…” (136, 5.2.178). Bosola tells Julia that he wants to plumb the cause of the Cardinal’s recent depression. He says that if the man has “fallen in some disgrace / With the Emperor,” he needs to know so he can nimbly change his alliances as necessary (136, 5.2.195-203 inclusive).
“Thou’rt poisoned with that book”: the Cardinal, thinking to keep his secret safe, poisons Julia with a tainted Bible, only to find out that Bosola has heard everything he said about his involvement in the Duchess’s murder.
Still in Act 5, Scene 2, as the Cardinal giving orders to a servant that visitors must be kept away from Prince Ferdinand at all costs (he is worried that Ferdinand, in his distracted state, will give away the secret of the Duchess’s death), in walks Julia. She shows great determination and skill in getting the reluctant Cardinal at last to cough up the very thing he is so concerned to keep secret: namely, as he says, that “By my appointment, the great Duchess of Malfi / And two of her young children, four nights since, / Were strangled” (139, 5.2.261-263).
The Cardinal now does what any self-respecting corrupt Renaissance churchman in a revenge play would do — he holds out what appears to be a Bible for Julia to kiss and swear by as a pledge to keep his secret. He tells her, “Thy curiosity / Hath undone thee—thou’rt poisoned with that book” (140, 5.2.270-271). Julia’s last act is to make him understand that Bosola has overheard everything he said. When Bosola enters, the Cardinal again asks him to kill Antonio, and he pretends to agree.
“It may be / I’ll join with thee in a most just revenge”: instead of killing Antonio as the Cardinal wants him to do, Bosola will take his side and protect him.
Still in Act 5, Scene 2, Bosola tells us what he will actually do. By no means, he says to himself when the Cardinal is gone, will he murder Antonio. He addresses the absent husband of the slain Duchess, “I’ll seek thee out and all my care shall be / To put thee into safety from the reach / Of these most cruel biters that have got / Some of thy blood already. It may be / I’ll join with thee in a most just revenge …” (142, 5.2.330-334). Bosola closes the scene with a reference to “Penitence” (142, 5.2.338). Whatever he does from now on, he apparently believes, will serve as penance in his quest for salvation.
Act 5, Scene 3.
“Oh, fly your fate”: an echo from the Duchess’s grave picks up the final cadences of Delio and Antonio’s speech as they stroll, and the sum of its advice is that Antonio should make his escape while he still can.
In Act 5, Scene 3, which takes place, as our editor’s note informs us, “outside the Cardinal’s lodgings in Milan,” a ghostly echo from the Duchess’s grave confirms for Antonio that he should flee instead of trying to reconcile with the Cardinal. The sum of Echo’s advice is “Oh, fly your fate” (145, 5.3.35). When Antonio asks Delio whether he will ever see the Duchess again, Echo answers, “Never see her more” (145, 5.3.42). Might Edgar Allan Poe have drawn inspiration from this very line for his poem “The Raven”? All the same, Antonio means to forge ahead with his plan to meet with the Cardinal.
Act 5, Scene 4
“We are merely the stars’ tennis balls”: Bosola, trying to prevent his own murder by the Cardinal or an assassin appointed by him, stabs Antonio in the dark by mistake.
In Act 5, Scene 4, the Cardinal steels himself against any possibility of his salvation. Like Claudius in Hamlet 3.3, as our editor’s note points out, the Cardinal finds himself unable to pray for God’s forgiveness. “Sorry, not sorry,” as we say. Such an evasion will not do. The Cardinal is too attached to the fruit of his sins to give up either the sins or the benefits they have brought him. His immediate aim is to transfer Julia’s body from his quarters in his Milan palace to her apartment nearby.
Bosola overhears the Cardinal in soliloquy admitting that as soon as Bosola has carried out the transferral of Julia’s body, he must die. Ferdinand concurs with the Cardinal, adding that strangling would make sense because it’s quiet, and that the deed should be done in the dark. Bosola now knows that the Cardinal is going to have him killed.
When Antonio enters the dark quarters of the Cardinal, Bosola mistakes him for a hired assassin or the Cardinal, and kills him instead. Realizing what he has done, Bosola makes an Earl-of-Gloucester-like pronouncement about the randomness or even cruelty of the heavens: “We are merely the stars’ tennis balls, struck and banded / Which way please them” (149, 5.4.53-54; in King Lear 4.1, Gloucester’s parallel was that humans, to the gods, are like “flies to wanton boys”). Just before Antonio dies, Bosola tells him that the Duchess is already dead.
