1One of the pivotal moments of John Webster’s tragedy The Duchess of Malfi is the writing of the Duchess’s will in a scene where the word “memory” first appears: “I am making my will, (as ’tis fit Princes should / In perfect memory) and I pray Sir, tell me / Were not one better make it smiling, thus?” (1.1.362-364). The moment foreshadows the Duchess’s tragic fate as she is to be executed under the orders of her brothers. The initial trochee, “I am,” places the Duchess at the centre of the action, asserting her agency against the societal expectations and political decorum compressed in “as ’tis fit Princes should.” As a ruler among others, the Duchess’s desire for self-definition is partly normative.
- 1 Examining Webster’s non-collaborative works (The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, The Devil’s Law (...)
- 2 In The Devil’s Law-Case, the grieving Leonora expresses a desire to disappear and erase all traces (...)
2Deriving from the Middle English word “memorī,” synonymous to “senses” or “mind” (Hinckley 318), “memory” does not merely align with the broader definition of it as “the faculty by which things are remembered; the capacity for retaining the thought of things past” (OED 2.6.a). In matters of succession, “memory” is part of a larger structure of inheritance, legacy, and the transmission of wealth and values. To be in “perfect” or “sound” memory in legal terminology is to be of sound mind (OED P.3.a), a crucial prerequisite for writing a will and deciding what to pass on to one’s heirs.1 However, Webster accounts for another meaning of memory that is more closely connected with death: “that which is remembered of a person, object, or event; (good or bad) posthumous reputation” (OED 1.3).2
- 3 For example, Bosola, mocking Castruchio for being a cuckold, insults his intelligence: “I would hav (...)
3In the entirety of The Duchess of Malfi, “memory” occurs four times only, each instance reflecting either the mental capacity to remember the past, or a broader hint at wits and perceptiveness.3 Memory might not then appear to be a significant theme in the story as it mostly seems to evoke someone’s intellectual sharpness and awareness. However, despite its limited number of occurrences, I contend that the concept is in fact central to driving the narrative. The writing of the Duchess’s testament triggers her marriage with Antonio, which, in turn, prompts her brothers to seek revenge. Initially a decoy to court the steward, this minor event indirectly leads to the Duchess’s downfall and eventual death, acting as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- 4 Beyond considerations of lineage and recognition (remembering her first husband for the Duchess, re (...)
4At first glance, The Duchess of Malfi appears to downplay the issue of posterity, prioritizing the Duchess’s scandalous remarriage. Both Ferdinand and the Cardinal emphasize the need for her to remain chaste in order to preserve her status, her family’s lineage, her reputation, and her salvation in the afterlife. However, the brothers’ true motive is the wealth the Duchess will leave behind. The play thus retains the standard concern for legacy and posterity in tragedies depicting the conflicts of characters of noble birth.4
5My contention is that both the Duchess and her brothers are concerned with issues of memory and oblivion albeit in different ways for they are opposing forces in the play’s agon. Is the call to memory an attempt to distinguish between the virtuous, who deserve to be remembered, and the sinful who are to be consigned to oblivion, or is it rather evidence of a common human experience and a shared human obsession? Is there – like Hamlet’s Ghost – a specific deed which the characters must remember for the tragedy of blood to be fully realized, or is memory the artificial backdrop of the play, something which the characters vainly hanker after? I will first take a closer look at the textual occurrences of the word “memory” to show how memory provides a dramatic frame for the play’s events. Secondly, I shall analyse how memory and posterity are intertwined through the motif of the memento mori – the Duchess must remember her dead husband as well as her own mortality. Finally, I will oppose the Duchess’s post-death presence as an “echo” to the brothers’ fall into oblivion. The Duchess’s monument-like status after death might be seen as an endorsement of the nobles’ quest for posterity – she is rewarded for her virtues as befits a noblewoman – but this could be at odds with the play’s harsh commentary on the vanity of the nobility and their false sense of grandeur. An analysis of the Art of Dying is therefore required to understand the performative nature of memory as a tool of control. This inquiry will help us understand the deeper significance of memory, posterity, and the pursuit of legacy in The Duchess of Malfi.
6In the play’s incipit, the Duchess is not being forthright with Antonio, her steward and future husband. The writing of her will is merely a ploy to seduce him. Her intention to remarry is revealed immediately after her brothers have left the stage: “I, through frights, and threatnings, will assay / This dangerous venture” (1.1.333-334). Though the will seems superfluous and does not appear to indicate the Duchess’s concern with her legacy from a narrative standpoint, I propose, following Brian Chalk’s interpretation, that the scene is central, not insofar as the Duchess is concerned, but rather because it highlights Webster’s own interest in posterity and the traces one leaves after death. Chalk presents The Duchess of Malfi as the playwright’s literary monument for himself:
Webster’s paradoxical desire for his works to endure for posterity and his disbelief in this possibility generates the pathos that drives his tragedies. […] Webster is deeply preoccupied with death and its relationship to monuments – how people die, how they are represented in death, and how they may or may not be memorialized. (Chalk 381)
- 5 This contradicts his apparent concern for his sister’s first husband: “Thou has tained that massy s (...)
7Webster’s preoccupation with posterity is mirrored in his dramatic work and his concern with legacy permeates the central themes of this tragedy. The brothers’ command that the Duchess remain a chaste widow suggests their wish that she would disappear completely after death, leaving only her material possessions behind. The presence of a husband and of children would serve as a reminder of the Duchess’s memory. To put it differently, by defying her brothers and marrying again, the Duchess chooses to continue her bloodline. Her decision is vindicated by the appearance in the final scene of her heir, Antonio’s son, “[a] pritty gentleman, his sonne and heire” (5.5.107), declared the sole inheritor of the Duchess’s wealth and political status (109-111). His summoning on stage brings about a hopeful turn to the future, confirmed by Delio’s wish to use the play’s tragic events as a moral lesson: “Let us make noble use / of this great ruine” (5.5.109-110). As protagonists and antagonists alike are dead, the remaining heir symbolizes the persistence of the Duchess’s legacy despite her brothers’ efforts to annihilate her for her wealth. After his sister’s murder, Ferdinand admits that his anger stemmed not so much from moral outrage as from frustration over Antonio’s intrusion into the line of succession:5
Onely I must confesse, I had a hope,
(Had she continu’d widow) to have gain’d
An infinite masse of Treasure by her death:
And that was the mayne cause. (4.2.271-274)
- 6 The Duchess is, from the very first act, subtly presented as a character linked with forgetting: “D (...)
8Presented as the driving force behind the play’s events, the question of posterity shapes the Duchess’s life while being of little concern to her. Ferdinand’s admission confirms that the lineage issue, introduced by the will, is the crux of the play’s tragic story. Undisturbed by the potential disruption a second marriage could cause, the Duchess wilfully forgets about her brothers’ warnings, and proceeds with her plans.6 Her “[im]perfect memory” leads her to dismiss the issue of her brothers with a brief rhetorical question: “Shall this move me?” (1.1.327). As she is about to be strangled, she recalls the will-writing scene: “In my last will, I have not much to give; / A many hungry guests have fed upon me” (4.2.186-187), and finally remembers her brothers and their desire for her riches: “Go tell my brothers, when I am laid out, / They than may feede in quiet” (4.2.224-225).
