The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster (review)

As a Shakespearean I have long been interested in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, mostly because of its incessant echoes of Hamlet—an aspect of the play ignored in Michael Neill’s newish Norton Critical Edition. That being said, the very best piece I’ve read on Webster’s horny, doomed Duchess is Neill’s brief but luminous essay, ‘The Spirit of Greatness or of Woman,” which occupies xxxi to xxxv of the introduction.

Neill’s edit of the play is very well done. Older notes are not discarded merely because they are old. And the selection of others’ essays about the play manages to sample opinion from the nineteenth century to Mike Figgis’s motion picture, Hotel. Of particular interest is Barbara Correll’s “From Malvolio at [sic] Malfi: Managing Desire in Shakespeare and Webster.”

Yet the nagging problem remains: while it offers engaging scenes, as a play The Duchess of Malfi is not a very good play. By turns it is stagey, talky, chatty, over-precise, obscure, and always heavy-handed. Egregious villains have unprepared moments of candor which must shock an audience completely out of their suspended disbelief. And everybody who’s anybody dies. The Duchess is dead before the end of act 4—Neill compares the death of Antony before that of Cleopatra—and Bosola dies at the end of 5, giving Malfi the dubious distinction of having more deaths than King Lear (if you leave out Cordelia’s war and count the Duchess’s kids, serving men, etc.). But what disappoints in the ending of Malfi that does not disappoint in the ending of A&C, Lear, Hamlet or for that matter Julius Caesar (where the big guy is dead in act 3)—is that the deaths in Malfi amount to nothing, accomplish nothing except to get some lofty words tossed around. It’s Hamlet rewritten by a cadre of existentialists. At least Antony’s and Cleo’s deaths usher in the time of universal peace, and Hamlet’s brings Fortinbras (Shakespeare’s anagram for “A First Born”) to the throne. Malfi is not the heir of Hamlet but the lovechild of The Revenger’s Tragedy.

The Duchess of Malfi is a creaky play, but Neill is correct when he declares it an important social document. Though set in Italy, it levels stinging criticism at England’s society of rank (sixteenth-century playwrights who took aim at the foibles of the English nobility were well-advised to move the action overseas; only Jonson had the nerve to play the home team at home). But the social criticism in Malfi is so heavy-handed, unremitting, and repetitious that the text comes closer to polemic than stageworthy drama. Comparison with Shakespeare’s most seditious play, As You Like It, makes Malfi out as hamfisted, verbose, and dull. There is some tasty poetry in Malfi, and Neill cites several memorable examples. But the play’s scene-ending rhyming couplets are so predictable and precious as to approach parody.

Neill claims that Malfi is enjoying a renaissance in our time, and is called to the stage more than any other play of its period not by Shakespeare. Neill is a formidable scholar, and if he says it, it must be so. And one can see how an appetite for Malfi’s testosterone-fueled violence and burlesque mysticism could draw audiences. But that says more about us than about Malfi. In sum: if you must own a text of The Duchess of Malfi, you could do worse than Michael Neill’s Norton Critical Edition. If there’s a more knowledgeable or erudite unraveling of the play, I haven’t seen it.