Webster's "Worthyest Monument": The Problem of Posterity in The Duchess of Malfi

For John Webster, death was not merely an artistic preoccupation; it was a fundamental part of the family business. Webster's father ran a successful coach transport firm and was a prominent member of the Guild of Merchant Taylors. Coach makers had no guild of their own but were admitted to the Taylor's Guild on the grounds that there was "a close and obvious connection between tailors, who made trappings for funerals, plays and pageants, and the men who provided hearses for coffins." ¹ While Webster's father did not participate directly in the royal funerals that his more celebrated son occasionally commemorated poetically, he likely provided hearses to transport plague victims to burial pits. Webster inherited this enterprise, and his contemporaries in the theatrical community were clearly well aware of this and even amused by the overlaps between the two professions. Henry Fitzgeffrey's nickname for Webster—"Crabbed (Websterio) / The Play-wright, Cart-wright"—alludes directly to the family business and strongly suggests that Webster himself took more than a passing interest in running it. ² In a mock elegy lamenting the loss of the poet Thomas Randolph's finger in a tavern brawl, moreover, William Hemminge goes so far as to conflate Webster's role as a saddler with his status as playwright, as he remarks that initial attempts to mourn the lost digit in grand fashion were unsuccessful:

Ytt had byn drawne and wee in state aproche but websters brother would nott lend a Coach: hee swore thay all weare hired to Conuey the Malfy dutches sadly on her way, And witty fortune ytt seemes thought ytt more meett to have our Poettes quayntly vse thayr feett.

(2.37-42) ³

Slyly incorporating Webster's most famous heroine, Hemminge travesties both expensive funeral processions and the potential of poetic tributes to stand in their place. The desire to commemorate loved ones with grand ceremonies is all well and good; however, Hemminge reminds the reader, if one lacks the financial resources, then "websters brother" will not "lend a Coach," and the "quaynt" metrical "feett" that poets offer will have to do.

Webster's firsthand experience with the grim, material realities of death as well as his membership in a struggling artistic community clearly informs his attitude toward the commemorative abilities of poetry. In the address "To the Reader" that precedes the 1612 quarto of The White Devil, for example, Webster shows little interest in subscribing to the fantasy that poetry confers immortality on its author. Instead, rather than argue for the enduring value of his own work, Webster seems determined to preserve the dignity of the entire theatrical community that he represents. "For mine own part," he avers, speaking of his fellow playwrights, "I have ever truly cherished the good opinion of other men's worthy labors." ⁴ He claims that he is willing to "rest silent" in his own work but lists George Chapman, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, William Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Heywood as authors whose work is worthy of the epitaph non norunt, haec monumenta (these monuments do not know how to die). Rather than assert his right to be remembered among his contemporaries, Webster acknowledges them as friends engaged in a similarly uncertain pursuit.

This essay argues that 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's skepticism that plays can provide a stable vehicle for literary posterity, moreover, intersects provocatively with Jacobean attitudes toward the purpose and efficacy of monuments and provides evidence of his feelings on both. In The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, 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. This interest in monumentality and its relationship to commemoration, which features repeatedly in Webster's prefaces, resurfaces as a crucial framing device in his plays. In much the same way that Webster characterizes himself and...