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Medea’s Fractured Self on the Jacobean Stage: Webster’s Duchess of Malfi as a Case Study in Renaissance Readership

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Fig. 1
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Notes

  1. Discussed below. Quotations come from Brian Gibbons, The Duchess of Malfi, London, 2001 and John Fitch’s 2002 Loeb text of the Medea, though all Latin translations are my own. Works widely cited include G. Boklund, The Duchess of Malfi, Cambridge, 1962; A. J. Boyle, Tragic Seneca: An Essay in the Theatrical Tradition, London, 1997; G. Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege, New Haven, 1985; D. Callaghan, Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy: A Study of King Lear, Othello, The Duchess of Malfi, and The White Devil, New York, 1989; R. Dent, John Webster’s Borrowing, Berkeley, 1960; T. Jankowski, ‘Defining/Confining the Duchess: Negotiating the Female Body in John Webster’s “The Duchess of Malfi”’, Studies in Philology 87: 2, 1990, pp. 221–45, and Women in Power in the Early Modern Drama, Urbana, 1992; E. Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare, Oxford, 1977; M. Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy, Oxford, 1997; J. Peterson, Curs’d Example: The Duchess of Malfi and Commonweal Tragedy, Columbia, MO, 1978; T. Pollard, ‘What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?’, Renaissance Quarterly, 65: 4, December 2012, pp. 1060–93; and F. Whigham, ‘Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi’, PMLA 100.2, 1985, pp. 167–86.

  2. The title page of the first edition (1623, fig. 1) states that it was first performed privately at Blackfriars, then publicly at the Globe, though the dates are debatable; it was certainly performed at Blackfriars by December 1614, and perhaps as early as 1612. See R. Barker, ‘The Duchess High and Low: A Performance History of The Duchess of Malfi’, in The Duchess of Malfi: A Critical Guide, ed. C. Luckyj, New York, 2011, pp. 42–65, and K. McLuskie and J. Uglow, ‘Introduction’, Plays in Performance: The Duchess of Malfi, Bristol, 1989, pp. 1-65 for the play’s performance history.

  3. The plays have much else in common beyond the scope of this study, including a concern for honour and monumentalization; crossed kinship boundaries, fratricide and infanticide; and power and hypocrisy.

  4. Braden, Anger’s Privilege, pp. 69-70 observes this change in scholarly fashion, with some qualifications and caveats about the project of detecting Senecan influence.

  5. This study is loosely informed by examinations of exemplarity in the Renaissance as well as the Roman world: see T. Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature, Ithaca, 1990; F. Rigolot, ‘The Renaissance Crisis of Exemplarity’, Journal of the History of Ideas 59:4, 1998, pp. 557–63; M. Roller, ‘Exemplarity in Roman Culture: The Cases of Horatius Cocles and Cloelia’, Classical Philology, 99: 1, 2004, pp. 1-56; and S. Bell and I. Hansen, Role Models in the Roman World: Identity and Assimilation, Ann Arbor, 2008.

  6. Dent, Borrowing (n. 1 above), p. 44. The quotation is from Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella 74.8; see Dent, p. 8.

  7. For instance, he notes only six examples of Webster’s allusion to Vergil, all specifically verbal and often in Latin, though over thirty to Seneca; ibid., pp. 322-23.

  8. E. Shellist, ‘John Webster’, in A Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur F. Kinney, Oxford, pp. 553-66 (565n2), notes that Webster’s ‘supposed lack of ability in the classical languages’ is ‘mere conjecture,’ based on little more than his use of a commonplace book and the appearance of some of his Latin quotations in other authors.

  9. Webster also reveals some familiarity with Greek authors like Aesop and Plutarch, and makes occasional more limited reference to Homer, Xenophon, Plato, Lucian, and the Greek tragedians.

  10. As the son of a freeman of the company, Webster likely entered the school in 1588-89, and was certainly admitted to the Middle Temple from the New Inn in 1598; cf. Shellist, ‘John Webster’ (n. 8 above). In one documented exercise at the Merchant Taylors’ School, the headmaster would read out a random passage of Cicero: students would then transcribe the Latin passage and translate it into English, ancient Greek, and Latin verse. They would repeat the exercise in the afternoon, but for Greek. For a general overview of Renaissance education, cf. J. Brink, ‘Literacy and Education,’ in A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway, Oxford, 2010, pp. 27-37.

  11. Braden, Anger’s Privilege, pp. 99–114 overviews Seneca’s rich influence on Renaissance thought, though he notes the difficulty of tracing direct verbal allusions (69–70) and warns that ‘it has proved hard to make a case for [Seneca’s plays’] really widespread influence even at less visible levels’ (171). Cf. also J. Cunliffe, Early English Classical Tragedies, Oxford, 1912; T. S. Eliot, Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca, London, 1927; E. Waith, Ideas of Greatness: Heroic Drama in England, New York, 1971; R. Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome, Cambridge, 1983, and ‘Early Modern Antigones: Receptions, Refractions, Replays,’ in Classical Receptions Journal 6.2, 2013, pp. 221-44; and, recently, L. Helms, Seneca by Candlelight and Other Stories of Renaissance Drama, Philadelphia, 1997; R. Bushnell, ‘The Fall of Princes: The Classical and Medieval Roots of English Renaissance Tragedy,’ in A Companion to Tragedy, ed. Rebecca Bushnell, Malden, MA, 2005, pp. 289–306; and H. Norland, Neoclassical Tragedy in Elizabethan England, Newark, DE, 2009. I discuss available editions and translations at n. 24 below.