9As the play opens, Ferdinand reminds the Duchess of her status, “You are a Widowe” (1.1.280) and “my sister” (316), underlining her obligations to honour her first husband and obey her brothers. The Duchess must remember her place as a woman in a patriarchal social order. Evidently, their reminders are actually threats presented as advice as the evocation of Ferdinand’s dagger makes clear. Nonetheless, the duty to remember is later echoed in Antonio’s exchange with the Duchess in the same scene:
Duchess. I am making my will […]
If I had a husband now, this care were quit:
But I intend to make you Over-seer;
What good deed shall we first remember? Say.
Antonio. Begin with that first good deed began i’th’world,
After man’s creation, the Sacrament of marriage:
I’ld have you first provide for a good husband,
Give him all.
[…] ‘Twere strange if there were no will in you
To marry againe. (1.1.362-377).
Antonio’s advice that the Duchess should remarry sharply contrasts with Ferdinand’s insistence on her chastity. The antanaclasis on “will” brings together the Duchess’s agency and her testament and posits marriage as an act of self-assertion.
10The exchange is characterized by recurring temporal markers and more generally the semantic field of time, “first,” “after man’s creation,” “begin,” “began.” In an explicit intertextual reference to the Book of Genesis and “man’s creation” (372), Antonio seems to prompt the Duchess to remember the beginning of times. The line is evenly divided into two segments, one looking back to the past of the Creation, and the other forward to the imminent future of Antonio’s own marriage to the Duchess, both sections being united by the man – creation / sacrament – marriage network of crisscrossing sounds. Marriage is not simply a sacred calling but a way to remember the beginnings of time as the union between man and woman fulfils God’s command in Eden: “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28).
11Antonio goes against the advice of Ferdinand and the Catholic Cardinal. His comment on marriage is actually an intrusion of Protestant values into the Catholic environment of Malfi:
Duchess. What doe you thinke of marriage?
Antonio. I take’t, as those that deny Purgatory:
It locally contains, or heaven, or hell,
There’s no third place in’t. (1.1.378-381)
- 7 Protestant views on remarriage were heterogenous, especially regarding young widows like the Duches (...)
The evocation of the rejection of the doctrine of Purgatory indirectly aligns Antonio with Protestant conceptions of Heaven and Hell. His endorsement of remarriage contrasts sharply with the attitudes of the people of Malfi, a duchy in a quintessentially Catholic country: “The common-rabble, do directly say / She [the Duchess] is a Strumpet” (3.1.25-26),7 echoing the brothers’ “They are most luxurious, / Will wed twice” in the opening scene (1.1.284-285). Thus, the issue is not simply whether to remember or not to, but whether memory should uphold the Catholic ideal of chastity or the Protestant ideal of companionate marriage. This choice is made early in the play, and the spectator sees its consequences and ramifications unfold. Furthermore, it marks the beginning of a series of instances of forgetting and remembering, of memory or the lack thereof punctuating the play. For example, Ferdinand is visibly tormented by his distorted, perverse vision of his sister as a lustful widow betraying her first husband:
Rubarbe, oh, for rubarbe
To purge this choler, here’s the cursed day
To prompt my memory, and here’t shall sticke
Till of her bleeding heart, I make a spunge
To wipe it out. (2.5.12-16)
Ferdinand, as the sponge metaphor indicates, wishes to erase the vision of debauchery he has created in his mind. Only revenge can allow him to forget, justifying his plot to have the Duchess executed. After his sister’s death, he does indeed forget about her imagined perversions. Ferdinand’s wish is proleptic and it comes with a price: the Duke of Calabria is torn by regret and guilt. At that moment, the Duke in denial forgets his own responsibility in the murder plot:
Ferdinand. I bad thee, when I was distracted of my wits,
Goe kill my dearest friend, and thou hast don’t.
For let me but examine well the cause;
What was the meanness of her match to me? […]
Bosola. Let me quicken your memory: for I perceive
You are falling into ingratitude: I challenge
The reward due to my service. (4.2.266-281)
- 8 A similar vision of regret as a loss of “memory” (wits, conscience) is expressed in Bosola’s compla (...)
12Ferdinand’s remark about his wits suggests he might not have been in “perfect memory”8 when deciding to have his sister killed, forgetting the close relationship he had with a dear family member. The struggle between memory and oblivion in Ferdinand echoes that of the Duchess at the beginning of the play. Both the main protagonist and antagonist face a duty to keep their family in their memory, and their failure to do so is precisely what drives forward this tragedy of blood. Murder occurs as a result of forgetting, whether it is the Duchess forgetting her first marriage and her brothers, or Ferdinand forgetting his love for his sister.
13Issues of memory, posterity and lineage therefore become intertwined. For the Duchess, remembering one’s heirs is a matter of life or death, something she presumably either fails to realise or refuses to accept. For her brothers, memory and lineage are an obsession illustrated by the killing of the Duchess’s children, symbols and memorials of the forbidden couple as well as obstacles between Ferdinand and the Duchess’s riches. The madness in this obsession is underscored by Bosola, who highlights the cruelty of the murders: “Alas, how have these offended?” (4.2.245). Once again, death and memory go hand in hand. Such proximity seems to harken to the Renaissance trope of the memento, which is why, once the importance of memory is established, we must discuss the significance of the use of the memento mori in the play.
- 9 Webster’s interest in posthumous rituals persisted after The Duchess of Malfi as evidenced by his p (...)
14John Webster was familiar with posthumous praises. His eulogy to Prince Henry in A Monumental Column was first published in 1612 shortly after the Prince’s death on the 6th of November 1612 and one year prior to the first performance of The Duchess of Malfi.9 As is well-known, the play and the elegy are closely connected: “Webster was working on Act 3 in late November or December of 1612, for he took time off from playwriting to provide an elegy for Prince Henry, which has numerous echoes of The Duchess, especially of its third” (Brown xvii). The end of the play is heavily influenced by the commemoration of the Prince’s memory, as shown by Webster’s metaphor of greatness as ephemeral snow, taken up by Delio in the play’s closing speech:
O Greatnesse! What shall we compare thee to?
