FERDINAND’S SELF-HOOD: LYCANTHROPY AND AGENCY IN THE DUCHESS OF MALFI

by Connor Boyle

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida December 2013

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Jennifer Low, who has been both teacher and mentor to me for the past five years. Additionally, I would like to thank my committee members, Dr. Carol McGuirk and Dr. Lisa Swanstrom, for their insightful feedback and encouragement. I am also indebted to my mother, who is the one responsible for my love of all things spooky. Really, the seeds of this thesis were planted twenty years ago, when she sat me down in front of the TV and put on Creature From the Black Lagoon.

iii ABSTRACT Author: Connor Boyle Title: Ferdinand's Self-Hood: Lycanthropy and Agency in The Duchess of Malfi Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Jennifer Low

Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2013 John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi subverts early modern hierarchical structures of matter and life by characterizing the human body as fundamentally deceptive and inferior to the animal body. Through close readings of Bosola’s meditations and Ferdinand’s lycanthropy, I consider how Webster constructs animals as simplistic creatures that enjoy a desirable existence, where body and soul are continuous. Within Webster’s play, the dualist conflict between human body and human soul is a primary subject of discourse. Various human characters see animal existence as preferential, as they view animals as automated creatures that do not suffer the self-consciousness that humans do. This model of animal existence further increases the thematic significance of Ferdinand’s lycanthropy, which I argue is an escape from the discontinuity between the human body and human soul

iv FERDINAND’S SELF-HOOD: LYCANTHROPY AND AGENCY IN THE DUCHESS OF MALFI

Introduction...... 1 Chapter I: Dualist Imprisonment and Automated Bodies in the Works of Andrew Marvell and John Webster...... 14

Chapter II: Human-Animals and the Humoral Body...... 23 Conclusion...... 33 Works Cited...... 38

v CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION So the legend goes, when the moon is full, “whoever is bitten by a werewolf and lives becomes a werewolf himself” (Wolfman). The transformation of man into wolf when the moon is full is an often-used trope in literature that deals with lycanthropy. There are, of course, several other methods of transformation in the body of literature, film, and graphic novels that deal with werewolves. The transformation, however, remains a largely overlooked aspect in criticism dealing with lycanthropy. The duality of the lycanthrope is the more popular area of discourse in criticism of horror fiction. The werewolf, being half man and half human, is often pointed to as a symbol of man’s duality. The animal aspect of the lycanthrope represents man’s capacity for evil, and the human features that can be observed in the werewolf represent man’s capacity for good. While the discussion of good and evil is frequent, the significance of the transformation is generally left by the wayside. Without any debate, man is obviously capable of good and of evil. The transformation of man into a werewolf, then, might be called an act of realization. By turning man into a hybrid, the qualities or characteristics of man are further illuminated. In this thesis, I discuss both duality and transformation as they relate to lycanthropy in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. First performed in 1613, The Duchess of Malfi is regarded a a quintessential example of the Jacobean era tragedy. Webster’s text contains several tropes that are typical of early modern drama, including philosophical commentary on dualism and metaphysics, and the use of animal metaphors. The Duchess of Malfi also contains a corporeal version of “self-fashioning,” a term first used by twentieth-century literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt. Ferdinand, the Duchess’ brother, imagines himself a new canine body that mitigates his own dualist conflict. The Cartesian dynamic of the play’ metaphysics complicates any discussion of Ferdinand’s lycanthropy as representing 1 good or evil. Ferdinand’s dualistic conflict is a matter of mind and body. The inability of the soul and body to function cohesively is simultaneously represented by the lycanthrope and reectified by the transformation in to the lycanthrope. In Webster’s play, lycanthropy represents unity between soul and body. The life of the lycanthrope is described much in the way that automatons are described in early modern text; it is characterized by a limited sense of self awareness and singularity of purpose. Writers of the Romantic period are often credited with the notion that feeling and emotion are immediately relevant to what being human means. The notion that emotion can alter physical reality, however, is central to the work of the early modern dramatist

John Webster, particularly in his play The Duchess of Malfi. Webster’s use of lycanthropy suggests an emotion based ontology, where strong feelings have the ability to alter the human body. Ferdinand’s lyanthropic bodily reconfiguration is made in the name of betterment. By becoming a wolf, he escapes conflicts relating to differences between the soul and body. More specifically, by identifying as a wolf, Ferdinand makes his exterior form mirror his interior soul. Implicit in this reconfiguration is the assumption that humans are capable of altering their basic physical form. For Ferdinand, emotion resonates outwardly from the soul and shapes the physical reality of his body and the world around him. The idea of an inherently evil soul and a transformable body contradict early modern ideas regarding what it means to be human and within an early modern context, categorize Ferdinand as posthuman. The lack of scholarship linking posthumanism and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi is, in my opinion, an unfortunate gap in criticism on the play. It should be acknowledged that early modern literature does not directly operate under a posthuman framework. How could it? Rather, writers like Webster and Andrew Marvell provided a deep commentary on the relationship between body and soul. They suggested alternatives to dualist conflict, and at times pushed the discourse on what it means to be human into new and controversial territory. The lexicon of posthuman theory provides a useful 2 vocabulary for describing the work of early modern writers that considered the deeper implications of Neoplatonism, but the issues of technology and globalization in the 20th and twenty-first centuries remain largely irrelevant to the content of early modern texts. The recent essay collection Posthumanist Shakespeares demonstrates that theories of posthumanism are relevant when considering early modern texts. The reason for the lack of criticism linking The Duchess of Malfi to posthumanism may simply be that posthuman theory is typically applied to works of science fiction, as this genre draws on several different tropes that are directly related to posthumanism: cyborgs, cyberspace, and anthropomorphism, to name a few. As I will show, anthropomorphism is a significant element in The Duchess of Malfi, and vital to the play’s discourse on duality. The central anthropomorph of the text is Ferdinand, who, in the play’s final act, claims that he is a lycanthrope, or werewolf. Thus far, criticism has neglected to consider Ferdinand’s lycanthropy in the context of Bosola’s meditations on animals. When viewed through Bosola’s own critical animal theory, lycanthropy can be read as an “enabling disability.” Whereas werewolfism is often represented as an uncanny liminal state, the werewolf and, in general, the animal both become more and more familiar to the reader throughout the text. When Ferdinand claims he is a werewolf in Act Four, the reader is not presented with a figure of “otherness,” or an insane figure whose mental state is unknowable to the reader, but with a posthuman figure, one that is in the process of both acknowledging early modern anxieties regarding the relationship between the body and soul and simultaneously moving beyond the early modern model of dualism. When The Duchess of Malfi begins, the Duchess is a widow, but still young. Her two brothers, the Cardinald and Duke Ferdinand, warn her to remain chaste and unmarried. Antonio arrives at the Duchess’ castle in the first act, and it is revealed that he is to be the Duchess’ new steward. Bosola, a disgruntled soldier and former prisoner, is chosen to be the Duchess’ Master of Horse. It is revealed that Bosola was under the employ of the Cardinald when he was imprisoned for murder. Bosola petitions the Cardinal for 3 recompense for his imprisonment, but is rebuked. Bosola scorns the Cardinal and claims that he will gain satisfaction through other means: “Slighted thus? I will thrive some way: blackbirds fatten best/ in hard weather, why not I, in these dog days?” (1.1.36-7). A year passes between Act I and Act II, and in this time the Duchess secretly marries Antonio and becomes pregnant. Bosola suspects the Duchess’ pregnancy and gives her a present of apricots, which induces her childbirth. While the Duchess attempts to keep the childbirth secret, Bosola discovers the truth and reports on the Duchess’ pregnancy to the Cardinal and Ferdinand. The Cardinald and Ferdinand are both enraged at what they view as their sister’s unbecoming sexuality; however, it is Ferdinand that vows violent revenge upon the Duchess. Two to three years passes between Act 2 and Act 3, and in this time the Duchess has had two more children. Antonio learns that Ferdinand and Bosola are conspiring to kill the Duchess. After receiving a threatening letter from Ferdinand, the Duchess decides that she and Antonio must part. Antonio and his youngest son are sent to Milan. The Duchess also attempts to escape Malfi, but is captured by Bosola and returned to her castle. Act 4 begins with Bosola visiting the Duchess in her chamber. He gives her a dead man’s hand, and then proceeds to show her wax replicas of Antonio and her children. The Duchess believes the wax figures to be dead bodies, but the audience knows that they are fake. Later on, a group of madmen, led by a disguised Bosola, visit the Duchess. Bosola speaks on the futility of life and the inconstancy of the human body. A group of executioners enter the room and strangle the Duchess and her waiting-woman, Cariola. Ferdinand arrives, and Bosola shows him the strangled bodies of the Duchess and her children. Ferdinand, at first, shows no remorse, but later blames Bosola for manipulating him into playing a “villain’s part” (4.2.280). Bosola is once again denied compensation for his deeds. Instead of paying Bosola for arranging the Duchess’ murder, Ferdinand says that he will give Bosola “a pardon/ for this murder” (4.2.285-6). By Act 5, Ferdinand has become unbalanced by grief. He attempts to strangle his 4 own shadow and cannot be cured by any doctor. He declares himself to be a wolf, and is diagnosed with lycanthropy, a form of mental sickness. The Cardinal instructs Bosola to murder Antonio and complete their conspiracy. Julia, the Cardinald’s mistress, invites Bosola to become her lover, but is soon after killed by the Cardinal after he discloses to her the recent murders he was involved with. The Cardinal asks Bosola to assist him in disposing with the body. Bosola then vows to help Antonio seek revenge for the murder of his wife and children. Bosola overhears the Cardinal reveal his plans to kill Bosola. Bosola attempts to stab Ferdinand in a darkened corridor, but instead kills Antonio. Bosola hastens Antonio’s death by telling him that his wife and children are already dead. The play concludes with the Cardinal trapped in his apartment by Bosola. The Cardinal is stabbed to death. Bosola and Ferdinand both fatally wound each other. In his final moments, Bosola declares that his revenge is complete. The final image of the play is Delio, Antonio’s friend, arriving with one of Antonio’s sons, and announcing his intent to establish the young boy as the Duke of Malfi. Most scholarship on Ferdinand’s lycanthropy has taken place within the realm of historical criticism. It is a matter of historical fact that the Duchess and Antonio were real historical figures. It is also widely accepted that William Painter’s The Second Tome of the Palace of Pleasure (1567) was Webster’s principal source for the play (Tricomi 349). In R.W. Dent’s 1962 John Webster’s Borrowing Themes, Characters and in the 1927 authoritative edition of The Duchess, edited by F.L. Lucas, various other sources are explored as possible inspirations for the text. Therefore, it seems reasonable that there might be a historical source for the play’s occult and demonic images. The historical foundation of the text, however, does not mean that the characters, images, and themes should be viewed solely through a historical lens. In the first scene of the fourth act of The Duchess, Ferdinand tortures his sister by exposing her to a series of horrific images. He tricks his sister into kissing a dead man’s hand, and then shows her wax bodies of her husband, Antonio, and his children. 5 The Duchess, however, does not know that the bodies are fakes. F.L. Lucas identifies the “dead man’s hand” scene as being inspired by Sir Phillip Sidney’s Arcadia, while Albert H. Tricomi prefers Henri Boguet’s Discours Execrable as a source. Henri Boguet was an appointed judge of the lands of the Abbey of St. Claude from 1596 to 1616, where he presided over several criminal cases in which the accused claimed to be werewolves. Tricomi also suggests that Boguet influenced Webster’s representation of lycanthropy in the play. In Discours Execrable, Boguet tells a story wherein a huntsman cuts off the paw of a wolf that attacks him in the woods. When the huntsman returns to the chateau where he is a boarder, it is revealed that the chateau owner’s wife is missing her hand.