Bosola now looks forward only to killing the Cardinal. He says, “I have this Cardinal in the forge already. / Now I’ll bring him to th’hammer. Oh, direful misprision!” (150, 5.4.78-79). The act of saving and revenge that he saw as a key part of his penance is now no longer possible.
Act 5, Scene 5
“Let worthy minds ne’er stagger in distrust / To suffer death or shame for what is just!” Bosola takes revenge for himself, the Duchess, and others against the Cardinal, along with whom he and Ferdinand die by stabbing. Delio arrives escorting the son of Antonio and the Duchess, who will become Duke of Malfi.
In Act 5, Scene 5, it’s open season on the Cardinal, whose guilty conscience is by now getting the better of him. Reading, he muses, “I am puzzled in a question about hell…” (151, 5.5.1). He also says, “When I look into the fishponds in my garden / Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake / That seems to strike at me” (151, 5.5.5-7). When Bosola enters the Cardinal’s quarters, he is trapped, and none of his usual bribes work. The Cardinal tries to scream for help, but thanks to his prior bid to ensure that none of the guests should attend to Ferdinand, they ignore him.
Bosola first stabs a servant to prevent him from helping the Cardinal to unbolt the door and escape, and then plunges his knife into the Cardinal twice. The mad Ferdinand then gains access to the room and, thinking the Cardinal is the devil, proceeds to stab him as well as Bosola, who is mortally wounded by the blow he receives. Bosola now gives Ferdinand his death wound, and the dying Duke briefly comes to his senses, saying, “My sister! Oh, my sister! There is the cause on’t” (155, 5.5.70).
When Pescara, Malateste, and Roderigo enter, Bosola gives them a brief accounting of why the slaughter before them has occurred: he says it is due to revenge for the Duchess, Antonio, and Julia. And, he says, “lastly, for myself, / That was an actor in the main of all / Much ‘gainst mine own good nature, yet I’th’ end / Neglected” (156, 5.5.83-86). The editor’s note points out that by placing himself last in the list of persons, Bosola seems to be trying to absolve himself of responsibility for the murders he has committed.
As for his account of Antonio’s death, Bosola says it was due to “Such a mistake as I have often seen / In a play!” (156, 5.5.94-95). He declares that he does not mind dying “In so good a quarrel” as the one in which he has just engaged, and draws the lesson for the audience, “Let worthy minds ne’er stagger in distrust / To suffer death or shame for what is just! / Mine is another voyage —“ (156, 5.5.102-104).
What exactly does Bosola mean by these final remarks? He seems to be referring to how he came by his present death, but it’s possible that he is also referring back to preferring money and status-based respect in front of keeping his conscience pure, as when he first accepted the position of court spy against the Duchess. He could have refused, but he didn’t, and the rest is fictive history.
Soon, Delio enters the deceased Cardinal’s palace quarters, returning with the son of Antonio and the Duchess, who will become the new Duke of Amalfi. This arrival isn’t historically accurate since it was the Duchess’s son by the long-dead Duke of Amalfi, Alfonso I Piccolomini, who became the next ruler. He would have been around thirteen or fourteen years old at the time, still a minor. But for dramatic purposes, it seems right to do as Webster has done, and place the son of Antonio and the Duchess in the royal seat.
Amalfi will go on, we are to understand, though nothing has stopped John Webster, master revenge-tragedian, from heaping up the appropriate body-count in his gloriously proto-Gothic and bloody revenge tragedy. In this instance, ten deaths are strewn across the play: in one batch, that of the Duchess, two of her children, and her maid Cariola; Julia and Antonio, who each die singly; and Bosola, Ferdinand, and the Cardinal, plus one of the Cardinal’s servants, who stab one another to death in the final scene.
Critics and audiences mostly agree that the Duchess is one of the strongest female characters—not “roles” since, strictly speaking, initially the role would have been played by a young man—in all of Elizabethan-Jacobean drama, or, for that matter, drama of any sort in any age.
Edition: Webster, John. The Duchess of Malfi. Methuen Drama / New Mermaids, 2021 5th ed. ISBN-13: 978-1474295673
Copyright © 2025 by Alfred J. Drake