To Giants, beasts, or Towers, fram’d out of Snow,
Or like Wax-guilded Tapers, more for show
Then durance? Thy foundation doth betray
Thy frailty, being builded on such clay. (A Monumental Column, 109-112)
Delio. These wretched eminent things
Leave no more fame behind ‘em, then should one
Fall in a frost, and leave his print in snow;
As soone as the sun shines, it ever melts,
Both forme, and matter. (The Duchess of Malfi, 5.5.112-116)
In Webster’s elegy to Henry, greatness is portrayed as the prince’s memory, his reputation or “fame” after death, as Delio terms it. However, both A Monumental Column and The Duchess of Malfi suggest that all men, nobles and commoners alike, are destined to be forgotten over time. Thus, memory and posterity (the nobles’ “greatness”) are given metaphorical textures, snow and wax, as in the “Wax-guilded Tapers” simile, while post-death memory melts away with time as one slips into oblivion, regardless of one’s former grandeur (“Giants,” “Towers”), recalling the danse macabre motif, an allegory on the universality of death.
- 10 On wax figures see also Owens.
15The melting wax image recurs in the stage direction for Act 4, Scene 1 in the first quarto: “Here is discover’d, (behind a Traverse) the artificiall figures of Antonio, and his children; appearing as if they were dead” [I2r], a possible reference to the funeral of Prince Henry. David M. Bergeron highlights the possible link between the play and the prince’s funeral: 10
The tradition of bearing a “representation” or effigy of the deceased atop the coffin was well-established, especially for funerals of royalty. The demand was that this figure resemble as far as possible the real person, and the artistic effort was expended on the face and hands with the rest of the body garbed in the regal habit. These effigies were often set up, as in Westminster Abbey, for display. The effigy of Henry was only the most recent that Webster and his audience could have seen. (Bergeron 334)
The thematic significance of wax is reinforced: not only a metaphor for posterity and memory (the way one is remembered after death), it is also the material used to create effigies to commemorate departed nobles. As wax melts in the sun, so efforts to preserve memory appear futile. In The Duchess of Malfi, the wax figures are not actual funeral effigies, but horrific visions designed to torment the Duchess and make her believe Antonio and his children are dead: “He doth present you this sad spectacle, / So that you know directly they are dead” (4.1.56-57). This emphasizes that memories of the dead – whether the term relates to monuments, effigies, or reputation – are artificial and sometimes oppressive.
16The themes of memory and posterity crop up in the various interactions between Bosola and the nobles, especially the Duchess. Bosola’s part is that of a double agent working for the Aragonian brothers, while faking a friendship with the Duchess. In true “malcontent” fashion and speaking as a former galley-slave, Bosola is critical of the aristocracy and their aspirations for posthumous greatness, the same greatness of spirit attributed to nobility that Cariola first mentions: “Whether the spirit of greatnes, or of woman / Raigne most in her [the Duchess], I know not” (1.1.487-488). In Act 4, scene 2, after obtaining from the Duchess a confession of her secret relationship, Bosola comes on stage disguised as a grave maker. As Rory Loughnane explains:
This Act [4], these scenes, are about how to the make final preparations for death, and have provided fodder for scholars interested in all things thanatological: from […] the Duchess’s desire, a la Stephen Greenblatt, to speak with the dead, to the madman’s song with its “deadly dogged howl” and speeches about doomsday, to the Executioners entering ceremonially with a coffin, cords, and bell, to the process of the Duchess’s mortification, to her ready acceptance of death […], to the Christological overtones of the Duchess’s resurrection and final exclamation of “Mercy.” The fourth Act is a treasure trove for scholars writing about the final moments before death and practices of remembrance. (Loughnane §2)
17Throughout Act 4, the Duchess enters the realm of the dead, metaphorically at first and then literally. Before her execution, she is a ghost-like figure, imprisoned and tortured in a hellish place, surrounded by evocations of funerals. This can be explained by both the play’s nature as a revenge tragedy and by the prevailing themes of early seventeenth-century theatre as Jean Rousset notes in relation to Webster’s work:
De tous les thèmes dramatiques, la vengeance est celui qui se prête le mieux à leur dessein; elle offre à foison les corps déchirés, les tombeaux, les gibets, les morts tourmentées; elle autorise le sang, les supplices provoquant d’autres supplices, parce que la vengeance engendre la vengeance; elle se nourrit du spectacle de la souffrance, de cette souffrance qu’on retarde, qu’on prolonge, qu’on amplifie; elle appelle une mise en scène de la douleur : un théâtre avide de cadavres et d’éclatantes mises à mort devait se tourner vers les drames de la vengeance, qui offrent en outre à l’homme de ce temps l’un des miroirs où il cherche son image. (Rousset 85)
- 11 “On connaît le somptueux et sanglant bouquet des grandes vengeances élisabéthaines issues de la Tra (...)
18Though Rousset’s focus is on French theatre, his mention of Webster draws a more global picture of an age obsessed with the cadaveric, the macabre and the gruesome.11 The Duchess’s vision of death is personal, a solemn acceptation challenged by Bosola’s presence. The spy speaks in prose, breaking the rhythm of the Duchess’s iambic pentameters:
Thou art a box of worm-seede, at best but a salvatory of greene mummey: what’s this flesh? A little cruded milke, phantasticall puffe-paste: our bodies are weaker then those paper prisons boyes use to keepe flies in: more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth-wormes. […] Thou art some great woman sure, for riot begins to sit on thy fore-head (clad in gray haires) twenty yeares sooner, then on a merry milke maydes. Thou sleep’st worse, then if a mouse should be forc’d to take up her lodging in a cats eare: a little infant that breedes it’s teeth, should it lie with thee, would crie out, as if thou wert the more unquiet bed-fellow. (4.2.116-130)
Death is evoked through images of decay and rot (“cruded milk,” “flies,” “worms”). Bosola lists body parts, “flesh,” “fore-head,” “eare,” “teeth,” almost dissecting the body into its component parts, while “gray haires” points to its weak and finite nature. Bosola’s ironic comment, “Thou art some great woman sure,” creates a dichotomy between the physical body, weak and rotten, and the imaginary reputation of the noble, represented by the notion of greatness. Assuming that the Duchess, as a noblewoman, would wish to be remembered as a great woman (this attests to his bias and clouded judgement on the nobility), he insists instead on her ageing body, picturing her as half-dead, a mummy.
- 12 Regarding the use of the memento mori motif in French paintings, Nadia Cernogora evokes the need to (...)
19Bosola’s speech is only an instance in a series of memento mori discourses intended to reveal the skull beneath the skin. This topos of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama connects the play’s depiction of death with the notions of memory and remembrance: one should not only remember those who have passed away, they should remember their own mortality as well. The array of images of rot, death and the rejection of pleasure and ambition is in keeping with the era’s fascination with baroque vanitas. Bosola’s hypotyposis of corpses and worms recalls the Renaissance tradition of the memento mori.12 Memory becomes a moral imperative; remembering death encourages pious behaviour and condemns acting on sinful impulses.