The wife then admits that she is a lycanthrope. Tricomi claims that Discours Execrable would have been widely available during Webster’s lifetime, and that “Boguet’s book is also just the kind to which Webster was particularly drawn--- civic, judicial, and historical works” (351). Tricomi integrates the dead man’s hand scene into the play’s discourse on lycanthropy. He writes, The fact, moreover, that the hand in Boguet’s narrative is initially identified as a wolf’s paw and is subsequently shown to belong to the gentleman’s wife foregrounds a second basic idea in the folklore of lycanthropy—the demonic, experientially inexplicable, transformation of the human into the bestial. The iconography of the ringed hand turned into a wolf’s paw signifies the violent alienation of the self from its own proper nature—the very meaning of madness. The prospect of the kiss upon the hand display that part of Ferdinand’s psyche that reaches out for reconcilement and is yet erotically obsessed with his twin sister. (354-55) I agree with Tricomi that Ferdinand’s use of the dead man’s hand has erotic connotations in the play, but I disagree with his more general thesis that lycanthropy, and particularly lycanthropy in The Duchess, represents a transformation into a bestial other, and that it is always posed as the violation of the self’s proper nature. Bosola’s meditations 6 on animals and the human body suggests that the complete opposite of Tricomi’s opinion is true. Bosola sees the normal human body as a violation of proper nature. For Bosola, lycanthropy is a return to proper nature because the normal human body exists in a state of disfigurement. I will later contextualize this view on the human body with Rosemarie Garland Thompson’s ideas on body normativity and disability theory. In addition to writing Discours Execrable, Boguet also wrote Discours des Sorcerier, which contains a large section solely dedicated to the religious epistemology legitimizing the phenomenon of werewolfism. He writes: My own opinion is that Satan sometimes leaves the witch asleep behind a

bush, and himself goes and performs that which the witch has in mind to do, giving himself the appearance of the wolf, but that he so confuses the witch’s imagination that he believes he has really been a wolf and has run about and killed men and beasts. (84) According to Boguet’s theory, individuals claiming to be lycanthropes are suffering under a form of hysteria that is brought upon them by the devil. Boguet still acknowledges the presence of evil or demonic wolves that run around and kill people, but denies the “transformation aspect of lycanthropy. The devil is able to transform himself, but not the witch, who is human. There are several references to witches in The Duchess of Malfi. After Ferdinand hears of his sister’s marriage, his first inclination is to murder her. His brother, the Cardinal, does not share Ferdinand’s rage. FERDINAND. Go to, mistress, ‘Tis not your whore’s milk that shall quench my wild-fire, But your whore’s blood! CARDINAL. How idly shows this rage, which carries you As men conveyed by witches through the air On violent whirlwinds! (2.5.45-50) 7 Accordingly, it is this rage that carries Ferdinand to orchestrate his sister’s murder, which in turn results in his overwhelming grief and subsequent lycanthropy. Later, Bosola and Ferdinand speak of the Duchess’ marriage, and Bosola suggests that sorcery was used on the Duchess to make her fall in love with Antonio. Ferdinand rejects this: Do you think that herbs of charms Can force the will? Some trials have been made In this foolish practice, but the ingredients Were lenitive poisons, such as are of force To make the patient mad; and straight the witch

Swears, by equivocation, they are in love. The witchraft lies in her rank blood. This night I will force confession from her. (3.1.72-9) These two direct associations of the Duchess with witchcraft lend further credence to Tricomi’s hypothesis that Boguet’s text was a major historical influence on Webster’s use of occult imagery. However, there is a distinction to be made between Boguet’s use of witches and Webster’s. Boguet believes that witches imagine that they are wolves, and that their desire to be a wolf wills the devil to actually appear as a wolf. In Webster’s play, Ferdinand perceives the Duchess’ “witchcraft” as her ability to tempt men, mainly Antonio. It is this “witchcraft” that captures Antonio, which in turn creates the stressor that will lead Ferdinand to murder his sister and become a lycanthrope. Webster’s use of witchcraft does not function like Boguet’s; however, Webster’s writing contains a conglomeration of images from Boguet’s texts. The characterization of the Duchess’ “witchcraft” as a metaphor for her desirability rather than as an actual magical phenomenon raises an important question regarding the actuality of the play’s occult elements: are they meant to be taken literally or not? In an article entitled “Historicizing the Imagery of the Demonic in The Duchess of Malfi,” Tricomi attempts “to approach Webster’s supernatural images from a much more local 8 cultural and historical perspective” (351). Tricomi characterizes the cultural environment of Webster’s audience as being engaged in a form of “liminal metaphysics,” which he describes as “a metaphysic that trembles between belief and skepticism” (346). Regarding the Doctor’s diagnosis of Ferdinand’s lycanthropy in the fifth act, Tricomi writes: Incomprehensible as it is for most modern readers to grasp, Webster, along with most of his contemporaries... tirelessly sought to comprehend the operations of demonism naturalistically... Seen from this perspective, the Doctor’s account in The Duchess clearly functions as a clinical diagnosis... Just as notably, the physician’s diagnosis conforms to the dominant

