KNAVES AND SHAPE-SHIFTERS: WEBSTER'S MALCONTENTS, CLASS AND THEATRICALITY ZN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
by
Roberta Ellen Barker
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia Septmer, 1997
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and
For Shannon In Honour of Her Johnny Webster Impression
"Milly recognized her exactly in words ...: '1 shall never be better than this. "' -- Henry James, The Winss of the Dove TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Contents ...... v Abstract Abbreviations Used ...... vii Introduction: Social Actions: The Playhouse World of the Malcontent . 1 Chapter One: Desire and Distance, Or, "1s This the End of Service?". 32
Chapter Tuo: The Art to Hide: The Malcontent and His Lady ...... 63 Chapter Three: "Another Voyagen: Death and the Malcontent ...... 100 Conclusion: "Whether-Either": John Webster Among the Actors ...... 129 Works Cited ...... 152 ABSTRACT "It may appear to some ridiculous / Thus to talk have and madman," remarks Flamineo, the witty malcontent in John Webster's The White Devil, "But this allows my varying of shapes, / 'Knaves do grow great by being great men's apes" (IV.ii.237-241). Both Flamineo and his counterpart in Webster's other major play, the hireling villain Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi, are characterized by their attempts to climb socially through virtuoso performances. Wnaves and Shape-Shifters" examines Webster's characterization of his malcontents in relation to early modem responses to the social power of theatricality. The Introduction looks at early modern English social relationships in terms of the uses, attractions and dangers of performance in this culture. Relating Webster's malcontents to their theatrical ancestors, it suggests preliminary links between these figures and the performative culture of early modem England- Chanter One examines the relations between Flamineo and Bosola and their aristoctatic patrons, Brachiano and Ferdinand, which resemble the early modem player's relationship with his audience in that both reflect the interdependency of actor and spectator. Because of this interdependency, the malcontent is frustrated in his effort to achieve a social position which might help him to evade his patron's power. Chanter Two suggests that Webster's malcontents seek to compensate for the limitations that plaque their social performances by manipulating the personae of the women closest to them. Vittoria and the Duchess, however, are less passive puppets than active self- fashioners, and the relations between the malcontent and his lady suggest the fluidity of the boundary between men and women in a society where gender identity rests largely on performance, Chanter Three examines the metatheatrical death scenes of Flamineo and Bosola in the context of early modern English responses to death and of the power relations between early modern actors and playhouse audiences. Although the malcontent's attempt to achieve a stable social position fails, as a rnaster actor he still attains an important form of power in a world where identity is constituted through the shifting dialectical relationship between performer and spectator. The Conclusion looks at Webster's own life, his views on acting and his additions to John Marston's The Malcontent, and argues that the playwright, like his malcontents and the actors who played them, was involved in the struggle to perform a socially powerful self. Webster's work suggests that theatricality can be a tool either of oppression or of social change, and that self-conscious actors like Flamineo and Bosola, despite their apparent powerlessness, can achieve a complex form of social agency. ABBREVIATIONS USED
Duchess -- John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi Khite Devi1 -- John Webster, The White Devil Induction -- The Induction to The Malcontent, in John Marston, The Malcontent
vii Introduction Social Actions: The Playhouse World of Webster's Malcontents
And besides, to speak truth, in base times active men are of more use than virtuous. -- Francis Bacon, "Of Friends and Followers~
By the playwright's own account, the first performance of John Webster's The White Devi1 was not a popular success. In his epistle to the reader of the play's first published edition, Webster blames the disappointing reception of his work on problems specific to the playhouse at which The White Devil premiered in 1612. The author complains that his tragedy was acted, in so du11 a time of winter, presented in so open and black a theatre, that it wanted (that which is the only grace and setting out of a tragedy) a full and understanding auditory: and that since that time 1 have noted, most of the people that corne to that playhouse, resemble those ignorant asses (who visiting stationers' shops, their use is not to enquire for good books, but new books)[.] (5) The playhouse in question was the Red Bull, which Bradbrook describes as "[a] square im-yard, open to the weather,