  12. Untranslated sources include Erasmus’ Adagia. Cf. Dent, Borrowing (n. 1 above), p. 174.

  13. L. Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade, Cambridge, 2013.

  14. T. Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England, Cambridge, 2009, p. 54.

  15. Cf. Stern, ibid., pp. 36-62, for title pages and bills; she cites at p. 53 an example from Barten Holyday’s Technogamia (1618), 1.7 (‘If there be any Gentleman, that, for the accomplishing of his natural indowments, intertaynes a desire of learning the languages…’).

  16. Cf. J. McManaway, ‘Latin Title-Page Mottoes as a Clue to Dramatic Authorship’, Library 26, 1945, pp. 28–36 and Erne, Book Trade (n. 13 above), pp. 93-101 for title pages and Latin epigraphs.

  17. Barker, ‘The Duchess High and Low’ (n. 2 above), p. 42; cf. also D. Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, Cambridge, 2001; Stern (n. 14 above); and Erne (n. 13 above) for book production.

  18. E.g., B. Gibbons, Shakespeare and Multiplicity, Cambridge, 2006.

  19. John Lowin and Richard Burbage, respectively; John Taylor supplanted the latter in a later revival. Barker, ‘The Duchess High and Low’ (n. 2 above), p. 45 observes that one might expect these celebrated actors ‘to have overpowered the pubescent apprentice who played the Duchess.’

  20. It appears likely that this plot twist is a Euripidean innovation; for a full account of the mythological variants and their evolution, see D. Mastronarde, Euripides’ Medea, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 44–70, and A. J. Boyle, Seneca: Medea, Oxford, 2014, lxi-lxxviii.

  21. H. Foley, ‘Medea’s divided self’, Classical Antiquity, 8, 1989, pp. 61–85 provides the classic analysis of Euripidean Medea’s self-division; C. Gill, ‘Two monologues of self-division: Euripides, Medea 1021-80 and Seneca, Medea 893-977’, Homo Viator: Classical Essays for J. Bramble, Bristol, 1987, pp. 25–37, links it with Senecan Medea’s. For the general reception of Euripides’s Medea, cf. J. Clauss and S. Johnson, Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art, Princeton, 1997. Its influence on Dido via Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica has been well established: cf. D. H. Abel, ‘Medea in Dido’, Classical Bulletin, 34, 1958, pp. 51–53; C. Collard, ‘Medea and Dido’, Prometheus, 1, 1975, pp. 131–51; A. Schiesaro, ‘Furthest voices in Virgil’s Dido’, Studi italiani di filologia classica, 4, 2008, pp. 60–109; and especially Y. Baraz, ‘Euripides’ Corinthian princess in the « Aeneid »’, Classical Philology, 104: 3, 2009, pp. 317–30. Studies of Senecan Medea’s relationship with Euripides include J. Barnes, ‘The relative privileging of baroque and classic structures in Euripides and Seneca’, Text and Presentation, 15, 1994, pp. 11–18; C. Blitzen, ‘The Senecan and Euripidean Medea. A comparison’, Classical Bulletin, 52, 1976, pp. 86–90; R. Johnson, ‘Medea nunc sum: the close of Seneca’s version’, Language and the Tragic Hero, ed. P. Pucci, 1988, pp. 85–101; S. Ohlander, Dramatic Suspense in Euripides’ and Seneca’s Medea, Ann Arbor, 1985; E. Cidre, ‘Los lechos en la « Medea » de Séneca’, Faventia, 23: 2, 2001, pp. 9–23; and H. Roisman, ‘Women in Senecan tragedy’, Scholia, 14, 2005, pp. 72–88. For more general treatment of Senecan tragedy’s relationship with Euripides and Augustan literature, cf. R. Tarrant, ‘Senecan Drama and Its Antecedents’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 82 (1978), pp. 213-63. Ovid, too, wrote a tragedy on Medea, now lost, though praised by the ancients (Tacitus, Dial. 12.5; Quintilian, Inst. 10.1.98; Lucan, too, was reputed to have written a Medea play). His portrait of her in Metamorphoses 7 as a sorceress fond of dismembering and rejuvenating bodies was influential, as was his more sympathetic treatment of her in Heroides 12 as a victim of love for Jason. For the Heroides in Renaissance England, cf. S. Wiseman and A. Thorne, ‘The Rhetoric of Complaint: Ovid’s Heroides in the Renaissance and Restoration’, Renaissance Studies, 22: 3, June 2008, pp. 295–432.