contemporary understanding that lycanthropia is a genuine disease of possession. (362-63) Conversely, in “An Italian Werewolf in London: Lycanthropy and The Duchess of Malfi,” Brett Hirsch contends that there is “nothing in the play to suggest that Ferdinand’s lycanthropy is an instance of demonic possession” (7). “On the contrary,” Hirsch writes, “Ferdinand’s lycanthropy is clearly treated in medical, natural terms, as are other instances of disease in the play” (7). Hirsch looks to Webster’s biography to substantiate his claim that the Doctor’s inability to cure Ferdinand is not proof of the supernatural within the play, but rather that it signifies Webster’s condemnation of corrupt physicians and fallacious cures (8). Hirsch characterizes Webster’s construction of the play “as primarily a medical universe with eschatological overtones, rather than vice versa” (15). He writes, “There is no reason to extrapolate from the doctor’s use of the term ‘possess’d’ an entire world of demonic possession and intervention” (15). While the Doctor’s discussion of lycanthropy is marked by a use of highly clinical language, it seems to me that Hirsch overextends the importance of Webster’s own biography in his interpretation of lycanthropy in the play. That Webster was critical of early modern medicine may be true, but whether or not this skepticism influenced his imagination is uncertain. Like Tricomi, I believe that we cannot look at Ferdinand’s lycanthropy without regard to its actuality; I 9 suggest we should extract important conclusions pertinent to animal theory and disability theory from it. Ferdinand’s lycanthropy is the product of a perspective, one of liminal metaphysics, that is almost entirely foreign to modern thought. Rather than reduce his lycanthropic condition to being merely medical or demonic causes, we can acknowledge our inability to understand lycanthropy exactly as Webster’s audience might have, and still treat it as a complicated metaphor that maintains significance whether it is actual or not. In “‘Hairy on the In-side’: The Duchess of Malfi and the Body of Lycanthropy,” Lynn Enterline looks at issues of bodily difference between the Duchess and her brother. Enterline considers lycanthropy as a metaphor for the incestual eroticism between

Ferdinand and the Duchess. Of the Duchess herself, she writes: When her body signifies a desire different from his, Ferdinand kills her, for that such a body should be familiar, in oedipal terms, is horrifying: “that body of hers” dazzles cruel sore eyes; it is a root that shrieks when disturbed. But the Duchess cannot be finally done away with any more than the shadow Ferdinand tries to throttle, so her death is this play is no end... Even death does not mark difference enough between his form and hers: his figure for his lycanthropy speaks only of an alien skin, of an exterior surface turned into a now alienated interior. (120) I largely agree with Enterline’s connection of lycanthropy with incest, and it is the association of animals with incestual desire, selfishness, and violence that I will examine in relation to critical animal theory. Like Tricomi, Enterline associates the lycanthropic body with ideas of “Otherness.” I concede that the lycanthropic body is different; however, I do not think that it entirely qualifies as “the Other,” given that Bosola attaches philosophical significance to animal bodies and connects them to human bodies in the play even before Ferdinand’s lycanthropy occurs. The only existing piece of criticism that even hints at the relevance of Ferdinand’s lycanthropy to theories of disability and medicine is “Awakening the Werewolf Within: 10 Self-Help, Vanishing Mediation, and Transversality in The Duchess of Malfi,” by Courtney Lehmann and Bryan Reynolds. Lehmann and Reynolds explore the relationship between lycanthropy, self-help, and transversality. Their essay examines the way that mental and emotional space is constructed in politically complex terrains. The essay is part of a collection titled Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. In the first chapter of the text, Reynolds outlines the theoretical underpinnings for transversal criticism. Transversal criticism is largely focused on the way that “sociopolitical conductors” influence culture. Reynolds writes: Sociopolitical conductors are vital to transversal poetics because they are

the familial, religious, juridical, media, and educational structures – the reciprocators, transmitters, and orchestarators of thoughts, meanings, and desires – that interconnect a society’s ideological and cultural framework... Thus, social and cultural economies negotiate and function, vis-a-vis sociopolitical conductors, in conjunction with the articulatory spaces through which they develop. Through this engagement people to see and believe certain things, consequently undergoing “becomings” and “coming- to-be” as the result of exposures and performances. (1-2) Lehmann and Reynolds discuss the manner in which sociopolitical conductors shape an individual’s “subjective territory,” which they describe as “the emotional- conceptual range from which individuals – subjected by a particular ideology – perceive and experience their environment” (228). Their thesis is that in The Duchess of Malfi Webster fashions a cult of self-help that shows “how, in times of crisis, people place ‘giants’ at the margins of what transversal theory calls ‘subjective territory’” (228). The authors view self-help as a vanishing mediator, a concept created by Frederic Jameson. Vanishing medatiors are described as “kinds of dialectical, intermediary structures, sociopolitical entities... that precondition their own transubstantiation, thereby allowing new societal structures to manifest themselves” (228). They ultimately conclude that 11 Ferinand’s lycanthropy, as a tool for coping with his role in his sister’s death, demonstrates that transversal power of self-help. They write: The “miracle” of self-help, the outcome of a steady process of accretion that expands our “Master system” of referents, is the miracle of fantasy, the belief that our identity is something that lies outside of us, in the vast desert of sacred fetishes, whereas identity actually rides on the ebb and flow of our becoming and comings-to-be, as our subjective territory spatializes as it is spatialized in negotioation with state machinery and fugitive forces of transversal power by which it reconfigures. (237)

Again, I am hesistant to acknowledge Ferdinand’s lycanthropy in terms of “otherness” or as being “something that lies outside of us.” When looking at Ferdinand’s own action and his own words, it seems to make sense to come to conclusions similar to the critics I have cited so far. However, if we consider Bosola’s discourse on disability and animality, we may come to a different interpretation. I view Bosola’s ideas on animals and disfigurement as a much more interesting discussion of disability than Reynolds’ and Lehmann’s. Bosola links animality with empowerment, and categorizes the normative human body as “disabled.” So far, no critic has ever considered how Bosola’s meditations might be brought to bear on Ferdinand’s lycanthropy. Bosola’s discourses on disability and animality need to be further explored, and will become much more lucid when translated with ideas and terms from the fields of critical animal studies and disability studies. Before progressing with my explication of Ferdinand’s lycanthropy, it should be noted that the critical intersection of animal studies and disability studies is a particularly troublesome one. One of the goals of disability studies scholars is to ensure that disabled subjects are viewed as complete humans. Quite often, disabled persons are regarded as lacking something that makes them fully human. Similarly, animal studies is critical of portraying animals as creatures that are lacking certain human characteristics, and are 12 therefore sub-human. To explore familiarities between disabled humans and animals runs the risk of placing both of them in the same category. As troublesome as the merging of animal studies and disability studies seems, there are still critical connections to be made between the categories of “the disabled” and “the animal.” The well-known animal rights activist Temple Grandin, for instance, claims that her autism has given her special insight into the minds of animals. In Thinking in Pictures, she describes how she thinks in pictures rather than words, and how her non-lingusitic thought-process allows her to perceive things that the overactive consciousness of so- called normal humans cannot. With Grandin, it seems that her supposed disability allows her to escape the familiar anthropocentric perspective that is guaranteed by language-based thinking. In this case, her autism is enabling. Grandin uses her so-called disabled thought- process to empathize with animals, and has had significant success in reforming animal treatment in the farming industry. Bosola believes that both human-animals, to use the term, and non-human animals are motivated by violence and predation, but that animal bodies are more suited for this form of existence. Keeping Bosola’s own critical animal theory in mind, Ferdinand’s lycanthropy can be viewed as a form of self-help, whereby he escapes the “disfigurement” mentioned by Bosola and achieves an “able-body” more fitted for violence. This particular aspect of the play would best be explored using ideas from critical animal theory and critical disability theory, two emerging veins of posthuman studies. In identifying as a wolf, Ferdinand escapes dualist conflicts between body and soul. As a wolf, Ferdinand adopts a simplified soul that is limited in ability. It is this limiting, however, that Ferdinand desires. The wolf body matches Ferdinand’s desire for simplicity, as animals were thought during the early modern period to be fundamentally mechanistic creatures.