20Bosola suggests that the Duchess’s appearance is the manifestation of her guilt, having betrayed the sacred vows of marriage by remarrying. The analogy comparing the young widow to the “merry milke maydes” refers to one of Webster’s characters in New Characters. In “A fayr and happy Milke-mayd,” Webster describes a pure young woman embodying pastoral ideals of simplicity:
Is a Countrey Wench, that is so farre from making her selfe beautifull by Art, that one looke of hers is able to put all face Physicke out of countenance. […] All her excellencies stand in her so silently, as if they had stolne upon her without her knowledge. The lining of her apparell (which is her selfe) is farre better then outsides of Tissew: for though shee bee not arrayed in the spoyle of the Silke-worme, shee is deckt in innocence, a farre better wearing. (1-8)
His depiction of the simple country maid serves as an inverted portrait of the noble Duchess, the maggot replaced by the silkworm, infant cries by silence, and guilt by innocence. Bosola comments on false appearances, cosmetics, and deception. He suggests that the Duchess’s body ages “twenty yeares sooner” than the milkmaid’s (evident in her gray hair), because she is not “deckt in innocence.” This reflection echoes his criticism of post-death reputation and memory. Like memory, physical appearance is an illusion, ultimately destroyed by the reality of the rotting, dying body. Bosola’s memento mori for the Duchess echoes his caricature of the Old Lady in Act 2:
Though we are eaten up of lice, and wormes,
and though continually we beare about us
A rotten and dead body, we delight
To hide it in rich tissew. (2.1.52-54)
- 13 A possible reference to King James I’s plantation of mulberry trees in 1608/09 to start a native si (...)
21With this reference to New Characters, Bosola addresses the Duchess directly in what at first glance appears to be a form of direct criticism. By contrasting the milkmaid with “the spoyle of the Silke-worme,” he questions the idea of “greatness” and the reputation nobles construct during their lifetimes often through clothes and makeup, and which they intend to endure after their death.13 It is as if nobles, over the course of their lives, made a monument of themselves using artifice to solidify their reputation and ultimately ensure their memory after death (an image taken up in Act 4, Scene 2, with the exchange on funeral arts).
- 14 Bosola. “There’s rough-cast phrase to your plastique” (2.1.30).
22In Act 2, the Old Lady can be viewed as a distorted, grotesque parody of the Duchess through the lens of Bosola’s misanthropy, as is the Lady in France afflicted with smallpox and “flaying the skin off her face to make it level,” which Bosola terms “careening” (2.1.29-30) – scraping clean a ship’s bottom. Their faces, along with their noble reputations, are like monuments, built and carved both literally and metaphorically, or as here, repaired and plastered when necessary.14
- 15 The Duchess is no stranger to deception by false appearances. For example, her loose-bodied gown is (...)
23Webster depicts, once again, this dichotomy between the memory (an object left in remembrance of someone, an effigy) and the decaying body it represents. Interestingly, in his critique of the vanity of noblewomen, Bosola mentions their “paintings”: “You come from painting now?” (2.1.20). While referring to makeup, “painting” also evokes aristocratic portraiture. Of the many purposes served by commissioned paintings, one was to commemorate the dead and celebrate their memory. In this sense, the makeup used by the Old Lady is like the beautiful portrait of a monarch: both serve to deceive and to create a false sense of grandeur.15
24In Act 4, scene 2, a third kind of worm, the glow-worm, is introduced by Bosola in a rhyming couplet and used as a symbol to criticize the nobility’s obsession with posthumous glory: “Glories (like glowe-wormes) a farre off, shine bright, / But look’d to neere, have neither heate, nor light” (133-134). In the opening choriambus, “glories” and “glowe-wormes” create a perfect symmetry. Echoing sounds fuel the metaphor of glory as a source of light. But even though the “light” is “bright” as implied by the rhyming pattern, Bosola makes it only the faint glow emitted by glow-worms; the light of glory is deceptive, a pejorative dimension conveyed by the trochee. The chaotic prosody of the first line is a formal embodiment of the worm’s sinuous shape contrasting with the perfect iambic pentameter that follows.
25These images are telling, given the role of natural light sources as religious representations of monarchs. As Erzsébet Stróbl notes in her analysis of these symbols, the sun was used to evoke kingship, while, on the other hand,
one of the most common figures of praise for Queen Elizabeth in the second part of her reign was her association with the goddess Diana whose attribute was the Moon. While the metaphor was applied widely to eulogize the Queen, there were instances where lunar symbolism expressed anxieties about female power. (Stróbl 68)
Bosola’s criticism of the Duchess as a female leader uses the same faint moon-like glow, contrasted with the manly, radiating, blinding sun. This glow is another illusion giving neither heat nor light. This aligns with Bosola’s larger critique of the nobility and echoes Ferdinand’s own use of the light symbolism: “You were too much i’th’ light” (4.1.40). The Duke suggests his sister’s reputation is problematic as she is too much in the public eye. Light here may refer to fame, and, in turn, to memory and how a monarch is considered, before and after death, but with an additional pun on “lightness” pointing at the Duchess’s supposed sensuality as a “light” woman.
26With this series of images, Bosola aims to highlight the Duchess’s blindness to herself and her refusal to accept death and the passage of time. However, he is clearly mistaken as the audience sees that the Duchess is indeed ready to accept her fate and has embraced death. Bosola’s perspective is marked by his belief that the Duchess is an archetypal noblewoman, a bias he betrays as he discusses princes’ tombs and effigies with her. This blinds him to her true acceptance of mortality. The first scene of Act 4 contains numerous references to death from the Duchess. She lists different ways of dying: “Let me freeze to death” (68), “I’ll starve my selfe to death” (75), “I long to bleed” (108). In her contemplation of death, the Duchess also mentions remembrance in the context of religious devotion:
Let them like tyrants
Never be remembred, but for the ill they have done:
Let all the zealous prayers of mortified
Church-men forget them.
[…] Let God a little while cease crowning Martirs
To punish them.
Goe, howle them this: and say I long to bleed
It is some mercy, when men kill with speed. (4.1.101-108)
- 16 Bosola’s role as a demonic tempter has affected the Duchess who seems to succumb to despair, hintin (...)
27The Duchess curses the stars, symbols of divine authority. Her speech contains a form of dramatic irony as her words hint at future events. Her wish that churchmen forget the stars foreshadows the actions of the Cardinal, while her mention of howling anticipates Ferdinand’s lycanthropy and her mention of martyrs her own martyr-like death. Her plea, “It is some mercy, when men kill with speed,” a Senecan commonplace, is echoed in the scene of her execution: “Come violent death” (221). In her curse, the Duchess is tempted to forget the “stars,” to forsake faith and embrace oblivion. Her attitude is that of despair, suicide, an antithesis to proper, Christian death.16 Yet the numerous eschatological references to the following scenes anticipate a move towards acceptance, and a more positive outlook on death.
28Webster’s use of the memento mori in The Duchess of Malfi carries an ironic twist: it is mainly invoked by villains such as Ferdinand (in Act 1) and Bosola (in Act 4), who, prompted by power, lust and greed, repudiate their Christian values to plot, lie, and kill. In Act 4, scene 2, the spectator may wonder if Bosola – in disguise, and directed to betray and torture the Duchess – might not be the one who should actually take his own advice and contemplate his own actions rather than those of the play’s female protagonist. Webster’s ironic use of the memento mori, promulgated by those who need it the most, calls to question the relationship between future and present in the play. In this exchange between Bosola and the Duchess, pondering on one’s future is meant to affect one’s choices in the present. Similarly, the way one might choose to die in the present shapes one’s afterlife.