...converted in 1605 when the Queen's Men moved in ...[and] given to al1 kinds of spectacle: fireworks, big built-up displays" (120). The Red Bull was often described as Vrequented by Citizens, and the meaner sort of People" (Wright cited in Gurr 1980:199), so that Webster's complaints about the Red Bull's detrimental effect on The White Devil can be read as class-based, a slur against the ignorant citizen audience which is too uneducated to understand his experiment in tragic dramaturgy. This audience, however, is not merely comprised of "ignorant asses," but of ignorant asses with pretensions to aesthetic judgement. These people, after all, are the sort who visit wstationersl shops." Theytrenot illiterate bumpkins, but they are interested in novelty rather than quality, seeking new books rather than good books, new plays rather than good plays. In other words, Webster would seem to be allying himself with the conservative order in his society which looked disdainfully dom its nose at the upstart mercantile classes whose newfangled social and economic attitudes caused them, as John Ryder remarked in Commendations of Yorkshire (1588), to "despise their old fashions if they cCould] hear of a new, more commodious, rather affecting novelties than allied to old ceremonies" (cited in Knights
Such a reading of The White Devil's preface is complicated, however, by the fact that Webster is addressing himself "to the reader," stating his determination to
"present [his play] to the general view" (5) in print form. In fact, the playwright is supplying the upstartsl appetite for new books, although he mitigates this fact by the strong implicaticn that his book is also aood -- that it, unlike the theatrical run of The White Devil, will in fact "last three agesu (White Devil 6). Some have gone so far as to argue that Webster's work is part of a cultural shift from stage to page; in this vein, Andrea Henderson suggests that Webster's second major play, The Duchess of Malf if 'lis in fact anti-theatrical and reflects the movemenl toward a literary culture which privileges private reading" (206). The ambiguities inherent in the preface to The White Devil are amplified by the epilogue Webster appended to his play. "For the action of the play," he mites,
'twas generally well, and 1 dare affirm, with the joint testimony of some of [the players'] own quality (for the true imitation of life, without striving to make nature a monster), the best that ever became them: whereof as 1 make a general acknowledgement, so in particular I must remenber the well-approved industry of my friend Master Perkins, and confess the worth of hfs action did crown both the beginning and the end. (152) Far from simply blaming The White Devilfs failure on the limitations of the theatrical apparatus, Webster implies that the of the Queents Men, the Company resident at the Red Bull, was one of the redeeming points of the experience. Indeed, he goes so far as to praise Richard Perkins, "the young leading actor of the Red Bull Company" (Bradbrook 119), for having "crowned" his play. In some sense, Perkins' performance is credited with having completed The White Devil, or with having been the play's chief ornament, thanks to the player's expert ability to give public being to Webster's words, The playwright's praise of the Queen's Men for "the true imitation of life, without striving to make Nature a monsterfrsounds perilously like a response to puritan and other anti-theatrical polemicists who viewed the "imitation
of life" offered by the stage in the terms irnplied by the title of William Rankins' 1587 tract, A Mirrour of Monsters,
For the anti-theatricalists, the player embodied al1 that
was monstrous and threatening about early modem English
society; John Cocke wrote that a common player is "but a shifting cornpanion" (in Chambers 257), and, indeed, the
protean and (at times) shockingly lucrative shifts of such a man may well have seemed like the very image of a monstrous society which "despise[dJ,..old fashions if lit could) hear of a new, more commodious," By reflecting back, and even magnifying or reinforcing, such social tendencies, the player constructed by the anti- theatricalists did indeed "strive to make nature a Monster." Webster's assertion that the Queen's Men presented, rather,
"the true imitation of lifew becomes even more contentious when one considers that the actor he singles out for praise,
Richard Perkins, probably played Flamineo, the witty social-
climbing malcontent and pimp to his own sister whose role dominates The White Devi1 by virtue of its sheer length alone. In other words, the master actor Perkins was playing a master actor of a different sort, a brilliantly histrionic courtier who at one point in the play turns to his theatrical audience and remarks,
It may appear to some ridiculous Thus to talk have and madman; and sometimes Corne in with a dried sentence, stuffed with sage. But this allows my varying of shapes, 'Knaves do grow great by being great men's apes,' (IV.ii- 239-243)
Louis Montrose suggests that the early modern English actor lived "a meta-social relationship to [his] fellow