13 CHAPTER I: DUALIST IMPRISONMENT AND AUTOMATED BODIES IN THE WORKS OF ANDREW MARVELL AND JOHN WEBSTER Although Marvell wrote “A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body” several years after The Duchess of Malfi was first performed, both Marvell’s poem and Webster’s play demonstrate an early modern model of humanism dominated by images of incarceration and suffering. Although the title of Marvell’s poem suggests that it will contain a dialogue or exchange between the body and soul, there is a noted absence of discussion or rebuttal between the poem’s two elements; rather, the poem might be thought of as a series of monologues, with body and soul each taking turns blaming each other for their miserable existence. The setting can be said to take place in the discursive space of “the human,” which Marvell constructs as a combination of material and immaterial elements. Marvell’s poem will serve as a useful artifact to further emphasize and illuminate the incarcerated and pained form of humanism that is deployed in Webster’s play. Before considering the metaphysics of Marvell’s poem, the philosophical tradition of thought regarding body and soul needs to be further contextualized. Plato is regarded as the patron saint of philosophical thought in the early modern period. Operating under the dynamic of Neo-Platonism, early modern thinkers altered, complicated, and sometimes contradicted Plato’s metaphysics. Renaissance historian Ernst Cassirer writes, “for Cudworth and More, as for Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, Plato formed but one link in that golden chain of divine relation, which besides him includes Moses and Zoroaster, Socrates and Christ, Hermes Trismegistus, and Plotinus. Plato for them is the living proof that the true Philosophy is never opposed to genuine Christianity” (9). Regardless of the transformations that Plato’s metaphysics went through in the early

14 modern period, Plato’s ideas on the nature of the soul remain the basis for seventeenth- century philosophical discussions of metaphysics. Generally speaking, Plato’s theory of metaphysics speaks of a reality that can only be found in a world of eternal, unchanging, and perfect Forms. The journey to the realm of Forms begins in the material world, and the purpose of philosophers is to recapture knowledge of those forms throughout their lives. The forms can be contemplated by the soul before it is incarnated in a body, but the reflective philosopher should seek knowledge of those forms by observing their simulated and reduced versions in the material world (Hamilton 17). As Cassirer points out, Plato’s metaphysics were considerably complicated by early modern ideas on religion and spirituality. Descartes’ notion of a distinct body and a distinct mind emphasizes that it is the soul that can only be truly in touch with the divine realm of Forms. The poem begins with a statement by the soul. The soul uses bodily images to describe its suffering inside the “dungeon” of the body. Marvell establishes at the onset that the soul is situated inside of the body, much like a prisoner in a cell. The soul states: O who shall, from this dungeon, raise A Soul enslaved in so many ways? With bolts of bones, that fettered stands In feet; and manacled with hands. Here blinded with an eye; and there Deaf with the drumming of an ear. (1-6) Here, we see the soul using images of bondage to describe its pain at the hands of the body. Marvell inverts the utility commonly ascribed to physical body parts to describe the soul’s feeling of imprisonment. The freedom of motion ascribed to hands becomes a means of manacling. The ability of the ear to hear becomes a means of deafening. Whereas eyes are used to see, here they blind. The body parts selected as metaphors share the commonality of being sensory body parts. All of the stimulation that hands, feet, eyes, and ears receive are attributed a negative value, and reinforce the soul’s perception of the 15 body as site of sensory temptation. The body offers a critique that also employs images of bondage and imprisonment: O who shall me deliver whole, From bonds of this tyrannic Soul? Which, stretcht upright, impales me so, That mine own precipice I go; And warms and moves this needless frame: (A fever could but do the same), And wanting where its spite to try,

Has made me live, to let me die. (11-18) The body further emphasizes the organizational structure of the soul-body relationship when it identifies itself as a frame. The body is the frame which the soul must reside in, and the soul is the pilot of the frame. Without the soul, the body would be quite like an inanimate rag doll. The movement or animation of the body implies the movement of the body toward death. As long as the body is alive and moving, it is also undeniably moving through time toward death. Since it is the soul that has given the body its life force, it is also the soul that has set the body on an entropic decline toward death. However similar the sufferings of body and soul may be, the ends that each desire essentially differ. Of course, the body and soul may escape their coextensive sufferings in death, when body and soul are separated, but this solution of death seems to benefit only one party. In death, the body ceases to exist, but the soul moves on to an immaterial realm. The incarceratory imagery that the soul uses implies a longing for escape or liberation. The soul does not want to live in the physical matter of the human body, but rather transcend it and move to an immaterial realm. The soul almost seems to imagine a life beyond its imprisonment in the body and that it will still have purpose and meaning once it is away from the body. The body shares the basic commonality with a prison that they both consist of 16 physical matter. This may seem a mere triviality, but this idea gains significance when considering the resolution that the body desires. A prisoner (soul) can leave the walls of a prison (body) and go elsewhere, but the prison (body) lacks significance when it is devoid of a prisoner (soul). The body, or prison, then only exists as a material entity that is devoid of significance. The soul’s reduction of the body to sensory apparatus suggests that the soulless body is merely matter in search of sensation. In this sense, the body concedes a certain dependency upon the soul for significance when it describes itself as a needless frame. Without the soul, the body merely leads an existence whose purpose is merely physical, and without any symbolic significance.

The reduction of the soulless body to a singularly purpose driven piece of matter might also be described as the reduction of the soulless body to a programmed life form. The needless frame does not vary in its purpose for existing, it simply exists to perform a mechanical function. The description of the body as a needless frame is synonymous with the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of automaton: “an organism that functions purely involuntarily of mechanically; an animal, insects, etc., not motivated by higher consciousness” (OED). Although often considered a science fictional concept, automatons were literal phenomena in the earlier modern period. In her writings on the origins of automatons, Jessica Riskin discusses the work of seventeenth-century French engineer Isaac de Caus, and his design for an automated owl (Riskin 602). It is also known that Leonardo DaVinci drafted designs for an automaton. Riskin’s analysis of automatons focuses on the eighteenth-century French inventor Jacques Vaucanson and his “defecating duck,” which was essentially a mechanized duck that ate corn out of the operator’s hand, digested it through its simulated stomach, and then excreted it out of its rear. That this popular early automaton was an animal is of particular interest to Riskin. Riskin acknowledges that the automated defecating duck was a mere simulation of the internal workings of a real duck, but that this automaton reinforced the idea of animals being merely mechanistic creatures. She writes that Vaucanson’s duck simultaneously 17 affirmed the eighteenth-century belief that “animal life is essentially mechanistic and that the essence of animal life is irreducible to mechanism” (612). Although the defecating duck is an eighteenth-century artifact, the principle of the animal as mechanism is also affirmed in writing of the mid-seventeenth-century, when Marvell wrote his poem. The association of automata with animals is based upon the idea of the automaton and the animal both lacking a rational soul. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton presents a hierarchical arrangement of metaphysical faculties. Burton interchanges the word “faculty” for “soul,” as he believes that the soul is the essence or spirit that establishes the boundaries for the capabilities of plants, animals, and humans.