- 17 Bosola’s murder of the two brothers before his own death is evoked in the line “Their death [is] a (...)
29Paradoxically, as Bosola dies, he contrasts his relief for having avenged the Duchess with his misanthropic despair and his pessimistic view of the world: “Oh this gloomy world” (5.5.99). He does not explicitly mention the afterlife, which is unlike his recurring hellish visions, “the Scritch-Owle” (4.2.166), “a hideous storm of terror” (176). Furthermore, his memento mori images, used in the execution scene, seem to echo not so much the death of the Duchess as his own.17 The Duchess does not take up these same images of hell. Instead, she holds a positive vision of death: “I perceive death, (now I am well awake) / Best guift is, they can give, or I can take” (4.2.211-212). As Bosola comes dressed as a tomb-maker to accompany the Duchess in her final hour, the spectator is made to see their exchange as a play upon the tradition of the Art of Dying. Sister Mary Catharine O’Connor explains how the ars moriendi opposes the violent memento mori images:
In spite of its purpose the Ars moriendi is not a doleful book – no clarion call to repentance. There is little stress upon hell, only hope of heaven. Always is Moriens [the dying character] encouraged and consoled. True, at the hour of death horrible devils tempt him to grave sin with greater vehemence than ever before, but they are followed immediately by angels, who help him to combat the temptation. Again and again, he is reminded of the pity and mercy of God, which is above all wickedness. (O’Connor 5)
30In her last moments, the Duchess mentions “my women” (4.2.214) and “my brothers” (223), and comments on the joy of being reunited with Antonio, whom she assumes is dead: “Who would be afraid on’t? / Knowing to meete such excellent company / In th’other world” (198-200). The Duchess’s positive vision of death is marked by her memory of her relatives, her children and her entourage. Despite her less-than-ideal death by strangling, which parallels the brothers’ brutal murders at the end of the play, her reaction contrasts sharply with theirs. While Ferdinand goes mad and the Cardinal calls for help, the Duchess forgives her executioners, demonstrating a readiness to die: “I forgive them” (195).
- 18 The connection between the echo (the natural phenomenon occurring in the ruins) and the spirit of t (...)
31In this regard, Webster’s work illustrates the early modern period’s use of the medieval traditions of the Art of Dying. The Duchess’s composed acceptance of death and her forgiveness reflect the principles of ars moriendi, which emphasized a calm and prepared approach to death, in contrast to the violent and tumultuous deaths of her brothers. By remembering and accepting her mortality, and by remembering her family, is the Duchess rewarded with posterity, appearing as an echo while the brothers vanish in oblivion?18 A possible answer is to be found in the parallel with the figure of Moriens in ars moriendi texts.
32At the core of the Art of Dying is an inner conflict between good and evil manifesting itself as a series of temptations to sin and inspirations against sin. One of the main goals of the ars was to comfort the dying as they would look back upon their life, contemplating if they had lived well, and it offers a final struggle against the devil in order for them to die peacefully, even joyfully. The ars moriendi is characterized by memory: man must constantly prepare for death, and thus always remember his mortal condition. Except for the Duchess, most characters in the play face unplanned death (mors improvisa). Imprisoned in the palace, the Duchess has time to accept and welcome death.
33By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the medieval Art of Dying tradition was still popular, and Webster’s visions of death would have been familiar to Blackfriars audiences. Bettie Anne Doebler underscores the importance of the ars moriendi tradition in Renaissance England:
The first work on the theme of dying well which was more than a chapter in a theological treatise was printed in 1450 as a block-book […]. The purpose of the book was to instruct either the religious or layman on the art of dying well when no priest was present. There were two early versions of the text, both widely imitated and reprinted in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially in England, France, and Germany. The conventions of the tradition were expressed again and again in both Catholic and Protestant devotional books in the seventeenth century. Although the instruction had its source on the continent, it apparently came into England about 1490 with Caxton’s translation of the Tractatus de arte vivendi et moriendi. (Doebler 158-159)
34The ars moriendi is in the form of an allegory in which demons are opposed to religious angels and the figure of Moriens on his deathbed takes centre stage. I concur with Doebler that Webster places the memento mori images of hell, damnation, rot and coffins against the hopeful Art of Dying. The play’s male characters (Bosola, the Cardinal, Ferdinand) represent a vision of the afterlife rooted in oblivion and annihilation: “Cardinal. I pray, let me / Be layd by, and never thought of” (5.5.87-88), where ruins and “vaulted graves,” in Bosola’s words, “yeildes no echo” (5.5.97). It calls for a comparison with the echoing voice of the dead Duchess. With the exception of Cariola, female characters steeped in memory and the Art of Dying, remembering and accepting death, offer an alternative to their male counterparts.
- 19 Bosola’s description of the Aragonian brothers gives way to his criticism of court life and the hyp (...)
35In The Duchess of Malfi, the characters’ obsession with post-death memory and posterity is manifested in their capacity to “remember they will die” and therefore to act with humility, forsaking vanity. However, this duty of remembrance is not uniformly enforced for every character. The play is saturated with obligations directed at women to act according to religion and morality, and to preserve their reputation during their lifetime and their memory after death. This is not to say that male characters escape scrutiny. Bosola also delivers a scathing critique of male nobles.19 Nonetheless, the play links the idea of memory to a “double standard,” portraying memory – both post-death reputation and the duty to remember one’s mortality – as a patriarchal tool for control.
36Male antagonists perceive the Duchess as a sultry, sensual and proud woman, yet they are equally guilty of pride. While the Cardinal condemns his sister’s marriage as an act of selfishness and lust, his extra-marital affair with Julia is both unlawful and immoral, revolving mainly around sex. The “moral anarchy” (Mulryne xix) prevailing in Webster’s tragedy presents the focus on female memory as a gender issue. While the Duchess must act as a keeper of her first husband’s memory, most male villains ignore (or forget about) their own mortality. This hypocrisy highlights the double standards in how memory and morality are enforced, particularly against women.
37The dialogues between the Cardinal and his mistress Julia demonstrate an apparent (but deceptive) patriarchal superiority: Julia addresses her lover throughout as “my lord” (see for example 2.4.3, 9, 15, 19). While admittedly this may be a marker of class inequality, it is important to note how Julia ends her sentences with this distinction, punctuating them like a climax emphasising an idea of submission (the power in their relationship is imbalanced due, in part, to gendered norms).