subjects.. ,[as] the very personification of, ,.changeful social realities" (1996:39). What did it mean for a Jacobean audience to see a successful player impersonating a man who employs an outrageous forni of "experimental sensationalismn (Thomson 41) in his effort to climb the social ladder? Whatever their reaction may have been, Webster chose in his next play to experiment again with the figure of the malcontent whose abilities as a performer become entarigled with his determination to "thrive some wayM (I.i.38). Over the course of The Duchess of Malfi, Daniel de Bosola takes up and discards the masks of galley-slave, spy, Master of the Horse, rnelancholy "court-gallN (Li.23), benefactor and deadly enemy of the embattled heroine, hired torturer and assassin, tomb-maker, neglected good servant, criminal, red hot lover and revenger, to name but a few. His part, like Flamineo's, is the longest in his play; the first actor to play Bosola, John Lowin, gets top billing in the dramatis personae printed with The Duchess of Malfi, an honour considering that the next actor listed is Richard Burbage. In both of Webster's major plays, the shape-shifting malcontent emerges as a pivotal figure. 6 Just what about Flamineo and Bosola gives them this value in their cultural context? How does the representation of these figures relate to the questions about social mobility and class rivalry raised by the preface and epilogue to The White Devil? What have such characters to tell us about the complex relationship between early modern English society and the figure of the player, or, more generally, between that society and the idea of performance as a means of social self-definition? Flamineo and Bosola, like so many Jacobean authors, have uneasy, conflicted perspectives on their own social-climbing theatricality . "Sometimes," complains Flamineo, "when my face was full of smiles, / CI] Chlave felt the maze of conscience in my breastUf(V.iv.117-118); Bosola dies lamenting that he has been "an actor in the main of al1 /
Much 'gainst [his] own good natureff(V.v.87-88). Moreover, Webster represents his malcontents' involvement in highly performative social moments as a complicated dialectic between agency and passivity, self-fashioning and subjection, success and failure. Flamineo and Bosola offer us a richly ambiguous mirror in which to view an image -- true, monstrous, or otherwise -- of their author and his culture. II Perhaps the first question to be asked is how this mirror, the dramatic figure of the malcontent, was culturally constituted. The word "malcontentw itself deserves unpacking: Keller remarks that "in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Lit] carried the connotation of rebel," and was applied to a whole breed of theatrical characters primarily because of their "unwillingness to adjust to [their] social class" or position (5). While any critical tag tends to be reductive in the face of Flamineots and Bosola's rich range of contradictions and ambiguities, lfmalcontentflis as good a word as any to describe them, implying as it does the clash between a man of wit and ability and the unsatisfactory social situation in which he finds himself. Richard Mulcaster, writing in 1581, describes this clash when he remarks that while "wits well- sorted be most civil, ...the same misplaced be most unquiet and seditious.,.. [Hlow can it be but that such shifters must needs shake the very strongest pillar in the state where they live, and loiter without li~ing?~'(85). The only caveat 1 would add is that, while Flamineo and Bosola do seem to be condemned to VoiterCing] without living," they respond with concerted and sometimes devious displays of their ability and determination to "thrive some way." They are not simply malcontents, but theatrical malcontents.
This begs the question of what 1 mean by "theatrical." The OED defines "theatricalI1 as an adjective describing a manner, speech, gesture, or person "calculated for ef fect, showy, affected; of or suited to the theatre, of acting or 8 actors." Thus, to cal1 Webster's malcontents theatrical may
simply imply that their context is the playhouse. But these figures are more finely attuned to that context than some others in The White Devi1 and The Duchess of Malfi: both Flamineo and Bosola frequently address their audiences directly, building up a special intimacy with the theatrical spectator- Are such addresses -- or the malcontent's actions in general -- "calculated for effect, showy, affected"? 1 would suggest that the answer is yes, to the extent that they are the results of conscious choices on his part, deliberate manipulations of his public persona. What, then, is feigned by the theatrical malcontent -- his wit and ability, his discontent, or his sometirne deference to the system that holds him back? What is real? 1 prefer to remain wary of definitions of theatricality that would oppose it diametrically to reality, making the theatrical malcontent a necessary liar. Rather, I wish to define the malcontent's theatricality as his self-conscious situation in the playhouse and, within the courtly world of Webster's fictions, as his self-conscious plavins with his own public persona. Webster's malcontents, as Flamineo admits of himsel£, are expert shape-shifters. The relation of such shape-shifting to the truth of the malcontent's "inside" (Duchess II.i.82) remains to be explored.
