Mid-Century Jacobeans: Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, P. D. James, and The Duchess of Malfi

During the mid-twentieth century, a dramatic shift was taking place in the conceptualization of early modern drama. The internal tensions which had always beset the category of Elizabethan drama reached a critical point, and from that crisis the concept of the Jacobean emerged in all its horrific glory. Pascale Aebischer's work on the Jacobean has set the terms of debate in two ways. First, her metacritical history in the volume Jacobean Drama has traced the appearance of the term in scholarship and its shifting reputation among academics.¹ Second, her development of the concept of the contemporary Jacobean (notably in Screening Early Modern Drama) has drawn on the work of Susan Bennett to demonstrate the ways in which Jacobean drama has provided a source for critical, dissident, and resistant theater and film in the late twentieth century. Aebischer has identified works such as Mike Figgis's Hotel (2001), Derek Jarman's Edward II (1991), and Alex Cox's Revenger's Tragedy (2002) as exemplars of this contemporary Jacobean style, which is consciously deviant, transgressive, irreverent, and anachronistic, setting itself up in opposition to the tradition of heritage William Shakespeare films such as Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson's Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and John Madden's Shakespeare in Love (1998). Aebischer's ideas have been extended and debated by a number of other critics, including Courtney Lehmann, Jennifer Clement, and the scholars who contributed to a special issue of the journal Interdisciplinary Literary Studies devoted to "The 'Preposterous Contemporary Jacobean': Adaptations in Film and Theater, Responses to Pascale Aebischer."² Almost all of these developments have explored the applicability of her notion of the "contemporary Jacobean" to culture in the late twentieth century.³

In this article I intend to go backwards from this period, examining the appearance of the Jacobean in mid-century detective fiction. Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and P. D. James all produced novels in this period which allude to one of the defining dramatic texts of the Jacobean tradition, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. The books in question are Sleeping Murder, Singing in the Shrouds, and Cover Her Face, respectively. By examining the mid-century development of the idea of the Jacobean and tracing the engagements these novels make with Webster's play and its modernist reception, I will demonstrate that these texts fill a lacuna in our narrative of the Jacobean—one which Aebischer herself identifies. A longer origin for the category of the contemporary Jacobean will be provided by these novels, which work through the implications of their early modern cultural inheritance in devious and ambiguous ways and display critical unease about the value of that inheritance. Recent work on detective fiction's engagement with Shakespeare—most notably by Lisa Hopkins—has emphasized the playwright's presence as a near constant of the genre. As Hopkins demonstrates, Shakespearean quotation was a recognized convention of detective fiction—in no way did it represent a transgression of generic expectations or a straining after a more high-brow tone.⁴ Jacobean drama, however, was a less naturalized part of the genre's world, one which offered a (slightly) more recondite form of allusion with a less automatic justification for its presence. The cluster of novels I have focused on here are not the only works in the genre which allude to Jacobean drama. I could have considered James's The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982), Ruth Rendell's A Sleeping Life (1978), or Caroline Graham's The Killings at Badger's Drift (1987), to offer a few examples. What distinguishes the three novels discussed here is that they mark the turning of a cultural moment and exemplify the use of Jacobean drama in the detective novel to negotiate unease about the cultural inheritance of English literature.

I. the prehistory of the mid-century jacobean

By the mid-twentieth century, Shakespeare was so securely established as a literary, cultural, and even national icon that his work had come to stand for the entirety of the early modern period in the mind of the...