  22. Pollard, ‘Hecuba’, pp. 1064–65 (n. 1 above). Pollard’s discussion of Hecuba as a model for feminine tragic heroism reapplies in many particulars to Medea, who along with Atreus takes a similar pleasure in successful revenge. Most scholars continue to envision an indirect if nonetheless rich relationship between Greek and early modern tragedy; cf. Miola (n. 11 above) on the translation and transmission history of Sophocles’s Antigone. For other studies of Greek tragic influence on the English stage, cf. Jones, Origins (n. 1 above); L. Schleiner, ‘Latinized Greek Drama in Shakespeare’s Writing of Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 41: 1, Spring 1990, pp. 29–48; S. Dewar-Watson, ‘The Alcestis and the Statue Scene in The Winter’s Tale’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 60: 1, Spring 2009, pp. 73–80; and S. Dewar-Watson, ‘Jocasta: “A Tragedie Written in Greeke”’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 17: 1, March 2010, pp. 22–32.

  23. By the end of the sixteenth century, thirty editions of Seneca’s plays had been published in Germany, Holland, Italy, France, and England alone, and verse translations were available in Italian, French, and English (Boyle, Seneca: Medea, n. 20 above, p. cxxv, n. 278); in addition, many florilegia included selections from Seneca (cf., e.g., J. Cohon, Seneca’s Tragedies in Florilegia and Elizabethan Drama, unpublished doctoral thesis, Columbia University, 1960). Webster may well have known John Studley’s English translation of the Medea, which first appeared in a 1566 octavo and was reprinted in Newton’s 1581 quarto collection Seneca His Tenne Tragedies (reprinted, Bloomington, Indiana, 1964; cf. also Don Share, Seneca in English, London, 1998). However, Duchess’ depth of engagement with rhetorical and structural aspects of Seneca’s play that are somewhat obscured in Studley’s version suggest direct access to the Latin.

    To determine which edition Webster may have used is more difficult. J. Ker and J. Winston, in Elizabethan Seneca: Three Tragedies, London, 2012, note that the Inns of Court were a ‘hub of a large network of translators, who sought to render classical and continental works into English’ (p. 37). They note that Elizabethan writers relied on the A branch of the Senecan tragic manuscript tradition, which, though less reliable than the E recension favored by modern editors, is the only one to include the Octavia; this helped politicize Seneca’s whole dramatic corpus in the eyes of Renaissance readers (p. 280). Illuminating for this study is Jasper Heywood’s complaint, in his preface to Thyestes (1560), about errors in the Latin editions of Gryphius (1541), the Aldine text of Jerome Avantius (1517), and a version he terms ‘Colineus’ (perhaps Rudolphus Collinus, Simon de Colines, or an invention). Heywood claims to have solved these by directly consulting a manuscript, likely at Oxford, but nonetheless follows Gryphius’ edition very closely (p. 280). His preface documents the availability of multiple Latin editions in England. It may also point to the Gryphian edition’s dominance until Thomas Farnaby’s 1613 Latin edition and commentary. There is an intriguing if remote possibility that Webster consulted Farnaby’s edition. Farnaby (1575-1647), who ran a successful school in Cripplegate, printed his edition with Felix Kingston at Paternoster Row, very close to Webster’s own bookseller at St Paul’s churchyard (fig. 1). While the dates make it unlikely that Webster consulted Farnaby’s edition while writing Duchess for the stage, he may well have seen it as he revised the play before its 1623 printing. Farnaby’s edition certainly attests to continuing interest in Seneca’s tragedies in London at this cultural moment.

    Senecan influence on the early modern stage is documented in J. Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy, Hamden, Connecticut, 1965, and Boyle, Seneca: Medea (n. 20 above), pp. cxix-cxli, with a long list of medieval to modern plays showing Medea’s influence. Boyle rightly observes that the modern question as to whether Seneca’s plays were performed in antiquity would never have occurred to Renaissance readers. J. Winston, ‘Seneca in Early Elizabethan England’, Renaissance Quarterly 59: 1 (2006), 29-58 documents Seneca’s particular association with the Inns of Court, while Smith, ‘Plays performed in Cambridge colleges before 1585’, in Fasciculus Ioanni Willis Clark dicatus, Cambridge, 1909, pp. 265-73 (267-70), identifies performances of Seneca’s Latin play in Cambridge.

  24. M. Silk, ‘Shakespeare and Greek Tragedy: Strange Relationship’, in Shakespeare and the Classics, eds. C. Martindale and A. B. Taylor, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 241–57 has similarly argued for an affinity between Shakespeare and Greek tragedy without claiming a direct line of reception. See also L. Cooper, The Poetics of Aristotle, Boston, 1923, p. 134 and Pollard, ‘Hecuba’, p. 1076 n. 73 (n. 1 above).