The “vegetal soul” is attributed to plants, and describes the essence that allows a creature to find nourishment, augment itself, and reproduce (Burton 135).The vegetal faculty provides a creature the most basic of abilities, and is the essential characteristic of what Burton believes are lower lifeforms. The “sensible faculty” is attributed to animals, who also contain the vegetal faculty. Burton describes the “sensible faculty” as “an act of an organical body, by which it lives, hath sense, appetite, judgment, breath, and motion” (136). Although Burton identifies judgment as a faculty of the sensible soul, he concedes an extremely limited form of judgment for animals. The sensible soul has an apprehensive faculty, meaning that it is able to use the five senses and it is also able to make use of common sense, phantasy, and memory (137). The sensible soul can use common sense to judge colors and sounds; it can imagine colors, sounds, and other sensations; and it can remember the sensations it has encountered. It cannot, however, attribute any symbolic value to those sensory experiences, and it cannot reflect and judge upon its own doings (144). A rational soul ascribed to humans has “understanding, which is the rational power apprehending,” as well as “will, which is the rational power moving” (144). The vegetal soul and sensible soul are all subsumed and contained within the rational soul. The rational soul can do everything vegetables and animals can do, and more. Webster describes the rational soul as having a sense of self-awareness. 18 This taxonomizing of metaphysical faculties further complicates the dynamic of Marvell’s poem. The “needless frame,” the automaton, and the sensible soul all appear analogous. The soulless body, or needless frame, shares the characteristics of the automaton and the animal; all of its faculties are the result of feedback from material stimulation. It leads an existence devoid of self-awareness and self-contemplation, and acts only according to external stimuli. The “needless frame” that Marvell describes might best be considered as a human body imbued with a sensible soul, rather than no soul at all, as Burton’s writing suggests that the material human body can still function with a sensitive soul, but it can only function as a human when it has a rational soul. With a sensitive soul, the human body would be capable of doing only what animals can do, no more and, as I have demonstrated, the automaton and the animal are essentially identical in their limited capabilities. Both the automaton and the animal live an existence that might be described as programmed, as they are limited to only contemplating physical sensations. Marvell’s poem ends with a final expression of detestation by the body: What but a Soul could have the wit To build me up for sin so fit? So architects do square and hew, Green trees than in the forest grew. (41-44) Here, the body expands its criticism of the soul. Not only does the soul animate the body and begin the body’s journey toward an inevitable death, the soul is also described as that which designs the body. The body compares the soul to an architect, and believes that the human body was built with a disposition toward sin. The scholar Dennis Davison writes, “The architect soul can only discipline the body-tree with cruelty… and natural beauty is sacrificed, yet a new beauty is created” (324). Davison points out the imperfection of the mind-body dualist model. The body is driven toward sin, for which the soul punishes it. The body feels pain because of this punishment, but eventually the body will transcend the desire for “natural beauty” and pleasure, therefore attaining a new form of beauty. 19 Davison shows how the soul is a stronger force than the body. The soul cannot concede to the body, because man’s soul is configured as essentially good; the body has no choice but to endure the punishments of the soul and attain a new sense of beauty. Turning now to The Duchess of Malfi, I wish to demonstrate that there is a similar treatment of dualist conflict within the play. Bosola, like the characters in Marvell’s play, discusses the relationship between body and soul using images of bondage and incarceration and, like Marvell, privileges the soul as the superior and more powerful element in the soul-body dynamic. Just before the Duchess is murdered, she is visited by Bosola, who appears in the guise of a madman. The Duchess asks the disguised Bosola if he knows who she is. Bosola replies: Thou art a box of worm seed, at best, but a salvatory of green mummy. What’s this flesh? A little cruded milk, fantastical puff paste: our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in---more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth worms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o’er our heads like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison. (4.2.118-26) Here, Bosola uses several images to describe the bondage of the soul. He likens the soul in the body as a lark in a cage, implying that the soul is in need of liberation. He also describes the body as a prison, and states that the heaven over our heads is a tempting view of liberation that ultimately disheartens the soul. The soul can see liberation, but not attain it. Both with the lark image and the prison image, Bosola equates the liberation of the soul with upward motion. The lark that escapes the cage will be able to fly once it is freed, and the prisoner soul looks upward to heaven above, wishing that it could ascend and reach the immaterial realm of paradise that is above the material 20 world. Furthermore, Bosola’s diatribe seeks to subjugate the body as inferior to the soul. Bosola reduces the body to its biological functions. The body gets old and decays, and, to Bosola, this is pitiful. The description of the body as a “green mummy” invokes ideas of emptiness. A mummy might be thought of as a husk or frame that is devoid of energy or life, and is, in this sense, similar to the “needless frame” of Marvell’s poem. Bosola’s solution to the dualist conflict is death. For Bosola, death sets the soul free from its prison. This solution, however, is only of benefit to the soul. The body may be relieved of the soul in death, but it is also completely relieved of its animating force. In death, the body ceases to have any purpose at all. Bosola reduces the dependency of the body upon the soul as a form of weakness. Because the body is dependent upon the soul for animation, the body is configured as unsuitable and unworthy of the soul.The soul would be more appropriately placed outside of the body, where it does not have to habitate inside a domicile that relies upon the soul for significance. The framework I have so far established has served to demonstrate a similar metaphysical dynamic within the poetry of Marvell and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Both works confront the dualist conflict that arises from early modern thought on Platonism. A primary difference between the two texts is that Marvell applies the images of bondage and imprisonment for both body and soul. Webster uses the image of a prison only to describe the soul within the body. I believe that Webster restricts his use of the prison metaphor to the body to give further dramatic weight to his use of lycanthropy in the final act ofThe Duchess of Malfi, where the dualist conflict is resolved through the transformation of man into a werewolf. By restricting Bosola’s discourse on duality to a condemnation of the body, Webster opens up the possibility of the body being the source of resolution for conflicts between body and soul. Without a soul, the human body is dead and inanimate. In death, the conflict between body and soul is resolved; however, if the body can house a lesser soul than the rational one, then there is the possibility of resolution. A body without a rational soul may not be completely human, but, if it 21 contains a sensitive or animal soul, then they body can still function in a diminished, mechanistic capacity. As I will discuss in the next chapter, Ferdinand’s lycanthropy in the final act is prefigured by a proliferation of discourse on animals, particularly wolves, that occurs in the play’s earlier acts. The final image the audience is left with of Ferdinand before he appears as a lycanthrope is Ferdinand telling Bosola, “I’ll go hunt the badger by owl light,/ ‘Tis a deed of darkness” (4.2.324-5). Ferdinand then appears as a lycanthrope at the beginning of the next act. Although Ferdinand is first described as a lycanthrope at the beginning of Act 5, this scene of him in Act 4, where he pledges himself to deeds of darkness, might be considered the beginning of his transformation. In vowing to hunt the badger and commit a deed of darkness, it seems the Ferdinand is committing himself to a life of darkness. In this sense, he has adopted a lifestyle characterized by a singular drive: darkness. The association of badger hunting with darkness coupled with Ferdinand’s later identification as a wolf implies that the deeds of a wolf are deeds of darkness.At this point in the play, it appears that Ferdinand has committed himself to highly mechanized, or programmed, existence. The mechanization of Ferdinand might be considered as a solution to the character’s own dualist conflict of body and soul. The method of transformation will be discussed in the following chapter, as well as its relevance to disability theory and early modern notions of a humoral body.