As has been widely recognized (most notably in Spivakls Shakespeare and the Alleqory of Evil), the exuberant theatricality and the intimate relationship with their
audience associated with many early modem stage malcontents is an inheritance from the Vice figure of medieval English morality plays. Mankind's Titivillus, for instance, presages the seductive immorality of the malcontent when he brings poor Mankind to the point of perdition with a series of spectacular tricks and even attempts to draw the
theatrical audience into his web, promising that trTitivillus kan lerne yow many praty thingys" (1.572). Less remarked upon are the parallels between the strain of social protest that defines the malcontent and the social critiques voiced in many of the Corpus Christi plays of the fourteenth to the late sixteenth centuries. In the Wakefield Master's Mactacio Abel, for example, Cain's archetypal act of evil in killing his brother is associated with his resentment at the practice of tithing; on one level, the play may be read as a cautious critique of the abuses of feudalism. A similar critique is pushed to the front and centre of Marlowe's Edward II, where Gaveston, self-styled stage- manager of ItItalian masques by night, / Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing showsw (I.i.55-56), spits defiance at the feudal aristocracy which opposes him: Base leaden earls that glory in your birth, Go sit at home and eat your tenants1 beef, And come not here to scoff at Gaveston, Whose mounting thoughts did never creep so low, As to bestow a look on such as you. (II.ii.74-78) Although not usually classed among the officia1 malcontents of early modern drama, Gaveston can be read as one of a series of social climbers who combine the shape-shifting of the Vice with the critique of the established order inscribed in the playtexts of guild Corpus Christi dramas. His theatrical brothers include Jonson's Mosca, who joyfully describes his parasitic social climbing as the "art" of
"your fine, elegant rascal, that can rise, / And stoop,
almost together, like an arrow; ...And change a visor, swifter, than a thought!" (Vol~oneIII.i.23-24, 29). Among this band of unscrupulous brothers we might also include
Shakespeare's under-promoted Iago, who openly defies his
audience with the question, "And whatls he then that says 1 play the villain?" (Othello II.iii.336), and Edmund, whose expert dissimulation and Titivillian powers of seduction are propelled by the social predicament of the illegitimate son. Edmundls insistent question, "Why bastard? Wherefore base?" (Kins Lear I.ii.6), is far from being merely rhetorical; as we will see Webster's malcontents do, Edmund uses his intimacy with his audience to demand a serious reappraisal of his social position. This combination of theatrical power with social
stmggle may be read as an indication of a wider cultural association between the two. The ambiguous workings of this association are suggested in Middletonts The Chanaelinq by the figure of De Flores, who is at pains to remind the playhouse audience that Yhough my hard fate has thrust me out to servitude / 1 tumbled into thr world a gentleman't
(II. i. 48-49). Here, he seems to lay claim to some form of ontological superiority which contradicts or at least
mitigates his active humiliation at the hands of the aristocratic Beatrice-Joanna. Once he coxnmits murder at her behest, however, De Flores tells Beatrice-Joanna in no uncertain terms that their act has effectively erased the social distinctions between them, that it has given the lie to her fantasy of the essential difference between herself and her partner in crime. In his famous words, Beatrice is reborn as "the deed's creaturet' (III.iv.138), a construction particularly interesting for its social implications. If a deed can level the barriers of class between a servant and his mistress, then the question arises as to whether those barriers were ever stable, whether they ever represented something absolute, or whether they were based on actions -- on performances of difference -- and can subsequently be dissolved by performances of equation and equality. De Flores' statement takes place in the context of the
playhouse, where, of course all differentiation between stage characters is performatively constituted; what effect does this fact have on its socially subversive potential? Early modern English social theory has traditionally been described in terms of its utter repudiation of suggestions like De Flores'. The early modern English
subject, Knights tells us, was not enjoined to be "the deed ' s creaturett; " [cl oncord, not eqgalityttwas preached, and "[d]iffer~cesof rank and status were accepted as part of the natural order" (Knights 122). A sermon published in 1570 reminds the Elizabethan churchgoer that