  25. See Braden, Anger’s Privilege, and T. Rosenmeyer, Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology, Berkeley, 1989. For Seneca’s split selves, cf. Ker and Winston, Elizabethan Seneca (n. 23 above), 4-15, and J. Ker, ‘Seneca, Man of Many Genres’, in Seeing Seneca Whole: Perspectives on Philosophy, Poetry and Politics, ed. K. Volk and G. Williams, Leiden, 2006, pp. 19-41.

  26. See M. Nussbaum, ‘Serpents in the Soul: A Reading of Seneca’s Medea’, in Medea: Essays n. 21 above), pp. 219–49, and Braden, Anger’s Privilege (n. 1 above), pp. 33-34.

  27. Boyle, Tragic Seneca (n. 1 above), pp. 167-92, notes an uptick in female tragic protagonists after Elizabeth’s death, expressing ‘male anxieties about control, death, mutability and power’ (p. 173). In Seneca: Medea (n. 20 above), pp. cxix-cxli, Boyle also surveys the Medea’s reception history from antiquity to the present day. He argues for this play’s special importance to Renaissance revenge tragedy for its theatricality and ‘existential’ use of violence ‘in the construction and fixing of the self’ (p. cxxvi). For early modern Medeas specifically, cf. D. Purkiss, ‘Medea in the English Renaissance’, in Medea in Performance 1500-2000, ed. E. Hall, F. Macintosh, and O. Taplin, Oxford, 2000, pp. 32-48.

  28. Fantham, ‘Virgil’s Dido and Seneca’s tragic heroines’, Greece and Rome, 22, 1975, pp. 1-10, C. Littlewood, Self-Representation and Illusion in Senecan Tragedy, Oxford, 2004, p. 152, and Boyle, Seneca: Medea (ibid.), p. lxxxix, n. 184, discuss Dido’s influence on Senecan tragedy including the Medea. Gill, ‘Two monologues’ (n. 21 above), studies such characters’ surrender to passion and madness within Roman poetry.

  29. This study complements L. Woodbridge’s analysis of the Duchess as a ‘hero of desire,’ in The Female Tragic Hero in the Renaissance, ed. N. Liebler, Basingstoke, 2002, pp. 161–84.

  30. For Medea’s quasi-divine status specifically, cf. C. Walde, ‘Senecas Medea: Göttin wider Willen?’, Mythische Wiederkehr, ed. B. Zimmermann, Rommbach, 2009, pp. 167–98. In a parody of Stoic thought, Ovid had emphasized this quality even before Seneca; the Medea of his Metamorphoses declares, ‘The greatest god is within me’ (‘maximus intra me deus est,’ 7.55). See discussion and fig. 3 below for her vehicle of escape.

  31. D. Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton, Princeton, 1993 explores the issue of genre ambivalence surrounding the figure of Dido; cf. also M. Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid, Minneapolis, 1994 and R. Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 154–69. Early modern receptions of Vergil include the full-length translations of Gavin Douglas (1513, pub. 1553) and the Thomases Phaer and Twyne (1558-1584) along with Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (1587-93). Of the immense bibliography on this subject, see especially C. Kallendorf, The Other Virgil: `Pessimistic’ Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture, Oxford, 2007, and D. Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, Cambridge, 2010.

  32. Neill, Death (n. 1 above), p. 330; see also R. Ornstein, ‘Moral Vision in The Duchess of Malfi’, in Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Duchess of Malfi, ed. N. Rabkin, Englewood Cliffs, NY, 1987, p. 65.

  33. This type of twinning, discussed below, also characterizes more overtly Senecan dramas like Titus Andronicus, whose structure shows classical debts. Cf. Jones, Origins (n. 1 above), pp. 85-107, for its links with Euripides’s Hecuba.

  34. Sometimes spelled Paynter. For other sources see especially Boklund, Duchess.

  35. Painter tends to mention but eschew classical examples through praeteritio in prominent places throughout his tale (e.g. 170r-v, 185v).

  36. This alludes to Ovid’s story of the sculptor in Metamorphoses 10, but perhaps also indirectly to Dido, whose brother was named Pygmalion (Aen. 1.346-52); see below. The Duchess’s sleepless nights, concern for reputation, and flame-like passions recall Dido’s symptoms of love at Aen. 4.1-89.

  37. The specific context of this latter quotation, during Aeneas’s flight from Carthage, is relevant: Aeneas sees smoke on the horizon but does not realize that the abandoned queen has killed herself on a pyre. This resonates with the flame imagery Painter uses as he recounts the Duchess’s own profligate and self-destructive love.

  38. Painter clearly draws from Vergil’s allegorical personification: ‘And it suffised not that the brute was noised through Naples, but that the sound flew further off. As eche man doth know that rumor hath many mouthes, who with the multitude of his tongues and Trumps, proclaimeth in diuers and sundry places, the things which chaunce in al the regions of the earth’ (180v-181r).