22 CHAPTER II: HUMAN-ANIMALS AND THE HUMORAL BODY In Renaissance Self Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt uses the term “self-fashioning” to describe how “in the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process” (2). His study focuses primarily on the self-construction of six “talented middle- class men [who] moved out of a narrowly circumscribed social sphere and into the realm that brought them in close contact with the power and the great” (7). According to Greenblatt, the verb “fashion” derives from medieval English, signifying “the action or process of making, for a particular form of appearance, for distinct style or pattern... but it is in the sixteenth century that fashion seems to come into wide currency as a way of designing the forming of a self” (2). Greenblatt explores the way that different cultural mechanisms dictated how people should self-fashion and what they should fashion themselves after. Greenblatt describes several rhetorical handbooks of the Renaissance period that were “essentially compilations of verbal strategies” that offered readers “the power to shape their worlds, calculate strategies, and master the contingent” (162). In this chapter, I consider lycanthropy as a form of self-fashioning in The Duchess of Malfi. Ferdinand’s identification as a werewolf constitutes a willful designing or forming of the self, both in terms of corporeality and spirituality. Ferdinand’s self-fashioning is made possible because of his emotion-based models of epistemology and ontology. For Ferdinand, emotion is the basis for truth and reality, and even has the power to reshape material reality. Ferdinand rejects the epistemologies and ontologies of humoral theory in favor of non-biological emotion, but in doing so also creates a new form of rationalism that is based upon emotion. In Act V of The Duchess of Malfi, Ferdinand is found behind St. Mark’s church with a leg upon his shoulder, howling. Pescara asks the Doctor what Ferdinand’s disease is, to which 23 the Doctor replies, “A very pestilent disease, my lord,/ They call lycanthropia” (5.2.5-6). This initial discussion of lycanthropy is characteristically scientific. Pescara asks the Doctor to elaborate on lycanthropy, and the Doctor continues his scentific explanation: I’ll tell you: In those that are possessed with’t there o’er-flows Such melancholy humour they imagine Themselves to be transformed into wolves. (5.2.7-10) While the Doctor acknowledges that emotion, specifically melancholy, plays a role in the disease, emotion is still enveloped into a discourse on medicine and science. Emotion is not considered something spiritual, but rather as a function of the brain that can cause a disease of the imagination. Melancholy is mentioned previously in the play. After Delio reveals to Antonio that Bosola was captured and imprisoned while he was a soldier for the Cardinal, Antonio says: ‘Tis great pity He should be thus neglected, I have heard He’s very valiant. This foul melancholy Will poison all his goodness, for, I’ll tell you If too immoderate sleep be truly said To be an inward rust unto the soul, It then doth follow, want of action Breeds all black malcontents. (1.1.73-9) Again, melancholy is portrayed as a negative emotion, one that can poison goodness and create disfunction in an individual. Being in a highly emotional state is never treated as a distinct category of being but rather as a form of disability or abnormality. In order to fully understand the Doctor’s diagnosis, “melancholy humor” needs to be explained in relation to Galenic humoral theory, which posits that human body functions occur via four major humours, or fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile or choler, and black 24 bile or melancholy. In “Anatomy of Melancholy,” Robert Burton offers a survey of humoral theory beginning with its origins in antiquity. As a model for human physiology, humoral theory function extended into the seventeenth-century and might well be considered the dominant medical discourse of the early modern period. With this in mind, we can see that the melancholy that the Doctor refers to in The Duchess is not sadness but a physiological fluid that is maintained within the human body. One of the central notions of Galenic humoral theory is that an overflow of a particular humour can lead to madness. Galen emphasizes that the proper maintenance of humour levels is essential to human health. Giving consideration to models of health and normativity, Galen’s model categorizes health as a healthy moderation of fluids. Sickness or disease, according to Galen, stems from either a lack of fluids or an excess of fluids. Burton considerably complicates the relationship between melancholy and madness, defining them as two separate conditions. He writes, “madness is therefore defined to be a vehement dotage, or raving without a fever, far more violent than melancholy, full of anger and clamour, horrible looks, actions, gestures, troubling the patients with far greater vehemency of both body and mind, without all fear and sorrow” (122). Burton also offers a clinical definition of lycanthropy in his text. He writes, “lycanthropia, which Avicenna calls Cucubuth, others Wolf-madness, when men run bowling about graves and fields in the night, and will not be persuaded but that they are wolves, or some such beasts. Atius and Paulus call it a kind of Melancholy; but I should rather refer it to Madness, as most do” (122). The distinction between madness and melancholy may seem trivial, but is in fact important in recognizing the medical authenticity of the Doctor’s diagnosis. Ferdinand’s werewolfism is marked more by sadness and fear than by anger and violence. Although Burton categorizes lycanthropy as a form of madness, Ferdinand’s lycanthropy bears all of the symptoms of melancholy, and is even described as such. Although the Doctor’s diagnosis seems to draw heavily from Galenic humoralism and Burton’s writings on the subject, his diagnosis is not entirely dependent upon or reflective of Burton’s work. Webster utilitzes humoral theory as a 25 foil to Ferdinand’s non-scientific onto-epistemology. According to Burton, melancholy can be caused by several sources including anger and imagination. Although the Doctor claims that Ferdinand is imagining he is a wolf, the reader can tell from previous acts that Ferdinand’s lycanthropy is a result of his anger, not an overactive imagination. Early on in the play, Ferdinand is revealed as a character who is dominated by emotion. Both the Cardinal and Ferdinand are enraged when they first hear of the Duchess’ marriage, but it is Ferdinand who is overwhelmed by his emotions. Upon first hearing of the Duchess’ marriage, Ferdinand vows to murder his sister. The Cardinal is taken aback at his brother’s rage, and Ferdinand questions the Cardinal as to why he is not driven to violence by his anger. The Cardinal replies: Yes. I can be angry Without this rupture; there is not in nature A thing that makes man so deformed; so beastly, As doth intemperate anger. (2.5.55-58) Ferdinand’s character is marked by anger and violence. His nature differs from that of the Cardinal in that he does not view the overabundance of emotion as a form of disability or as being a deviation from the normal human state. Furthermore, the scenes that involve Ferdinand’s emotional outbursts are marked by a heavy use of animal metaphors. When Ferdinand imagines the Duchess laughing at him, he calls her an “excellent hyena” (II.v.39). The Cardinal calls her a “cursed creature” (2.5.31). After the Duchess is captured and imprisoned by her brothers and she enters a state of depression, Ferdinand states that the Duchess’ melancholy is fortified with “a strange disdain” (4.1.11). Bosola affirms this, saying that the Duchess’ emotional state is “like English mastiffs that grow fierce with tying” (4.1.13). Ferdinand then goes on to refer to the Duchess’ children as her “cubs” (4.1.33). This is a moment of irony, as Ferdinand is the one who will later identify as a wolf. Characters within the play find animal metaphors to have a strong signifying capacity for describing humans and, in the context of the play, the animal body seems to be a site of 26 truth, and the human body a site of illusion. In Act 1, Antonio and Delio offer one of the first description of Ferdinand. Speaking of Ferdinand, Antonio says, “What appears in him mirth is merely outside./ If he laughs heartily, it is to laugh/ All honesty out of fashion” (1.1.165-7). Antonio does not speak in animal terms, but instead he emphasizes that Ferdinand’s exterior mirth is in fact an illusion. Delio responds to Antonio’s description, saying, Then the law to him Is like a foul black cobweb to a spider, He makes it his dwelling, and a prison To entangle those shall feed him. (1.1.171-4)

Delio’s description of Ferdinand as a spider and his treatment of the law as a cobweb achieves much more poetic depth than Antonio’s, and is a more articulate and detailed description of Ferdinand’s character. There is a nuanced quality to Delio’s description, as if Antonio’s description needed to be translated into animal terms in order to be fully understood. Bosola’s commentary on physiognomy also reinforces the lack of truth to be found in the human form. After the Cardinal instructs Ferdinand to employ Bosola as a spy, Ferdinand and Bosola discuss Bosola’s troubled relationship with the Cardinal. Ferdinand tells Bosola that the Cardinal never really trusted him. Ferdinand suggests that the Cardinal’s distrust in Bosola might be related to “some oblique character” in Bosola’s face (1.1.226). Bosola replies, Doth he study physiognomy? There’s no more credit to be given to th’face Than to a sick man’s urine, which some call The physician’s whore, because she cozens him. He did suspect me wrongfully. (1.1.228-32) Bosola rejects the legitimacy of physiognomy. He believes that there is no truth to be found in observing the physical form of man. This theme is repeated again in the first act, when the Cardinal and Ferdinand confront their sister and instruct her not to remarry. Ferdinand uses 27 naturalistic imagery to describe the court setting: You live in a rank pasture here, i’th’ court There is a kind of honey-dew that’s deadly: ‘Twill poison your fame. Look to’t. Be not cunning: For they whose faces do belie their hearts Are witches ere they arrive at twenty years, Ay, and give the devil suck. (1.1.299-304) Ferdinand describes the court as a rank pasture, and the sexual temptations offered by court members as a sort of forbidden fruit. Again, the difference between body, in this case the face, and soul, spoken of as the heart, is reinforced. In this passage, however, Ferdinand extends natural imagery not only to individuals, but to the court. Ferdinand complicates the animal metaphor by not claiming that not only are the people around him like animals, but that the court environment itself is like a natural space. Twentieth-century literary scholar Gail Kern Paster describes the relationship between “psychological materialism” and the construction of animal similies in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Describing Macbeth’s comparison of himself to a bear, Paster writes, “because it is spoken by Macbeth about himself in relation to an environment made up of surrounding humans, the simile’s larger effects draw us into his state of mind—serving not to bestialize him but rather, as phenomenological figuration, to convey the heightened texture of his self-experience” (121). I would contend that there is a similar analogic relationship between Ferdinand’s identification as a werewolf and the actual ontological space that Webster’s play occurs in. In identifying as a wolf, Ferdinand not only comments on his identity and his own body, but comments on his own role in the world and the nature of that world. Webster’s audience can not only get to know Ferdinand better through his identification as a werewolf, but further understand the complications of the world Ferdinand inhabits by seeing how his werewolfism extends outwards. When Ferdinand becomes a wolf, it is not as if he is out of place, a predatory animal that has wandered into a court. Instead, Ferdinand is a creature 28 suitable to the court environment, which he configures as a natural and open space. Returning to Ferdinand’s lycanthropy, the Doctor continues to describe the discovery of Ferdinand behind St. Mark’s church: Said he was a wolf, only the difference was, a wolf’s skin was hairy on the outside, his on the inside; bad them take their swords. Rip up his flesh, and try. Straight I was sent for, And having ministered to him, found his grace Very well recovered. (5.2.15-20)