38However, the Cardinal’s death in the final scene takes on a comic dimension culminating in his repeated, incessant cries for help: “Helpe: we are betraid” (5.5.17), “My Dukedome, for rescew” (19), “Here’s a plot upon me, I am assaulted: I am lost, / Unless some rescew” (22-23), “O Mercy” (40), and “Shall I die like a Levoret / Without any resistance? Helpe, helpe, helpe” (45-46). As a ploy to clear the path while disposing of Julia’s corpse, the Cardinal had ordered his henchmen not to intervene even though he cried out for help. His own plan is the very thing that prevents the guards from helping him when his life is threatened. As the guards believe it to be a trick, the Cardinal is ironically the final victim of his own twisted schemes, illustrating the intervention of divine punishment.
- 20 “Bosola [to Cardinal]. Now it seemes thy Greatnes was onely outward” (5.5.41).
39Julia’s death, a pivotal moment in the play, not only exposes the Cardinal’s crimes but also symbolizes the moral decay of those in power. In their final moments, the power dynamics at the core of the couple are reversed: the Cardinal loses self-respect, grandeur and dignity, while Julia’s death, like the Duchess’s, grants her strength of character and spirit. In the end, the lustful courtesan seems to be redeemed; her death reveals the Cardinal’s involvement in the murder, and the removal of her body marks the villain’s undoing. After death, the reputations of the Cardinal and of Julia are inverted.20
40Therefore, the deaths of the female characters, particularly Julia and the Duchess, expose the true nature of the male antagonists, revealing their hypocrisy and moral failing. The play ultimately suggests that the true measure of a person’s character is revealed in their death, and such as have lived deceitful, corrupt lives cannot escape the eventual judgment of their actions. Post-death memory seems to oppose the lies and false appearances of grandeur.
41A character’s final lines tend to be of great importance, bringing an often moral conclusion to the character’s evolution. The Cardinal is doomed by his own cowardice; his weakness and manipulative nature are his hamartia, traits once concealed behind a facade of power through deceit and lies. His gruesome downfall contains a reference to Shakespeare’s Richard III (1597), parodying the famous line “My kingdom for a horse” (Richard III, 5.4.7). This reference is even more pronounced because, as David Carnegie points out: “Ferdinand was initially played by the leading actor of the King’s Men, Richard Burbage” (Carnegie 414), who was one of the first actors to play the role of Richard III (Gurr 91). Webster’s intertextual reference to Shakespeare’s Richard III is mirrored by the actors on stage. The spectator sees Burbage, playing Ferdinand, killing the Cardinal, whose dying lines echo the same Shakespearean play, providing an intertextual memory, as it were, at the heart of a play concerned with memory.
- 21 See the exchange between Cardinal and Malateste in 3.3.
42The Cardinal appears as Richard’s foil, a counterfeit character: while Richard is a warrior-king, the Cardinal is not, yet pretends he is.21 The “levoret” metaphor describing the Cardinal recalls the metaphor of King Richard as a “bloody dog” (5.5.2). The Cardinal is a weak animal, the antithesis of Richard III, facing a mors improvisa (unplanned death). He who forgets his own mortality is, in turn, forgotten. The Cardinal’s insistence on being alone, ignored by his peers, announces his departure into oblivion after death.
43Conversely, Julia’s death brings out the better aspects of her personality. The Cardinal’s mistress is throughout associated with the stereotype of the changeable, fickle woman, but she is lucid in her final moments. Her exchange with Bosola reveals that she is aware of the Cardinal’s views on women, emphasizing society’s double standards:
Bosola. If the great Cardinall now should see me thus,
Would he not count me a villaine?
Julia. No, he might count me a wanton,
Not lay a scruple of offence on you. (5.2.178-182)
Moreover, in noting the Cardinal’s misogyny, Julia makes a prophetic assumption that comes true in the same scene, another demonstration of her perceptiveness. The courtesan seduces Bosola as the Duchess did Antonio, in a tragic subversion of the opening scene. The two women share the masculine position of the seducer. The Duchess is enthusiastic about courting Antonio, but his modesty and humility (betraying his status as a commoner) make it harder for her to reveal the extent of her true feelings; similarly, in the last act, a disillusioned Julia has to take on the role of the seducer as Bosola’s advances are clumsy, profuse, artificial and conventional: “You will marry me with commendation” (5.2.174), she concludes. Both Julia and the Duchess reverse conventional gender norms. But in Julia’s case, the scene is essentially rooted in death and betrayal. Bosola and Julia both betray the Cardinal, who is himself prepared to betray his mistress, making her kiss a poisoned Bible. To put it differently, the Cardinal willingly forgets his lover, condemning her to oblivion.
- 22 On the other hand, the supposedly chaste Cariola cannot confront her death gracefully.
44Even though she knows her life to be in danger, Julia does not cry out for help but reflects upon her current actions. The scene is a confession in the Christian sense of the word, a pious acceptance of her sins contrasting with the Cardinal’s desperate pleas and laments. She is repentant: “For if I see, and steale a Diamond, / The fault is not i’ th’ stone, but in me the thiefe” (5.2.189-190). At the moment of her death, she is no longer portrayed as a woman running away from her commitments to men (Castruchio, Cardinal), but as one whose relationships were based on an imbalance of power. Both the Duchess and Julia share a similar attitude. Julia in many ways is a foil to the Duchess: both are sinful, lusty, and yet they face death with dignity.22 Death brings them to memory: for Julia, death triggers repentance (remembering her sins) and for the Duchess, it leads to her reflecting upon her life (remembering her family).
- 23 See Henten: “Prudentius characterizes the violent deaths of Emeterius and Chelidonius both decorum (...)
45This dichotomy invites us to question the Duchess’s pulchra nex (martyr-like death), as she addresses her executioner: “Pull, and pull strongly” (4.2.217). It seems that a “good death” is not the by-product of a noble upbringing, since the courtesan Julia also seems to experience it as she helps Bosola in her final moments. However, Julia’s pulchra nex is not fully realised, it is not a superba mors either, a splendid death under torture and pain.23 In the ars moriendi, martyr-like death is defined by images of perfect constancy in the face of pain, a theme Julia addresses as she mentions that the forced confession she extracted from the Cardinal is “[a] perfect triall of [her] constancy” (5.2.248).
46The insistence on constancy highlights the ambiguity of Julia’s character. Despite her unfaithfulness to Castruchio, Julia exhibits a form of constancy, albeit that of a liar, concealing her secret relationship with the Cardinal. Her line “never was occasion / For perfect triall of my constancy” (247-248) is itself a lie, as she betrays the Cardinal to side with Bosola. Thus, although Julia dies at the hands of the evil Cardinal, her death is far from martyr-like, as it is marked by lying and deceit. Her last words, unlike the Duchess’s, neither mention her husband nor her lover as if she had forgotten them. It seems evident that, in turn, she herself should be forgotten.