Almightie God hath created and appointed al1 thinges in heaven, yearth and waters in a moste excellent and perfect ordre .... Every degre of people, in their vocacion, callyng and office, hath appoynted to then their duetie and ordre. Some are in high degre, some in lowe, some kynges and princes, some inferiors and subjectes, priestes and laimen, masters and servauntes, fathers and chyldren, husbandes and wifes, riche and poore, and every one hath nede of other,,,. Where there is no right ordre, there reigneth al1 abuse, carnall libertie, enormitie, syn and babilonicall confusion. (cited in Montrose 1996:SO-21) Montrose remarks that, by the time this sermon was preached, the society which it purported to construct was in fact experiencing "the dislocations of rapid change," and that, while the arriviste Tudor dynasty which occupied the top of the traditional social structure "sought to legitimate itself by means of its integration into a providentially ordered cosmos[,] ...it could not effectively contain.,.the social flux that it had helped to set in motion" (1996: 21) . One might suggest that part of the problem was in the very terms of that putatively legitimating providential order, which could be taken as pointing toward the flux it sought to contain. The problem is in the ubiquitous use in such documents of words like "office," which suggest that the subjectts place in this divinely appointed order is demonstrated and affirmed by his work; that is, the subject cannot simply be defined by the hereditary situation into which he is born,
but must actively inhabit his place in the order by perf orming his his Voice of the Last Trumpet (1550), Crowley bids his reader, "First walk in thy vocation, / And do not seek thy lot to change" (cited in Knights 123). One's vocation, or calling, is of course fixed in advance by the divine plan; but can a placement in
society which depends so much on the subject's willingness or ability to "walk in lit]" really be a stable one? The
instability is apparent in Henry Percy's 1609 advice to his son:
There are certain works fit for every vocation; some for kings; some for noblemen; some for gentlemen; some for artificers; some for clowns; and some for beggars; al1 are good to be known by everyone, yet not to be used by everyone. If everyone play his part well, that is allotted him, the commonwealth will be happy; if not then it will be defomed; but which is fit for everyone, maere? (cited in Knights 125)
Which, indeed? What if the artificer or the clown (the words for craftsman and peasant sound revealingly, almost dangerously theatrical) refuses to "play his part well," deciding that some other "partN is, in fact, more fitting for him? The performative terms of Percy's advice threaten to de-essentialize his argument that "there are certain works fit for every vocation," and the weary glibness of "If
X then the commonwealth will be happy; if Z then it will be deformed" seems to suggest that "the imprisoned Earl of 14 Northumberland" (Knights 125) is aware that the situation is
far from being so providentially simple. As Montrose suggests, by 1609 English society had for some time been the site of social upheaval so profound that Percy's rather cynical tone is unsurprising; the idea of "degree," the fixity of one's position as either gentleman
or clown, was under serious assault from a number of quarters, Fox one thing, as Stone remarks, ''the gentry was changing with unprecedented rapidity. Exceptionally large numbers of new families were forcing their way to the top,
exceptionally large numbers of old families were falling on
evil days and sinking into obscurity" (38). Lower ranks of the gentry and even the mercantile classes were bettering their positions by the purchase of land, honours, or university educations for their sons (one thinks, for example, of the ferociously determined social climbing of the Yellowhammers in Middletonls A Chaste Maid in Chea~side). Such social-climbing was symptomatic not simply of a sort of vulgar rapaciousness, but often of "a presumption of national destinyu inculcated into young men at the university and into other citizens by the diffusion of humanist ideology throughout English society (Whigham 1984:13); seeking both to serve and to be served, the early modern social climber attempted to situate himself honourably in relation to his culture. The result of this movement, as Frank Whigham remarks, 15 was that "an exclusive sense of aristocratic identity ...was being stolen, or at least encroached upon, by a horde of
young men not born to ittt(1984:s). The scions of such aristocratic families as remained stable struggled to differentiate themselves from these upstarts; so too, one presumes, did the sons of old families fallen on evil days, who, as De Floresf emphatic declaration of his lost gentility suggests, must have wished to distinguish themselves from low-born gate-crashers even as they engaged in the same attempt to (re-)gentle their condition.
