Abstract
This chapter examines the intersection of magic, wax, and other forms of art in relation to John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and John Donne’s Sappho to Philaenis. Both of these texts imagine that wax art might have a particular power to impact a subject. In The Duchess of Malfi, Ferdinand uses wax tableaux of corpses to torture his sister and she, in turn, understands the impact of that display through both magic and art. While in Sappho to Philaenis, Sappho attempts to draw Philaenis’s back to her through enchanting power of verse, which also might be understood as kind of wax art.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006.
Akarloo, Bengt, and Stuart Clark, ed. Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Period of the Witch Trials. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Aristotle. “On the Soul.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, edited by Jonathan Barnes, Vol. 1, 641–92. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1994.
Bailey, Michael D. “The Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European Witchcraft Literature.” The American Historical Review 111, no. 2 (2006): 383–404.
Bergeron, David. “The Restoration of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale.” In Shakespeare’s Romances Reconsidered, edited by Carol Mcginnis Kay and Henry E. Jacobs. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
Bergeron, David M. “The Wax Figures in The Duchess of Malfi.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 18, no. 2 (1978): 331–39.
Blank, Paula. “Comparing Sappho to Philaenis: John Donne’s ‘Homopoetics.’” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 110, no. 3 (May 1995): 358–68.
Boschini, Marco. “Ricche Minere Della Pittura Veneziana.” In Italy and Spain, 1600–1750: Sources and Documents; Compiled and Translated from the Italian and Spanish by Robert Enggass, Jonathan Brown, edited by Robert Enggass and Jonathan Brown, 51–54. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970.
———. Le ricche minere della pittura veneziana. Venice: Appresso Francesco Nicolini, 1674.
Burton, Richard. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Oxford, 1638.
Cassirer, Ernst. The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. Translated by Mario Damandi. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963.
Chalk, Brian. “Webster’s ‘Worthyest Monument’: The Problem of Posterity in The Duchess of Malfi.” Studies in Philology 108, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 379–402.
Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Collins, David J., ed., The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Descartes, René. “Regulae ad directionem ingenii.” In Oeuvres de Descartes, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, Vol. 10. Paris: L. Cerf, 1897.
———. “Rules for the Direction of the Mind.” In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, edited by John Cottingham, Dugald Murdoch, and Robert Stoothoff, Vol. 1, 7–78. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Diehl, Huston. Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Donne, John. “The Ecstasy.” In The Major Works, edited by John Cary, 121–22. Oxford and New York: Oxford World Classics, 1990.
———. “Sappho to Philaenis.” In The Major Works, edited by John Cary, 65–67. Oxford and New York: Oxford World Classics, 1990.
Edwards, Kathryn A. “Introduction: What Makes Magic Everyday Magic.” In Everyday Magic in Early Modern Europe, edited by Kathryn A. Edwards, 1–10. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016.
Enterline, Lynn. The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing. 1 edition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Halberstam, J. Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. 1st US Edition 1st Printing edition. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–82. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Harvey, Elizabeth D. Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts. London: Routledge, 1992.
Hirsch, Brett. “Three Wax Images, Two Italian Gentlemen, and One English Queen.” In Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage, edited by Lisa Hopkins and Helen Ostovitch, 155–68. London: Routledge, 2014.
Holstun, James. “‘Will You Rent Our Ancient Love Asunder?’ Lesbian Elegy in Donne, Marvell, and Milton.” ELH 54, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 835–67.
Howarth, R. G. “Webster’s Vincentio Lauriola.” Notes and Queries 2 (1955): 99–100.
Kamerick, Kathleen. “Shaping Superstition in Late Medieval England.” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 3, no. 1 (2008): 29–53.
Kellaway, Jean. The History of Torture and Execution: From Early Civilization Through Medieval Times to the Present. 1st edition. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2002.
Levack, Brian P., ed., The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Lyne, Raphael. “Lyrical Wax in Ovid, Marlowe, and Donne.” In Ovid and the Renaissance Body, edited by Goran V. Stanivukovic, 191–206. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
Mann, Jenny C. “Marlowe’s ‘Slack Muse’: All Ovids Elegies and an English Poetics of Softness.” Modern Philology: Critical and Historical Studies in Literature, Medieval Through Contemporary 113, no. 1 (August 2015): 49–65.
Maxwell, Lynn. “Wax Magic and The Duchess of Malfi.” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2014): 31–36.
Meakin, Heather L. John Donne’s Articulations of the Feminine. 1st edition. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1999.
Mueller, Janel. “Troping Utopia: Donne’s Brief for Lesbianism.” In Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, edited by James Grantham Turner, 182–207. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Neill, Michael. Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Nunn, Hillary M. Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Edited by E. J. Kenney. Translated by A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
———. Ovid III: Metamorphoses, Books I–VIII. Edited by G. P. Goold. Translated by Frank Justus Miller. 3rd edition. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
———. Ovid IV: Metamorphoses, Books IX–XV. Edited by G. P. Goold. Translated by Frank Justus Miller. Subsequent edition. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916.
Owens, Margaret E. “John Webster, Tussaud Laureate: The Waxworks in The Duchess of Malfi.” ELH 79, no. 4 (n.d.): 851–77.
Quintilian. Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory; or, Education of an Orator. Translated by John Selby Watson. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1875.
———. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian. Translated by Harold Edgeworth Butler. Vol. 4. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920.
Rowe, Katherine. Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. 1 edition. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1987.
Shakespeare, William. “The Sonnets and ‘A Lover’s Complaint.’” In The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus, 1915–90. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
Shannon, Laurie. “Nature’s Bias: Renaissance Homonormativity and Elizabethan Comic Likeness.” Modern Philology: A Journal Devoted to Research in Medieval and Modern Literature 98, no. 2 (November 2000): 183–210.
Sidney, Philip. “Astrophil and Stella.” In Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones, Reissue edition, 153–211. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Traub, Valerie. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Tricomi, Albert. “Historicizing the Imagery of the Demonic in The Duchess of Malfi.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34, no. 2 (2004): 345–72.
Vasari, Giorgio. Vasari on Technique. Being the Introduction to the Three Arts of Design, Architecture, Sculpture and Painting, Prefixed to the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Edited by G. Baldwin Brown. Translated by Louisa Maclehose. New York: Dover Publications, 1960.
———. Le Vite de’ Piu Eccellenti Pittori Scultori e Architettori. Vol. 1. 6 vols. Florence, 1568.
Webster, John. “The Duchess of Malfi.” In The Duchess of Malfi and Other Plays, edited by Rene Weiss. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Maxwell, L.M. (2019). Wax Arts: Projects of Transformation in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Donne’s Sappho to Philaenis. In: Wax Impressions, Figures, and Forms in Early Modern Literature. Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16932-9_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16932-9_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-16931-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-16932-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)