47In a final attempt at obtaining agency, Julia’s seducing of Bosola proves to be the reason for her demise. John Eric Marriott points out this specific characteristic of Webster’s female characters, and their need for self-fulfilment:
Though these representatives of power do not themselves live by the traditional morality, they make it the buttress for their own authority and admonish and expect the protagonists to live by it. The women themselves […] do not aim to subvert the social order but seek only self-fulfilment. (Marriott 77)
The portraits of the Cardinal and Julia show that patriarchal conventions are a matter of appearances rather than inner authenticity. The patriarchal power of the Aragonian brothers is but a superficial, imaginary force, a power of a political nature opposed to the real strength of mind that the female characters possess. By contrast, Julia and the Duchess make a good end, creating a contrasting mirror-effect with the pair of brothers, lost and forgotten in a blood bath.
48Forgetfulness and the ultimate erasure of one’s memory sharply contrast with the Duchess’s death which, despite its brutality, is portrayed with a sense of dignity and forgiveness. The Duchess’s final moments are imbued with a sense of calm acceptance and remembrance of her loved ones aligning with the medieval traditions of the Art of Dying. Webster’s depiction of these contrasting deaths reinforces the themes of memory and posterity. Julia’s deceitful life and inconsequential death highlight the consequences of a life lived without remembering one’s mortality. This thematic exploration demonstrates how one’s actions and character ultimately shape their remembrance – or lack thereof – after death.
49It is interesting to notice how Webster moves away from his source material, the story of Giovanna d’Aragona as told by William Painter in the Palace of Pleasure (1566). Both Julia and the Duchess, despite their respective sins and defiant attitudes, come to be seen as examples of moral integrity when facing death. From this dramatic choice of characterization, Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey draws the conclusion that “Webster positions the death of a female character as a crucial occasion for the reproduction of virtue, suggesting that he consistently employs a gendered type of monument, one that extols the deaths of worthy women as generators of spiritual renewal” (115). Women characters in The Duchess of Malfi – this is true of most of Webster’s female characters – do not follow a traditionally religious, chaste, and pious life. They rather uphold a “new” form of virtue which, at its core, is paradoxical, reconciling individual desires with the expectations of the community. They are “monumentalized” as the embodiments of those ambiguous moral values and examples of a personal relationship with morality (contrasting with the male character’s insistence on destructive dogma). The Duchess is glorified by Antonio and Delio in the play’s opening scene then later by Bosola and Ferdinand. By the end of the tragedy, the Art of Death enables the court of Malfi to replace an older, patriarchal (yet effeminate, plotting, secretive) regime with a monument to female spiritual strength (traditionally associated with masculine values) on the model of Christine de Pisan’s Cité des Dames – a move that makes The Duchess of Malfi a landmark in the ongoing Controversy over Women, as A. Crunelle Vanrigh has suggested:
La pièce est un monument à la Duchesse. Elle a toute raison de l’être si elle appartient à cette Querelle des femmes qui connaissait alors un regain de virulence avec l’arrivée sur le trône d’un roi misogyne. Chaque camp met en avant ses modèles et il est possible que Webster ait jugé que l’histoire de la Duchesse italienne justifiait qu’on fasse d’elle un exemple. (Crunelle Vanrigh §21)
Delio’s moral statement to make a noble use of “this great ruin” is aimed at the audience, and the story of the Duchess’s death supports a moral message transcending the story of the play, for the edification of Jacobean England. Presented with Bosola’s memento mori, the Duchess does not seek to defend her nobility, her “greatnes” and glory. Her acceptance of death is coupled with a stoic self-definition as she declares “I am Duchesse of Malfy still” (4.2.131). Yet, she is to become a ghost in Act 5, the embodiment of a post-death memory, unlike her seemingly forgotten first husband.
50By contrast, Julia’s death does not grant her any post-death presence. Unlike the Duchess, she seems to be forgotten, stuck in oblivion. Dying a mors improvisa, she does not die in contemplation and memory. Despite confessing her wrongdoings, she refuses to reflect on them: “’Tis weaknesse, / Too much to thinke what should have bin done” (5.2.279-280). As a result, her echo is no post-death memory but a mark of her inconstancy:
Cardinal. The onely way to make thee keepe my councell,
Is not to tell thee.
Julia. Tell your eccho this,
Or flatterers, that (like echoes) still report
What they heare (though most imperfect) and not me:
For, if that you be true unto your selfe,
I’ll know. (5.2.235-239)
“Tell” creates a mirror-effect in their shared line (235). Despite her claim that she is not like flatterers merely echoing the Cardinal’s words, Julia pointedly reports everything to Bosola, which makes her a metaphorical echo and an untrustworthy confessor. Her derogatory portrayal of the echo puts the Duchess’s into question: is her echoing voice meant to show how she lives in the minds of Antonio, Ferdinand, the Cardinal, and Bosola? Or is it on the contrary, illusory and deceitful, like Julia’s description of it, the mere fading remnants of the Duchess’s former grandeur?
51The ambiguity of the echo motif reflects the complex interplay of memory and legacy in the play. The Duchess’s echo could symbolize her enduring influence, her memory living on in the minds of those she impacted. Yet, it could also represent the hollowness of her once formidable presence, reduced to a mere sound devoid of substance. Act 5, Scene 3 begins by the presentation of the echo, which is defined as a memory of the dead Duchess, a “Thing of Sorrow” (24) that lives on after her murder: “I, wifes-voyce” (26). The echo’s repetitions give the impression of orders and warnings: “Doe not” (29), “Be mindfull of thy safety” (32), “O flye your fate” (35). These instances of performative speech are reminiscent of the tone of the Duchess, they suggest a higher status, reinforcing the interpretation that the echo is the spirit of the dead widow. The following exchange between Delio and Antonio is full of dramatic irony:
Delio. Harke: the dead stones seeme to have pitty on you
And give you good counsel.
Antonio. Eccho, I will not talke with thee;
For thou art a dead Thing.
Eccho. Thou art a dead Thing.
Antonio. My Dutchesse is asleepe now,
And her litle-Ones, I hope sweetly: oh God
Shall I never see her more?
Eccho. Never see her more.
Antonio. I mark’d not one repetition of the Eccho
But that: and on the sudden, a cleare light
Presented me a face folded in sorrow.
Delio. Your fancy, merely. (5.3.36-46)
Once we acknowledge the dramatic irony – the audience is aware of the Duchess’s death though Antonio is not – Antonio’s speech assumes an entirely new meaning: “My Duchess is asleepe now,” “Thou art a dead Thing.” The Duchess manifests herself as both an echo and a ghostly apparition (“a face folded in sorrow”) discredited by Delio as a product of Antonio’s imagination. Webster draws a metaphor between ruins and the Duchess, who is both a “dead Thing” and “dead stones.” The echo functions on multiple levels. On the one hand, it serves as a reminder of the Duchess’s struggle for agency and as a reminder of her fate, suggesting her memory persists despite attempts to erase it. On the other hand, it embodies the fragility of memory and legacy, hinting that what remains of her might only be a distorted, weakened version of her former self, just as Julia’s echo is a corrupted repetition of truth. Paradoxically, it could be said that, in the absence of Antonio, the Duchess is just like Bosola, a ruin yielding no echo. Webster’s use of the topos of ruins may be intended to show that oblivion is men’s common lot, be they nobles or commoners. The question is to determine whether the echo indicates the existence of memory and posterity, or whether it reinforces unavoidable oblivion after death.