Thus, al1 participants in the social struggle that centred around the embattled estate of the gentleman in
early modern England became, in some sense, the deed's creatures. The primary deeds in this war were the monetary or otherwise exchange-based transactions which raised one family or debased another. Economic arrival, however, does not necessarily imply acceptance or assimilation into a group; Gervase Holles speaks of the country gentry ennobled by Queen Elizabeth as "trotting cornpanionsu and Vnconsiderable persons" whose preferment caused "the bettes sort of gentry [to] decline the Courtw (95). Hollest slighting tenus imply an almost physical distinction between the fltrottingllnew and the (presumably imposing) old gentry, a ffsymbolicdemonstration of differences in kind between the ruling classes and others in the face of substantive evidence to the contrary" (Whigham 1984: 94). If "elite 16 identity had begun to be a function of actions rather than of bisth[,] ...achieved rather than ascribed" (Whigham 1984:5), then the social-climber needed, as Bosola puts it
in The Duchess of Malf i, to It lighten into action" (V. v. 10 ) . In Ambition and Privilese, Frank Whigham argues that early modern English courtesy books functioned as dictionaries of such symbolic actions, and that, Yirst promulgated by the elite in a gesture of exclusion [to demonstrate how far the parvenu was from embodying true nobility], ...[they were] then read, rewritten, and reemployed by mobile base readers [as performance manuals] to serve their own social aggres~ions'~(5-6). Whigham's work is an encyclopedic compendium of the tropes and gestures which constituted this dialectical process of social exclusion and aggression, beginning with the conservative mystification of social degree as absolute and providential we saw in that 1570 sermon. The tropes Whigham associates with ambitious men like Webster's malcontents include deceit (dissimulating one's true position in an order), self-deprecation and irony (bringing oneself closer to a desirable position by pretending to distance oneself from it), deference (asserting one's position in an order by courtly deference to its other members), and the nasty
tactics of the courtier who tries to stabilize his own position by devaluing or denying the efforts of another.
These are al1 tropes which we shall examine in more detail when we see them at work in the performative courts depicted by Webster in The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi- Perhaps the master trope of a11 is that described in the "second bible for English gentlemen1' (Simon 358). Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, as sprezzatura.
Castiglione's Count Ludovico describes it thus: [Hlaving thought many times already about how this grace [of courtliness] is acquired (leaving aside those who have it from the stars), 1 have found quite a universal rule which in this matter seems to me valid above al1 others, and in al1 human affairs whether in word or deed: and that is to avoid affectation in every way possible as though it were some very rough and dangerous reef; and ...to practice in al1 things a certain sprezzatura [nonchalance], so as to conceal al1 art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it. (43) S~rezzaturais the ability to perform without seeming to be performing; it governs al1 the other tropes of courtesy theory because without sprezzatura it becomes al1 too obvious that one is merely trying to imitate nobility, and trying too hard at that. As Francis Bacon puts it, "if behaviour and outward carriage be intended too much, it may pass into a deformed and spurious affectationw (cited in Whigham 1984:23). On the other hand, Count Ludovico's injunction to "conceal al1 art and make whatever is done or said armear to be without effort" (emphasis mine) implies that even the most nobly born aristocrat will not necessarily be able to perform al1 the gestures symbolic of nobility without paying any attention to them; if even s~rezzaturais a performance, then nothing is truly natural.
Natasha Korda summarizes the conundrum thus: s~rezzaturais the sine qua non of courtliness, insofar as it is able to fabricate the illusion of an authentic, natural grace by dissimulating its own constructeàness .... [Yet] [wlhat from one perspective appears to be a point of absolute saturation of courtly meaning, from another is...revealed to be the dissimulation of its fundamental lack ...a point of lack perceived as supreme plenitude, of pure difference perceived as identity. (44) Perhaps behind the most brilliant courtier's performances lurks the fear that his art will ultimately be exposed as a desperate attempt to dissimulate his lack of any essential, indestructible social identity. The courtly performer is painfully dependent on the people around him; as Kenneth Burke puts it, he is "the servant of the very despot-audience he seeks to fascinatett (cited in Whigham 37). As Stefano Guazzo notes in his influential 1574 courtesy book, Civil Conversation, "the judgement which wee have to knowe ourselves, is not ours, but wee borrow it of othersn (115). In The Secretaries Studie (1616), Thomas Gainsford writes that the aspiring courtier "must speake them faire whom Che] like[s] not; and smile where the heart swelles; and goe along even with the observation of Courtw (48). Every courtly actor stares into the eyes of his audience, seeking validation, but the fact that al1 courtiers are finally engaged in the same struggle means that the audience often has a vested interest in judging the performance a failure. Moreover, each member of an early modern court or other public arena of social struggle is simultaneously spectator and performer, watcher
and watched; thus, al1 are drawn into a kind of vortex of social desire, grasping at identities continually withheld.
