The Duchess of Malfi on Film: Peter Huby’s Quietus

Keith Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 97–122.Google Scholar

Philip Franks, quoted in Steven Davies, Alex Cox: Film Anarchist (London: Batsford, 2000), 14.Google Scholar

For a full account of this film, see Susanne Greenhalgh, ‘The Jacobeans on Television: The Duchess of Malfi and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore at Chastleton House’, Shakespeare Bulletin 29.4 (2011): 573–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

For information about these early televised dramas, see Jason Jacobs, The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 25–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

John Russell Brown, ed., The Duchess of Malfi (London: Methuen, 1964), 5.5.1. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.Google Scholar

G. K. and S. K. Hunter, eds, John Webster: A Critical Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 310–11.Google Scholar

Alex Cox, ‘Stage Fright’, Guardian, 9 August 2002.Google Scholar

For the fullest account so far of Griffi’s film, see Catherine Silverstone, ‘Sexing Death: Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’, Shakespeare Bullet in 29.4 (2011): 559–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

A great deal of information about these and other films deriving from Renaissance plays can be found in Pascale Aebischer, ‘Early Modern Drama on Screen’, in Performing Early Modern Drama Today, ed. Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 142–61. She is able to show that there is now ‘a substantial corpus’ of film versions of non-Shakespearean Renaissance plays (144), with Volpone the most frequently adapted text.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Gordon McMullan, ‘“Plenty of blood. That’s the only writing”: (Mis)Representing Jacobean Tragedy in Turn-of-the-Century Cinema’, La Licorne 2 (2008), http://licorne.edel.univ-poitiers.fr/document.php?id=4274 (accessed 29 October 2009).

Ibid.Google Scholar

Quoted in Pascale Aebischer, ‘Shakespearean Heritage and the Preposterous “Contemporary Jacobean” Film: Mike Figgis’s Hotel’, Shakespeare Quarterly 60.3 (2009): 289.Google Scholar

Ibid., 292. See also Pascale Aebischer, ‘Renaissance tragedy on film: Defying mainstream Shakespeare’, in English Renaissance Tragedy, ed. Emma Smith and Garrett Sullivan Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 116–31.Google Scholar

Leah S. Marcus is being overly dismissive in the introduction to her Arden Early Modern Drama edition of The Duchess of Malfi when she refers to Hotel as ‘a soft-porn film adaptation’ but the following is worth noting. At the Cambridge Film Festival in July 2006, in a section of the festival titled ‘A Brief History of Erotic Cinema’, there was an advertised screening of a short erotic film by Mike Figgis, called ‘Tied up at the Office’, which he had made for the lingerie company Agent Provocateur. At the last minute this was replaced by episodes from Hotel, re-edited to become freestanding erotic short films, and discussed afterwards as such by the director. For Marcus’s comment, see Leah S. Marcus, ed., The Duchess of Malfi (London: A & C Black, 2009), 110–11.Google Scholar

Mike Figgis, In the Dark: Images and Text by Mike Figgis (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 2003), 158. After Figgis had screened episodes from Hotel at the Cambridge Film Festival in 2006, I asked him why he had chosen The Duchess of Malfi for his film-within-a-film. He replied, using the same trio of adjectives, that he had ‘asked all his actors which was the weirdest, bloodiest, sexiest play they knew and they all said The Duchess of Malfi’ (personal conversation 12 July 2006).Google Scholar

We know this because Sir John Yorke was charged in Star Chamber with allowing the performance of a play and interlude with Catholic sympathies to be played at his house, Gowlthwaite Hall in Nidderdale, as part of the Christmas festivities in 1609–10. The play was a saint’s play, Saint Christopher, but most of the trouble was caused by the interlude in which an English clergyman was defeated in a debate with a Catholic priest. Testimony from the actors indicates that the company of recusant players, known as the Simpsons (sometimes also referred to as the Cholmeley Players), which had been touring the area for years, had three other plays in their repertoire at the time — The Travels of the Three English Brothers by John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins, Pericles, and King Lear. See Phebe Jensen, ‘Recusancy, festivity, and community: The Simpsons at Gowlthwaite Hall’, in Region, Religion and Patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare, ed. Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 101–20; and Masahiro Takenata, ‘The Cholmeley Players and the Performance of King Lear in Yorkshire’, Shakespeare Bulletin 27 (2000): 37–47.Google Scholar

See Tom McAlindon, Shakespeare’s Tudor History: A Study of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 176.Google Scholar

John Russell Brown, ed., The White Devil (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), 2.1.246–7.Google Scholar

T. S. Eliot, ‘Whispers of Immortality’, in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 1974), 55.Google Scholar

William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, vol. 2 (1567), reprinted as Appendix 1 in John Russell Brown’s Revels edition of the play, 203.Google Scholar