In this instance, where the specific attributes of Ferdinand’s lycanthropy are articulated, Ferdinand becomes something that exists beyond the traditional tenets of humanism. Firstly, Ferdinand’s physical identification of a wolf, the belief that he has transformed, violates the idea that the human body is fashioned by god and is unable to change its form. When Ferdinand states that the “only difference” between him and a wolf is that he is hairy on the inside, he implies that his interior identity, or soul, is that of a wolf’s. In this instance, Ferdinand rejects the humanist notion of the soul being essentially good. Ferdinand’s soul is predatory, like a wolf’s. As the Doctor continues his diagnosis, Ferdinand complains of sore eyes, for which the Doctor offers a remedy: “the white of a cocatrice’s egg” (5.2.63). The Doctor’s rhetoric is primarily medical, as his discussion of lycanthropy involves a diagnosis of the disease and treatment of it. Ferdinand refuses the Doctor’s treatment. He says, “Physicians are like kings, they brook no contradiction” (5.2.65). Ferdinand’s self-identification as a wolf and his rejection of the Doctor’s diagnosis is a significant instance of self-fashioning within the play. When Ferdinand states that doctors “brook no contradiction,” he rejects the Englightenment values of science and rationality as ways to produce truth and interpret reality. Ferdinand, instead, seems to suggest that truth and reality is to be interpreted by emotion. The Doctors may think, according to humoral theory, that emotion plays only a minor role in the creation 29 of melancholy, but for Ferdinand there is no chemical or humoral significance to his lycanthropy. Ferdinand’s new form of thinking enables him to fashion himself a new body, one that better reflects his true self and the world around him. For Ferdinand, physical reality can be altered by one’s emotional state. At the same time that he rejects scientific rationalism and humoral theory, Ferdinand also produces a new form of rationality that is based on emotion. Ferdinand attempts to make his body better reflect his soul, so that others can know the nature of his soul by looking at his body. If others can see that his body is that of a wolf, then they can deduce that his soul is inherently predatory, as he imagines a wolf’s soul to be. Others won’t need to wonder what hides inside Ferdinand because his exterior form will implicitly guarantee a soul that is not guided by any traditional human morality. Because he is attempting to make his true self more observable, Ferdinand shows a desire to make spiritual analysis a rational task, rather than an emotional or intuitive one. When other characters look at Ferdinand, they will now know exactly what his true motivations are. Ferdinand attempts to make exteriority reflect interiority. His methodology is to allow emotion to achieve physical actuality. Since, to Ferdinand, emotion is the truth of all things, then the truth of the body cannot be derived from anatomy or medicine, but only from emotion. For Ferdinand, it is truer that he has the body of the wolf, as decided by his emotional onto-epistemology, than it is that he has a human body with a diseased mind, as the Doctor has decided according to his scientific mode of thinking. In Marvell’s poem, we can almost imagine the possibility of the human body losing all of its sensory apparatuses and therefore becoming immune to temptation. This is, of course, not possible according to Marvell, as the body is destined by fate to be the center of temptation. If the body were to lose its capacity for physical pleasure, however, then it would come to better reflect the soul. With Ferdinand, in contrast, the soul is not moral or good, but inherently evil. For Ferdinand, then, the problem with the traditional human form is that it is not physically suited for the heightened degree of evil and violence that the soul demands. 30 Ferdinand’s ideas on the non-functionality of the human body are relevant to critical animal writing of the early modern period. Specifically, Ferdinand’s ideas resemble those in the writings of George Wither. In Wither’s 1635 A Collection of Emblemes, he presents animals as creatures characterized by completeness. Animals demonstrate a natural sufficiency in their embodiment; Wither offers a drawing of a crocodile, followed by a listing of weapons. Wither claims that the weapons of man often fail. Instead, he suggests that humans must be like animals, who have embodied weapons. He writes: If, therefore, thou thy Spoylers, wilt beguile, Thou must be armed, like this Crocodile;

Ev’n with such nat’rall Armour (ev’ry day) As no man can bestowe, or take away: For, spitefull Malice, at one time or other, Will pierce all borrowed Armours. (112) Wither’s crocodile is characterized by its natural armor. While the bodies of all creatures can be said to be suffering from entropy and moving toward death and decay, Bosola and Wither both suggest that there is something inherently superior in the non-human animal body. The purposefulness of the animal body is emphasized in this instance. According to Bosola, the human body is not engineered to serve any particular purpose, except to deceive. If the human body had claws and fangs, however, it would be better suited to serve the desires of the soul. Ferdinand’s lycanthropy might better be thought of in terms of realization, rather than transformation. He realizes the inability of the human body to outwardly project his interior motives. For Ferdinand, the animal is a creature that is congruous in body and soul. The animal has a soul that is limited in its self-awareness, and limited self-awareness is what Ferdinand desires after the murder of his sister. In film and literature, werewolf transformations are often violent and painful experiences. The lycanthropic subject seems to struggle to stall the transformation by writhing and struggling. They warn others to run before the transformation completes itself. In The Duchess of Malfi, however, Ferdinand 31 welcomes the lycanthropic escape from humanity and into animality. His transformation into a wolf means that he will no longer operate with a dibilitating sense of morality or the self- consciousness specific to creatures with rational souls. Lycanthropy also seems to benefit the community around Ferdinand, as it makes visibly transparent the nature of Ferdinand’s interior motivations, which would have otherwise been obscured by his human body.

32 CONCLUSION In this thesis, I have demonstrated the way that Ferdinand refashions his body by way of psychological materialism in the last act of The Duchess of Malfi. Humoral theory, an early modern model of bodily functions, is deployed as a diagnosis for Ferdinand’s lycanthropy, but Ferdinand rejects the notion that emotions have physiological origins; which is to say that Ferdinand’s lycanthropy is not a matter of excess black bile, or melancholy. The play also offers a transgression of certain metaphysical doctrines dominating humanist discourse of the early modern period. According to Ferdinand, even though the body is site of temptation and pleasure in, it is not well equipped for the level of evil that the soul demands of it. In corporeally refashioning himself as a wolf, Ferdinand fashions himself a body that is more suited to what his emotions demands. Because Webster uses such a multitude of animal metaphors, and often uses one animal to describe several characters, there is an opportunity to see the reductionist nature of animal metaphors in the text. For Ferdinand, the wolf is a creature of darkness and dominated by its predatory instinct. For the Duchess, however, the wolf is characteristically maternal. The refashioning of the human body in the play is given further significance due to Bosola’s discourse on the disfigured body. Bosola configures the “outward form of man” as being inehrently disfigured and, in doing so, inverts traditional models of bodily normativity. The refashioning of one’s self as an animal to escape a form of disability marks an interesting intersection of critical animal theory and critical disability theory. Animals are often configured as being “less than” human, as are disabled individuals often represented as “less than human.” For Bosola, however, disabled individuals, specifically individuals that are lycanthropes, are more human than the ordinary person. The disfigured individual better represents the nature of the soul.The ordinary human 33 body creates the illusion that there is a beautiful soul underneath. In identifying as a wolf, Ferdinand simultaneously mitigates dualist conflicts regarding the discontinuity between body and soul, but also humanizes “the animal” by ascribing to it several human characteristics. I believe that there is still much critical work that can be done with Webster’s play, particularly in the field of disability studies. At multiple points in the play, Bosola speaks of the human body as being inherently deformed. Like Ferdinand, Bosola rejects early medicine and substitutes it with his own philosophy. Models of normativity and their relationship to the category of “disabled” are central to the critical work of noted disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. In Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, Garland-Thomson discusses disability in American culture, but her basic framework of determining disability according to normative body criteria is relevant to representations of disability in any culture of any time period. Thompson’s work touches upon issues of bodily difference and deformity, which are significant elements inThe Duchess of Malfi. She writes: The freak, the cripple, the invalid, the disabled—like the quadroon and the homosexual—are representational, taxonomical products that naturalize a norm comprised of accepted bodily traits and behaviors registering social power and status. Thus translated, physical difference yields as a cultural icon signifying violated wholeness, unbounded incompleteness, unregulated particularity, dependent subjugation, disordered intractability, and susceptibility to external forces. (44) As Thomson demonstrates, the disabled subject is often regarded as incomplete and dependent upon others. Disability, as she shows, is constructed as an inability to complete certain tasks on one’s own. The disabled subject is represented as unable to complete the tasks that the able-bodied subject can do. This is inherently problematic, as disabled individuals frequently demonstrate the ability to complete the same tasks, albeit in 34 different ways, that able-bodied persons do. Able-bodiedness, then, is not only the ability to complete certain tasks, but to complete them in a specific way. In Act 2, Bosola confronts the Old Lady after she has painted her face with makeup. The meditation he delivers is significant in terms of the play’s discourse on animals and disability. Bosola says: Observe my meditation now. What thing is in this outward form of man To be beloved? We account it ominous If nature do produce a colt, or lamb,