  39. The Duchess’s comparison of these flames to those of ‘mount Gibel’ (Aetna) also indicates some contaminatio with Ovid’s Met. 13.867-69, a classic case of Ovidian generic mixing well analyzed by J. Farrell, ‘Dialogue of Genres in Ovid’s “Lovesong of Polyphemus” (Metamorphoses 13.719-897)’, The American Journal of Philology, 113: 2, 1992, pp. 235-68 (235). Here, the Cyclops Polyphemus compares his passion for the sea-nymph Galatea to the flames that spew from this nearby volcano. Painter’s recollection of this passage may suggest the monstrousness of the Duchess’s love, the similarly insurmountable divide between her and Antonio (here, one of class rather than habitat), and the eventual slide of the Duchess’s pastoral fantasy into tragedy due to her inappropriate greatness (here, of lineage rather than size).

  40. As D. Callaghan observes, ‘The category of woman in the English Renaissance is … a category in crisis; a crisis which achieves some symbolic resolution in the narrative closures of Renaissance tragedy, but only at the cost of betraying the contradictions which in fact constitute such closure’ (Woman, n. 1 above, p. 172). Peterson’s entire 1978 book is inspired by her reading of the line ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’ as deeply ironic (vii) and emphasizes the Duchess’s culpability. E. Allman, Jacobean Revenge Tragedy and the Politics of Virtue, Newark, 1999, by contrast, regards this play as expressing nostalgia for the female rulership of Elizabeth; cf. also L. Tosi, ‘Mirrors for Female Rulers: Elizabeth I and the Duchess of Malfi’, in Representations of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Culture, New York, 2011, pp. 257–75. For other approaches to the problematic status of Jacobean women on stage, cf. Callaghan, Woman; Jankowski, ‘Defining’ and Women, pp. 147-88; and Whigham, ‘Social Mobility,’ all in n. 1 above; K. McLuskie, ‘Drama and sexual politics: the case of Webster's Duchess,’ in Drama, Sex, and Politics, ed. J. Redmond, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 77-91; C. Luckyj, ‘“Great Women of Pleasure”: Main Plot and Subplot in The Duchess of Malfi’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 27: 2, 1987, pp. 267–83; L. Jardine, ‘The Duchess of Malfi: A Case Study in the Literary Representation of Women,’ in Teaching the Text, ed. S. Kappeler and N. Bryson, London, 1983, pp. 203-17; E. Oakes, ‘“The Duchess of Malfi” as a Tragedy of Identity,’ Studies in Philology 96, 1999, pp. 51–67; L. Hopkins, The Female Hero in English Renaissance Tragedy, Houndmills, 2002; and L. Stanavage, Domesticating Vengeance: The Female Revenger in Early Modern English Drama, 1566-1700, diss., UC Santa Barbara, 2011.

  41. Pollard, ‘Hecuba’, p. 1061 (n. 1 above).

  42. Jones, Origins, argues for similarities between its plot structure and Hecuba’s; cf. also Gibbons, Shakespeare (n. 18 above), p. 116.

  43. Following Jankowski, ‘Defining,’ and M. Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession, London, 1977.

  44. For some discussion of these motivations, cf. Whigham, ‘Social Mobility’ (n. 1 above); for inheritance and marriage law in the play, cf. Jankowski, ‘Defining,’ and Women, pp. 147–88 and L. Marcus, ‘The Duchess’s Marriage in Contemporary Contexts’, in Duchess (n. 2 above), pp. 106–18.

  45. Dido, Medea, and the Duchess all unfold their thoughts to female confidantes, perhaps suggesting some discomfort with female secrecy; cf. F. Zeitlin, ‘Playing the other: theatre, theatricality, and the feminine in Greek drama’, in Nothing to Do with Dionysos?: Athenian Drama in its Social Context, ed. J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin, Princeton, 1990, pp. 63–96 (esp. 75–84) and S. Montiglio, Silence in the Land of Logos, Princeton, 2010, pp. 252–56. In serving as the Duchess’s sounding board and articulating a more plebeian and pragmatic perspective, Cariola is analogous both to classical choruses and nurse figures.

  46. Euripides’s Medea articulates women’s experience of marriage in the terms of masculine heroism, saying that she would rather stand three times in battle than give birth once (230-51). Though Seneca’s Medea makes no similarly radical declaration of female bravery, she too uses masculine language and is driven by a heroic concern for glory and reputation. Whigham, ‘Social Mobility’ (n. 1 above), p. 171 similarly observes that the Duchess here assumes ‘the unmistakably male tone of the Renaissance hero.’

  47. Cf. Jankowski, ‘Defining’ (n. 1 above), p. 236 for a reading of this passage and the more general argument that ‘by not actively challenging the Renaissance discourse of ‘woman,’ the Duchess, effectually, allows herself to be read as ‘whore.’’

  48. Medea’s association with witchcraft, especially in the tradition surrounding Ovid’s Metamorphoses, has been well noted; Dido too sends her sister away to fetch a priestess with magical powers (Aen. 4.478-98) and conducts a rite before her death, invoking Hecate among others (Aen. 4.502-21).