However, there are means of trying to stabilize class identity by recourse to other systems of social differentiation, such as gender codes. Whigham rarely mentions gender relations in Ambition and Privilese, focusing on the male subject who is, he suggests, the primary performer on the courtly stage. Still, his analysis of the early modern prejudice against painted women is extraordinarily suggestive. Whigham argues that [iJt is no accident that antifeminist diatribe is the standard discourse for the blaring condemnation of cosmesis, for this is a case of pots accusing kettles. In terms of the larger stmggle with natural weakness -- a category including birth as well as beauty -- this cheap shooting promulgates a class of female whipping boys. (116) In Whigham's formulation, which recalls the anti-cosmetic rants of Webster's Bosola (II.i.23-40), the routinely castigated painted woman is a convenient stand-in, a displacement. "The mockery of another's self-fashioning disguises the insecure courtier's own predicament and perhaps serves as a catharsis for resentment at his own repulsive self-repair, possibly more slimy than any old woirtan's new fucus" (Whigham 1984:117). The painted woman, described by Castiglionek Count Ludovico as "so plastered ...that she seems to have put a mask on her face and ...shows herself only by torchlight, like wily merchants who display their cloth in a dark place" (65), is a mirror for the potentially monstrous self-fashioning of the courtier, but she also allows the courtier to lkanage [the monstrosity] by projecting it outwards" (Levine 18). Of course, women could also function as more positive vehicles for the social-climbing male's self-advancement or reassurance. On the most practical level, the matrimonial trade in women could help to solidify or improve social positioning; Stone notes that It is evident [frorn marriage statistics] that around the turn of the [sirteenth and seventeenth] centuries the growing financial embarrassrnent of the peerage drove them into a far more single-minded pursuit of wealthy marriages than had previously been their custom. The new peers created between 1603 and 1641 were men who had always had a sharp eye to the main matrimonial chance, and indeed this was often an important cause of their advancement. (617) Stone describes the comparatively straightforward financial transactions by which a wornan could improve her husband's position on the social stage. But a wealthy or socially prestigious marriage could reinforce the social-climber1s desired self-image in more performative ways, too. The early modern English wife was enjoined by womenls conduct books to be obedient to her husband, to function as his tllooking-glass"(Dod and Cleaver in Aughterson 81); cornpliance with such injunctions on the part of a woman with wealth or social clout could hardly fail to improve her husband's credit in the courtly arena. Such a wife would have been a valuable commodity whose purchase might demonstrate her husbandts arriva1 at her level; presumably, the family of a desirable unmarried partie would benefit from the same aura of ownership. Even a woman so highly placed as to be completely out of most men's matrimonial reach could improve their social status, as in Queen Elizabeth's choice of ''the gentlemen of greatest hopes ...to fil1 the most honourable roomes of hir household servantesu (Holles 94). The patronness' demonstration of favour, like the wife's demonstration of obedience, could improve a man's performative as well as his economic position,
Or so the theory nins; the reality was not so easy. Queen Elizabeth's favour waç notoriously capricious, often a case of here today, gone tomorrow; and a wife was a notoriously unreliable social tool who might refuse obedience to her husband with the same contempt shown to Camillo by Vittoria in The White Devil. Women were courtier's mirrors insofar as both were enjoined to "make Estimation [their] highest prize" (Brathwait 105), but, as
Elyot remarks, "we know nothing but by outward significations .,.[and] honour is but the estimation of the people, which estimation is not ...perceived, but by some exterior si-" (163). Brathwait begs his English
Gentlewoman "net to make faire and glorious pretences, purposely to gull the world ...[but to] be indeed what [she] desireCs] to be thought" (106). In much of the misogynist 22 literature of the period, howevet, woman is distinguished by the same ability which Puttenham saw in the essential courtier: "cunningly to be able to dissemble" (299)- And if women, too, are players in the great struggle for
"estimation," then, far from offering some form of stability, they may simply complicate the male search for a fixed place in the order. In fact, as Whighamrs example of the painted woman suggests, both sexes seem to be trapped in the same vicious cycle, precluded from changing their conditions by the frequently adverse reactions of the very audience they need so desperately to please.