A fawn, or goat, in any limb resembling A man; and fly from’t as a prodigy. Man stands amazed to see his deformity In any other creature but himself. (2.1.45-52) Bosola’s word choice is significant in this section of the play. When he specifically says “outward form of man,” he is implying that there is an interior identity of man, thus rooting his discourse within the realm of dualism. He goes on to describe instances of disfigurement, specifically where human features appear in animals.This commentary prefigures Ferdinand’s lycanthropy later on in the play, as Ferdinand’s werewolfism is an instance where animal features appear in the human body. Bosola specifically uses the word “deformity” to describe a “normal” human body. In this instance, we see the traditional model of normativity inverted. The “outward form of man,” that which Bosola identifies as the body that is beloved, , is now inverted within the traditional model of normativity. That which is commonly viewed as normal, “the outward form,” becomes disfigured. By Bosola’s logic, it is suggested that the transgressive body that was once thought of as disabled now occupies that status of “able-bodied.” While there is great value in considering early modern texts in regard to new critical frontiers like disability studies, I think that the greatest significance ofWebster’s 35 play might be a historical one. Before The Duchess of Malfi, lycanthropes appeared mostly in mythology and folklore. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lycaon is transformed into a werewolf after attempting to kill Jupiter. Lycanthropy is, in this case, a form of punishment the gods bestowed upon a human. In The Satyricon of Petronius, Niceros tells a story wherein he witnesses a companion turn into a wolf while walking in the moonlight. Since The Duchess of Malfi, lycanthropy has been utilized by novelists, filmmakers, and visual artists as a tool to pursue themes relating to the issue of duality. The popularity of young adult literature such as the Twilight series is a testament to the creature’s signifying capacity. Webster’s play, however, remains something of a dark horse in discussions of werewolfism. It is one of the earliest dramatic representations of werewolfism, yet the rich characterization of lycanthropy thatWebster presents seems disregarded by later novelists and filmmakers that produce creative works about werewolves. The text I see as having many direct connections to John Webster’s play is director Joe Dante’s 1981 film The Howling. In The Howling, therapist George Waggner invites traumatized news reporter Karen White to his self-help colony on the California Coast after a near fatal encounter with a werewolf. Waggner’s retreat is occupied by a diverse group of individuals, including a nymphomaniac and several other married couples. All of the patients at the resort also happen to be werewolves. The film’s opening lines link animal identity with the self-help. Waggner, while being interviewed on television, states: Repression. Repression is the father of neurosis, of self-hatred. Now, stress results when we fight against our impulses. We’ve all heard people talk about animal magnetism, the natural man, the noble savage, as if we’d lost something valuable in our long evolution into civilized humanbeings. Now there’s a good reason for this. (The Howling) Waggner’s self-help program aims to help werewolves understand their lycanthropy as 36 an enabling form of subjectivity that evolution has eliminated over time. The film contains several hammy inside references to other texts dealing with lycanthropy. A copy of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” even appears on screen for a brief moment. Omitted from the list of cultural references that Dante inserts into his film is any mention of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, which contains one of the earliest representations of lycanthropy in drama. It may seem odd to draw a connection between a 1981 horror film and an early modern play; however, both Dante’s The Howling and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi portray lycanthropy as a form of self-help, and treat non-lycanthrope humans as disabled persons. Just as Dr. Waggner has his own unique view of medicine and self-help, so does

Bosola. Both, however, prove to be ineffective. It seems that lycanthropes are destined to be tragic creatures. While lycanthropes attempt to embrace their animality and become empowered by it, their animality also seems to be the one fact that guarantees their demise. The many animal images in The Duchess of Malfi open up the reader to an alternate vision of the Malfian court. The animalized version of the court is a much more textured setting, and it seems that greater understanding of the play’s setting and characters can be achieved if their outward humaness is disregarded. As Webster demonstrates multiple times in the play, outward appearances are deceiving. When the identities of characters are considered in non-human terms, greater truths are revealed. The animals that Websters uses as metaphors and the relationships between those animals reflects a courtly ecosystem dominated by predatory creatures.

37 WORKS CITED Boguet, Henri. “Discours des Sorcerier: Of the Metamorphosis of Men into Beasts.” 1602. A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves in Western Culture. Ed. Charlotte F. Otten. New York: Syracuse UP, 1986. 77-90. Print. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. 1638. Kila, MT: Kessinger, 1991. Print. Cassirer, Ernst. The Platonic Renaissance in England. Austin: U of Texas P, 1953. Print.

Davison, Dennis. “Marvell’s ‘The Definition of Love.’”George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets. Ed. Mario A. DiCesare. New York: Norton, 1978. 322-30. Print. Enterline, Lynn. “Hairy on the In-side’: The Duchess of Malfi and the Body of Lycanthropy.” Yale Journal of Criticism 7.2 (1994): 85-129. JSTOR. Web. 7 January 2013. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Print. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980. Print. Hamilton, Walter. “Introduction to Phaedrus.” By Plato. New York: Penguin, 1973. 4-9. Print. Hirsch, Brett. “An Italian Werewolf in London: Lycanthropy and The Duchess of Malfi.” Early Modern Literary Studies 11.2 (2005): 1-43. JSTOR. Web. 7 October 2013. Howling, The. Dir. Joe Dante. Perf. Dee Wallace and Patrick Macnee. AVCO Embassy Pictures, 1981. Film. Lehmann, Courtney, and Bryan Reynolds. “Awakening the Werewolf Within: Self-help, Vanishing Mediation, and Transveraslity in The Duchess of Malfi.” Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations. Ed. Bryan Reynolds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 227-39. Print. 38 Marvell, Andrew. “A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body.” George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets. Ed. Mario A. DiCesare. New York: Norton, 1978. 201-5. Print. Paster, Gail Kern. “Melancholy Cats, Lugged Bears, and Early Modern Cosmology: Reading Shakespeare’s Psychological Materialism Across the Species Barrier.” Reading the Early Modern Passion: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Ed. Gail Paster. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press. 2004. 113-129. Print. Reynolds, Bryan. “Transversal Poetics and Fugitive Explorations: Theaterspace, Paused Consciousness, Subjunctivity, and Macbeth.” Transversal Enterprises in the

Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations. Ed. Bryan Reynolds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 1-26. Print. Riskin, Jessica. “The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life.” Critical Inquiry 29.4 (2003): 599-633. JSTOR. Web. 16 June 2013. Tricomi, Albert. “Historicizing the Imagery of the Demonic in The Duchess of Malfi.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34.2 (2004): 345-72. JSTOR. Web. 5 June 2013. Tricomi, Albert. “The Severed Hand in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 44.2 (2004): 347-58. JSTOR. Web. 7 October 2013. Webster, John. The Duchess of Malfi. Ed. Brian Gibbons. London: A. & C. Black, 2001. Print. Wither, George. A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne. 1634. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1975. Print. Wolfman, The. Dir. George Waggner. Perf. Lon Chaney, Jr. and Claude Raines. Universal Pictures, 1941. Film.

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