  49. For instance, like Medea, the Duchess perceives and despises the hypocrisy of the world around her, particularly in powerful men like her brothers. In the translation of John Studley, discussed at n. 23 above, the young Medea ‘drinks deadly poyson’ from the ‘goulden Cup’ of Jason’s ‘suger’ tongue, though ‘Fayth in fayre Face hath sildome yet ben seene’ (121v-122r, in Newton’s 1581 edition). The Duchess, like the older Medea, can see through the words of the men who try to manipulate her. ‘False hearts speak fair / To those they intend most mischief’ (3.5.25-26); ‘Pray thee, why dost thou wrap thy poison'd pills / In gold and sugar?’ (4.2.19-20).

  50. For the legal status of this marriage, cf. Jankowski, ‘Defining’ (n. 1 above), pp. 230–34.

  51. B. Chalk, ‘Webster’s “Worthyest Monument”: The Problem of Posterity in The Duchess of Malfi’, Studies in Philology, 108: 3, Summer 2011, pp. 379–402 (p. 388) argues that this passage collapses the wedding with a funeral; cf. also Neill, Death (n. 1 above), pp. 338–41.

  52. Cf. Dent, Borrowing (n. 1 above), p. 301.

  53. Arguing against Peterson, Curs’d Example, pp. 112–13, this study accords with Neill, Death (n. 1 above) and A. Henderson, ‘Death on the Stage, Death of the Stage: The Antitheatricality of “The Duchess of Malfi”’, Theatre Journal, 42: 2, May 1990, pp. 194–207, in understanding this motto as unironic.

  54. Dent, Borrowing (n. 1 above), p. 122 notes some other uses of this tag.

  55. B. Pavlock, ‘The hero and the erotic in Aeneid 7-12’, Vergilius, 38, 1992, pp. 72–87 detects continuing echoes of Dido and Apollonius’s Medea in the violent passions of the latter half of the Aeneid.

  56. Cf. Braden, Anger’s Privilege, pp. 23-27 (n. 1 above) and Rosenmeyer, Senecan Drama, pp. 160-205, esp. 166-67 (n. 25 above), for Senecan Medea’s ‘rage to embrace nature’ and ‘conjuration of the noxious powers of the earth’ (indebted in part to her portrayal in Ovid’s Metamorphoses).

  57. For classic treatments of this much-discussed passage, cf. F. Bowers, ‘A Note on The Spanish Tragedy’, Modern Language Notes, 53: 8, December 1938, pp. 590–91; M. Levin, ‘“Vindicta Mihi!”: Meaning, Morality, and Motivation in The Spanish Tragedy’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 4: 2, April 1964, pp. 307–24; and S. McMillin, ‘The Book of Seneca in The Spanish Tragedy’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 14: 2, April 1974, pp. 201–8.

  58. For the Senecan revenger’s competitive drive toward excess, see Braden, Anger’s Privilege, pp. 28-62 (n. 1 above), especially 42-46 for specific comparanda in Thyestes, Medea, and elsewhere.

  59. Pollard, ‘Hecuba’, p. 1082 n. 93 (n. 1 above) traces these devices through the dumb-show back to the Greek chorus, ‘which they first complement and eventually replace’ (1083). This bolsters the argument that Bosola serves as a chorus-like figure in this scene to highlight the Duchess’s individuality.

  60. The latter, in Pollard’s analysis; ibid., p. 1082.

  61. Cf. Callaghan, Woman, p. 151, and Jankowski, ‘Defining’, pp. 242-43, respectively (n. 1 above).

  62. B. Doebler, ‘Continuity in the Art of Dying: The Duchess of Malfi’, in Modern Critical Interpretations: The Duchess of Malfi, ed. H. Bloom, New York, 1987, pp. 203-15 (72-73).

  63. Chalk, ‘Worthyest Monument’ (n. 51 above), noting at p. 380 that Webster’s father ran a cartwright firm so the playwright was familiar with the transportation of corpses and other material realities of death from an early age.

  64. J. Lord, ‘The Duchess of Malfi: “The Spirit of Greatness” and “Of Woman”’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 16: 2, 1976, pp. 305–17 (esp. p. 315). One might compare the ‘black mass’ of Seneca’s Medea 740-842; the term is Boyle’s, Seneca: Medea (n. 20 above), p. xlix.

  65. Illustrated editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses are far more common in the Renaissance than Seneca’s tragedies; D. Kinney usefully collates several 16th-century versions at Ovid Illustrated: The Reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Image and Text (http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/about.html). Though Ovid’s epic only briefly touches on the story of Medea’s infanticide, treated in far greater depth by Seneca and Ovid’s own lost tragedy Medea, such illustrations nevertheless hint at the imaginative picture the story would conjure in the minds of Renaissance readers.

