Abstract
‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle’, said Blake, ‘than nurse unacted desires.’1 Webster would have agreed. More important, he would have understood. In The Devil’s Law-Case — an uninspired play by Webster’s standards or anyone else’s — the darker purposes of art repeatedly spill out as discursive thought. On one such occasion Leonora, having been told that the man she craves is dead, breaks into an oddly philosophical moan: ‘There is no plague i’th’ world can be compared / To impossible desire’ (3.3.236-7). Here Webster is no match for Blake: instead of the choice between hateful contraries, the one shockingly concrete and the other evasively abstract, he is content to announce his character’s feelings as if they were a generally binding principle. At his best — which is where he is in The Duchess of Malfi — Webster can be spectacularly better than this: ‘Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young’ (4.2.264). Spoken by Ferdinand as he looks down at his sister’s corpse, this line is fat with whatever it is that he’s been nursing inside himself. Impossible desire is still a principle, but not a slogan; you have to infer it from the guilt in Ferdinand’s eyes.
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Notes
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (1957; London: Oxford University Press, 1966) 152.
Henry Fitzjeffrey, Satyres and Satyricall Epigrams (London, 1617) F6v.
See R.W. Dent, John Webster’s Borrowing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960) 10, who believes it ‘extremely probable’ that Webster’s writing exhibits ‘a density of borrowings unrivalled in English literature ’.
Dena Goldberg “By Report”: the Spectator as Voyeur in Webster’s The White Devil’, English Literary Renaissance 17 (1987): 71.
See Geoffrey Chaucer, The Knight’s Tale (1. 1761), The Merchant’s Tale (1. 1986), The Squire’s Tale (1. 479), and The Legend of Good Women (Prologue F, 1. 503), in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson, 2nd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957) 34, 122, 132, 494.
The spectators too are obliged to pass judgement on Vittoria; as Catherine Belsey remarks, ‘The problem for the audience is not what Vittoria has done. That has been established in I.ii. The question is rather what she is.’ See The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985) 162.
Edmund Wilson, Europe without Baedeker: Sketches among the Ruins of Italy, Greece and England (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1947) 11–12.
‘The Duchess of Malfi (Haymarket)’, Punch 2 May 1945: 382.
‘The Duchess of Malfi’, New Statesman 28 April 1945: 271.
Frank Whigham has posed an ingenious answer to this question, based on the view that Ferdinand is, above all else, a ‘threatened aristocrat’; what appears to be incestuous desire is therefore a form of endogamy, a desire for purity pushed far enough to express itself as ‘hysterical compensation ’. See ‘Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi’, PMLA 100 (1985): 169–70. I agree with Richard A. McCabe, who finds this view ‘unduly prescriptive’; it’s more plausible, McCabe argues, that politics (aristocratic posturing) is repressed sexuality (incest fantasies) than the other way round: ‘The point, I think, is that Ferdinand is not representative of any class or social outlook, but remains imprisoned within his own private melancholy.’ See Incest, Drama and Nature’s Law: 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 251–2. Lynn Enterline, in a sustained Lacanian reading of Ferdinand’s narcissistic involvement with his sister, restores the sexual tension implicit in Ferdinand’s language to its defining place in this relationship: ‘The notoriously lurid and excessive quality of Webster’s sexual imagery prevents it from being exhausted by explanations that turn to other areas of contemporary social conflict.’ See “Hairy on the In-side”: The Duchess of Malfi and the Body of Lycanthropy’, Yale Journal of Criticism 7 (Fall 1994): 92.
The Cheek by Jowl production (1996) was a case in point: according to John Peter, Scott Handy played Ferdinand with ‘a hint ... of greedy adolescent incest’; see ‘Keep it in the Family’, Sunday Times 7 January 1996: 10.19. Indeed, in my view there was more than just a hint of incest in their relationship; disconcertingly, the Duchess (played by Anastasia Hille) seemed fully aware of Ferdinand’s erotic obsession, and at times used gestures or extra-textual whimpers to suggest that the sexual attraction was mutual and reciprocal.
The legal conventions governing marriages performed ‘Per verba de presenti’ (1.1.479) are outlined by Ernest Schanzer in ‘The Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Survey 13 (1960): 81–9; the context of social attitudes is the subject of Frank W. Wadsworth’s article, ‘Webster’s Duchess of Malfi in the Light of Some Contemporary Ideas on Marriage and Remarriage’, Philological Quarterly 35 (1956): 397–407; the critical issues raised by the unusual status of this marriage are intelligently reviewed by Charles R. Forker, Skull beneath the Skin: the Achievement ofJohn Webster (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986) 297–302.
Linda Woodbridge admires this scene for its ‘sane naturalness’ as demonstrated by ‘the easy banter and mutual teasing about sex’; see Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984) 260. Christina Luckyj praises ‘the playful intimacy of the bedroom scene’ and describes some of the ways in which modern productions have simulated this mood in A Winter’s Snake: Dramatic Form in the Tragedies of John Webster (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989) 20, 24. Edward Pechter remarks on the ‘quiet and relaxed intimacy’ of the scene in What Was Shakespeare? Renaissance Plays and Changing Critical Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) 100.
G. Wilson Knight, ‘The Duchess of Malfi’, The Malahat Review 4 (October 1967): 88–9.
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© 2003 Ronald Huebert
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Huebert, R. (2003). Impossible Desire: John Webster. In: The Performance of Pleasure in English Renaissance Drama. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503168_6
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