52Despite our first impression, Webster’s relationship with the memory of the dead and, by extension, with posterity is ambiguous. Citing a critique of his slow output – his last play, Northward Ho! Was published in 1607 – in his address “To the Reader” in the first quarto of The White Devil (1612), he gives a contradictory response, to say the least:
I must answere them with that of Eurypides to Alcestides, a Tragicke Writer: Alcestides objecting that Eurypides had onely in three daies composed three verses, whereas himselfe had written three hundreth: Thou telst truth, (quoth he) but heres the difference, thine shall onely bee read for three daies, whereas mine shall continue three ages.
Detraction is the sworne friend to ignorance: For mine own part I have ever truly cherisht my good opinion of other mens worthy Labours. […] I know them so worthy, that though I rest silent in my owne worke, yet to most of theirs I dare (without flattery) fix that of Martiall. – non norunt, Haec monumenta mori. (140-141)
After comparing himself to Euripides and justifying his slowness by the timeless quality of his work, Webster balances his excess of hubris with conventional false humility, showcasing the works of his contemporaries. His words recall Bosola’s condemnation of symbols of power and nobility despite his own quest for riches and status. The same contradiction is found in the malcontent’s speech, as he attacks the preoccupation of Princes with posterity:
Most ambitiously: Princes images on their tombes, do not lie, as they were wont, seeming to pray up to heaven: but with their hands under their cheekes, (as if they died of the tooth-ache) they are not carved with their eies fix’d upon the starres; but as their mindes were wholy bent upon the world, the self-same way, they seeme to turne their faces. (144-149)
The prince’s tomb here is but one of the many analogies between the Duchess and monuments, and one that points in Webster’s New Characters to the archetype of the “ordinary widow” who remarries, unlike the “virtuous widow” who remains chaste and whose heart is a monument enclosing the memory of her dead husband:
[A vertuous Widdow] Is the Palme tree, that thrives not after the supplanting of her husband. […] No calamity can now come neere her, for in suffering the losse of her husband, shee accounts all the rest trifles: she hath laid his dead body in the worthyest monument that can be: Shee hath buried it in her own heart. To conclude, shee is a Relique, that without any superstition in the world, though she might not be kist, yet may be reverenc’t. (478)
The virtuous widow is tomb-like (“losse,” “dead,” “monument,” “buried,” “Relique”) and in a state of eternal immobility, unlike the ordinary widow described in terms of life, vitality and continuous change expressed in the chiasmus “The end of her husband beginnes in teares; and the end of her teares beginnes in a husband” (478). The virtuous widow has turned into a monument to her dead husband and her love life is over. The Duchess does not fit this definition, as she makes it plain to Antonio:
What is’t distracts you? […] This is flesh and blood, sir;
’Tis not the figure cut in alabaster
Kneels at my husband’s tomb. (1.1.443-445)
- 24 “A widow must be a mourner; and she that is not, cannot so well secure the chastity of her proper s (...)
The Duchess’s corporality is opposed to her duty as a widow: she refuses to be associated with death, defining herself in opposition to the image of the monument.24 The reference to “alabaster” contrasts with the organic metaphors from the realm of plants often used to describe the play’s characters: women are “a bark / Made of so slight weak bulrush” (2.5.34-35); Antonio and the Duchess wish to be like “the loving palms, […] That never bore fruit divided” (1.1.469-471) and their cross-class union is termed “grafting” (2.1.139). A diptych is created between a landscape of death, chastity and spiritual purity on the one hand and carnal, sensual, possibly sinful life on the other, a sensuality the Duchess explores along gender lines:
Why should onely I,
Of all the other Princes of the World,
Be cas’de-up, like a holy Relique? I have youth,
And a litle beautie. (3.2.137-140)
Borrowing the image of the “Relique” from the description of the virtuous widow in New Characters, she questions the demands imposed on female, not male aristocrats.
53The Duchess’s widowhood announces her tragic fate from the beginning. As a widow, she is expected to keep the memory of her husband alive, effectively becoming a monument to him. Despite her struggle for agency, the Duchess eventually transforms into an echo of herself, perpetuating a contaminating cycle where remembrance triggers death, leading to her becoming a memory – first metaphorically, then literally. A few moments before she is executed, she sees her efforts come to naught. The exchange with Cariola confirms her destiny:
Duchess. Who do I looke like now?
Cariola. Like to your picture in the gallery,
A deale of life in shew, but none in practise:
Or rather some reverend monument
Whose ruins are even pittied. (4.2.30-34)
The Duchess’s role as a widow forces her into a static position of remembrance, suggesting that any attempt to break free from this role is futile and doomed to failure. This realization underscores the theme of memory and its oppressive power. Even as the Duchess refuses to become a monument, a living memory, she is made to come to a realisation that she has become one in the shape of a painting. Her journey through the play is a transformation from “flesh and blood” to a memory, whether as monument, painting, or ruin.
54The Duchess gets to live after death, and yet is marked by death from the very beginning. “Memory” is a dubious mechanism. It seems to be the key to an afterlife, for becoming a memory suggests access to a form of transcendence and becoming a monument is akin to living through other people’s recollections. If so, then, why does the Duchess escape Bosola’s view of death as a silent, barren landscape? The malcontent is critical of post-death memory: “We are onely like dead wals, or vaulted graves, / That ruin’d, yieldes no eccho” (5.5.96-97). According to him, memory is non-existent, an illusion, a semblance of transcendence to be quickly eclipsed by the carnage of the final Act. While Delio is designated, like Horatio in Hamlet, as the keeper of memory, re-telling the story of events, the same cannot be said of the Duchess’s “monumental” function. Webster may have been intent on highlighting a gendered connection to memory. As Chalk puts it:
The echo functions in the play much in the same way that monuments do: just as monuments are meant to compensate for the loss of the dead that they represent, the echo creates the impression that some form of posthumous communication is possible. But what Antonio hears is the reverberation of his own voice returning back to him in distorted form. […] Webster constantly calls our attention to the fact that although monuments purport to speak for the dead, they are much more likely to reflect the needs of the living. (Chalk 399-400)
The female protagonist was to act as a monument for someone, whether to honour her first husband, or to respond to Antonio’s plea, “Shall I never see her more?,” to which the echo responds “Never see her more” (5.3.42-43). Post-death memory, although a mere illusion that serves only the living, is what drives the plot to its bloody, violent end: the memory of the Duchess’s first husband drives the brothers’ plan to have her executed, that of the Duchess moves Bosola to seek revenge. The female echo is actually a voice given to Antonio’s male thoughts; there is no proper recollection of the Duchess after her death, only masculine projections of what she would say or wish to say. She is Duchess of Malfi no more.