  66. As Whigham, ‘Social Mobility,’ p. 174 (n. 1 above) notes, ‘In reiterating her freedom's origin (in rank), she inevitably also reminds us of her deep inscription in that system, for she has no independent proper name.’ Jardine, ‘Duchess’ (n. 40 above), p. 126 reminds us that the Duchess’s title is rooted in the past. For other ironic readings of this line, cf. Jankowski, ‘Defining’, p. 243 and Women, p. 178 (n. 1 above); Oakes (n. 40 above), 65; and especially Peterson, Curs’d Example (n. 1 above).

  67. Lord, ‘Duchess’ (n. 64 above), pp. 315-16 similarly reads this as the Duchess’s attempt to rewrite an otherwise sordid death in her own heroic terms.

  68. Neill, Death (n. 1 above), p. 344.

  69. ‘My resolution’s placed, and I have nothing / Of woman in me. Now from head to foot / I am marble-constant’ (Antony & Cleopatra 5.2.238-40). Neill, Death (ibid.), p. 328 also observes the similarity with Cleopatra’s death, and Jankowski, ‘Defining’ (n. 1 above) devotes a chapter to the two women in comparison. The idea of becoming marble had a strong association with Stoic virtue in antiquity and the Renaissance; cf. Braden, Anger’s Privilege (n. 1 above), pp. 93–94. At the same time, the Duchess knows she is a Senecan victim. She and others frequently characterize the brothers as ‘tyrants,’ particularly toward the end of the play, where their cruelties smack of the worst excesses of the Roman emperors (3.5.75, 4.1.65, 100, 4.2.2, 3, 60, 186, 319, 362, 5.2.242). She also refers to her brothers ‘feeding’ on her at 4.2.191 and 226-27, an image that evokes not only carnivorous animals but also the kin-cannibalism central to several classical tragedies.

  70. Cf. Pollard, ‘Hecuba’ (n. 1 above), pp. 1068-69 for the linkage between Hecuba’s violence and maternity.

  71. For the writing and Renaissance reception of Seneca’s death, see J. Ker, The Deaths of Seneca, Oxford, 2009, especially pp. 281-324 and T. Van Heijnsbergen, ‘The Renaissance uses of a medieval Seneca: murder, stoicism, and gender in the marginalia of Glasgow Hunter 297’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 39: 1, 2013, 55–81. Ker and Winston, Elizabethan Seneca (n. 23 above), p. 9 compile testimony for early modern receptions of Seneca as a proto-Christian and of his death in particular as an inspiration for Christians, e.g. by Edward Abbas and Thomas Lodge (the latter in a 1614 translation of Seneca’s prose works that again suggests a resurgence of interest in Seneca around the time of the Duchess’ debut).

  72. M. Lifson, ‘Embodied Morality in The Duchess of Malfi’, Pacific Coast Philology, 23: 1, 1988, pp. 47-59 also notes doubling between the Duchess and Bosola. My analysis complements K. Burke’s argument that the fourth act of a Shakespearean tragedy prepares audiences to ‘relinquish those figures who are about to die for our edification,’ in ‘Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method’, Hudson Review, 4, 1951, p. 178. While Chalk, ‘Worthyest Monument’ (n. 51 above), p. 397 uses this to highlight the Duchess’s haunting absence in Act 5, it also frames Bosola and Ferdinand as debased surrogates.

  73. See, e.g., Boyle, Senecan Tragedy (n. 1 above), p. 184.

  74. This hesitation is even clearer in Euripides’ play, where it has been well-analyzed and occurs even on a pronominal level; see Foley, ‘Medea’s divided self’, and, for comparison with Seneca, Gill, ‘Two monologues’ (n. 21 above).

  75. As Braden, Anger’s Privilege (n. 1 above), p. 60, notes, ‘Medea needs to be seen; her triumphant selfhood must be confirmed in the sight of his victim.’ This need to be witnessed may be linked with the Stoic injunction to ‘do whatever you do as if someone were watching’ (Seneca, Epistles 25.2, with analogues in Zeno and Cleanthes), as exemplified by Seneca’s suicide (Tacitus, Annales 15.62, discussed above; cf. Braden, ibid., pp. 25-26). This interest in exemplarity and witnessing informs much of Webster’s play, even the prefatory verses, and connects with the life-as-theatre metaphor that threads through the play’s final act.

  76. Cf. Boyle, Senecan Tragedy (n. 1 above), pp. 174-75.

  77. This latter evokes the Senecan tragic trope wherein victims beg the gods to punish their oppressors by plunging the world into darkness; cf. e.g. Phaedra 671-77, Thyestes 1068-96, and Lucan’s appropriation of the same imagery to condemn civil war.

  78. Act 3 Scene 2 provides a powerful image for this when staged so that the Duchess, who is clearly fixing her hair in the mirror (57-59), first glimpses Ferdinand behind her as a twisted reflection of her self.

  79. His inconstancy in this resolution—a few lines later he asks to ‘see her face again’ (4.2.262)—confirms his lack of integrity.

  80. The imagery of darkness and madness surrounding Ferdinand is prominent and well documented. For instance, he says to Bosola, ‘Never look upon me more’ (4.2.307) and leaves to hunt ‘by owl-light: / ‘Tis a deed of darkness’ (4.2.324-5). In similar vein, Delio adds at the play’s end, ‘These wretched eminent things / Leave no more fame behind ‘em than should one / Fall in a frost and leave his print in snow: / As soon as the sun shines, it ever melts, / Both form, and matter’ (5.5.112-16). The Duchess also turns against Ferdinand the same ‘witchcraft’ language he had applied to her (4.1.53-54).

  81. This allows them to conduct their ‘team-work’ in the Duchess’s mortification with a success unusual for cross-gender choral pairings, for which, cf. Pollard, ‘Hecuba’ (n. 1 above), p. 1085, nn. 106-7.

  82. Francis Bacon notes in Of Revenge that, unlike private vendettas, ‘public revenges are for the most part fortunate’; cf. also Boyle, Senecan Tragedy (n. 1 above), p. 185.

  83. Renaissance scholars associated tragedy with democracy and the leveling of kingship; Pollard (n. 1 above), p. 1074 compiles examples from Puttenham and Castelvetro.

  84. Cf. Boyle, Senecan Tragedy (n. 1 above), p. 172.

  85. At 5.5.36, when the Cardinal asks after Antonio, Bosola reports that he was ‘Slain by my own hand unwittingly.’ The separation of Bosola’s hand, i.e. actions, from the rest of his self finds a macabre analogue in his presentation of the dismembered hand to the Duchess at Ferdinand’s behest (4.1.42-44). For dismembered hands in general, cf. K. Rowe, Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern, Stanford, 1999, and for the Senecan trope, cf. Jones, Origins (n. 1 above), pp. 268-69. The Duchess posthumously undergoes an analogous division, in that her memory is split from her identity: i.e., Bosola uses it to justify his continued murders, and her ‘voice’ continues to speak beyond her death and without her agency in the echo scene (5.3).

  86. This reapplies, to a bloodier and unintended context, the Duchess’s earlier statement to Bosola that ‘Man is most happy when’ s own actions / Be arguments and examples of his virtue’ (3.5.117-18).

  87. Braden, Anger’s Privilege (n. 1 above), p. 34.

  88. The stage directions at 5.5.50-51 (p. 78 of the 1623 edition) note that Ferdinand here wounds the Cardinal and gives Bosola his ‘death’s wound.’

  89. Cf. Braden, Anger’s Privilege (n. 1 above), pp. 25-27, and Boyle, Senecan Tragedy (n. 1 above), pp. 188 and 200-1 for Senecan theatricality.

  90. While Euripides’ play did not specify the means of Medea’s escape, she was clearly raised aloft ex machina, a position typically assigned to the gods; the dragons were an important element of her iconography from the 5th century BCE, as in the famous Cleveland krater, up through the Renaissance, as in a 15th-century Northern Italian illuminated manuscript of Seneca’s tragedies (Bodleian, MS Canon. Class. Lat. 86, fol. 102r). See C. Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Medea at a Shifting Distance: Images and Euripidean Tragedy’, in Medea: Essays (n. 21 above), pp. 250–96, and D. Mastronarde, Medea (n. 20 above), pp. 64–70.

  91. Arrian uses similar imagery in observing, ‘So we ought to act, exhibiting the ball-player’s carefulness about the game, but the same indifference about the object played with, as being a mere ball’ (Epictetus 2.5.20-21; Braden, Anger’s Privilege, n. 1 above, p. 21). It is striking that these Stoic thinkers envisioned people as players of the ball-game of life, while Bosola envisions himself as the ball—a mere object. Compare the words of D’Amville in Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611): ‘Drop out / Mine eye-balls, and let envious Fortune play / At tennis with ‘em’ (2.4.27-29). Boyle, Senecan Tragedy (n. 1 above), p. 186, regards Renaissance tragedy as more closely aligned with a Senecan than a Christian moral universe, ‘generally projecting itself as hostile, morally perplexing if not amoral or perverse, sometimes, as in … The Duchess of Malfi … even irretrievably flawed.’

  92. See n. 25 above.

Acknowledgments

I dedicate this paper to Bob Miola, friend and mentor sans pareil, and to Tony Nuttall (1937-2007), who first walked me through the wild woods of Senecan tragedy at Oxford in 2003. I thank Bob Miola, Teresa Grant, and my other, anonymous reader for comments that enriched this paper; any errors that remain are mine alone. I also gratefully acknowledge audience members and my fellow panelists at the Renaissance Society of America conference in New York in March 2014; my gracious host Athena Kirk and audience at Washington & Lee University during an invited lecture in April 2013; the Honors students at Loyola University Maryland with whom I read and discussed Duchess of Malfi; and John Tully, for the ocean view of Rio de Janeiro that made the first draft flow.

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Pandey, N.B. Medea’s Fractured Self on the Jacobean Stage: Webster’s Duchess of Malfi as a Case Study in Renaissance Readership. Int class trad 22, 267–303 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-015-0372-4

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