Thus, the courtly stage chosen by Webster as the setting for his two major plays is revealed as a kind of insidiously desirable, histrionic black hole, where, in Gabriel Harvey's words, I1[j]t importes euerie negotiatour, discouerer, intelligencer, practitioner, and euerie wittie man continually to cast abowt, & scowre the coast. Still & still more & more" (cited in Whigham 1984:l). But what of that other stage, the stage of the Red Bull or the Blackfriars, the stage designated for the representation of such sites of cultural performance, the stage whicb stands in "meta-social relationship to ...changeful social realities" (Montrose 1996:39)? That stage may be a mirtor for other stages, but it is a sort of magic mirror, where the dialectic between performer and audience is seen in a new light. In Whigham's mode1 of the court, the audience from which the performer desires applause must be in a position of social superiority to him in order for its judgement to be truly valuable (thus, the final arbiter of a courtier's success or failure is the monarch). On the other hand, the playhouse audience, whose applause was begged in so many epilogues, was extraordinarily heterogenous. Sir John
Davies gives a vivid picture of the scene at the end of an early modern playhouse performance: When ended is the play, the daunce, and Song: A thousand townesmen, gentlemen, and whores... To issue al1 at once so forwarde are, As none at al1 can perfect passage finde. (cited in Gurr 1987~66) Gurr makes a convincing argument from contemporary documents that the typical playhouse audience did, in fact, resemble this melee, conforming to the description applied to it by Henry Fitzgeoffrey in 1617 when he spoke of the playhouse as "this Microcosme, Man's societie" (cited in Gurr 1980:201).
Moreover, as the citation from Davies implies, the power relations of the outside world did not necessarily apply inside the playhouse; gentlemen find no easier passage than whores. Gurr observes that "[i]t may not be wildly wrong to think of [citizens] and their lesser neighbours as forming a kind of silent majority in the playhouse" (1987:64). Jean Howard argues persuasively that womanrs status in a society which classified her as her husbandfs property and the object of his gaze was destabilized by fernale attendance at plays:
To whom, in such a context, does woman belong? Are her meaning and value fixed, or fluctuating? ...The antitheatricalists frequently commented on the disruptiveness of women who came to the theater, not only because they made themselves into spectacles, but also because they became spectators, subjects who looked. (78-79)
On the one hand, as Montrose forcibly reminds us, "there is considerable and familiar evidence to affirrn that the commercial theatre ...continued to maintain an important relationship to aristocratie and royal patronage, both financial and legal, throughout the Elizabethan-Jacobean period" (1996:87); the sheer mass of Documents of Control for the theatre reprinted in Chambersf The Elizabethan Staqe
attests to "the persistent concern of the state to regulate the drama, even while tolerating or supporting it" (Montrose
1996:86). On the other hand, the actual composition of the playhouse audience, like Webster's gripes about the Red Bull, suggests that artificers, women, clowns, and beggars had at Ieast as much direct influence on the success or failure of a play as did the "guardians of ...religious, social and political orthodoxy" (Montrose 1996:86).
If the audience of the performance dialectic described by Whigham was differently constituted in the playhouse than in the court, the position of the performer -- the "Cornmon Player," as Cocke called him -- was even more ambiguous. If "elite identity was...a ~ommodity'~(Whigham 1984:5), the player's was much more so, as Cockefs disgust with the Cornpaniest boasts about their aristocratic patronage implies: "howsoever he [the Player] pretends to have a royal
Master or Mistress, his wages and dependence prove him to be
the servaunt of the people" (in Chambers 256)- The Player,
Cocke suggests, is simply the courtier degraded: a tamed monkey performing, not for a prince, but for the rabble on
whose despicable applause he depends. Yet some antitheatrical writing suggests that the dependence was the
other way around; Anthony Munday writes that "the principal1
end of al1 [the players'] interludes is to feed the world with sights, and fond pastimes; to juggle in good earnest
the monie out of other mens purses into their owne handes" (in Chambers 212). The spectators are represented as needy, hungry to be "fed" with spectacle and amusement, whiie the
Players are nothing more than a bunch of slightly glorified swindlers: Yhey cosen and mock us with vain words, and we pay them good monie" (LG. cited in Mann 97).
They cosen and mock usN: these, of course, are the most familiar terms of antitheatrical discourse, constituting the imputation that a Player is fundamentally nothing more than a liar. What else is an hypocrite, in his true etimology," asks the most notorious anti- theatricalist of them all, William Prynne, in 1631, "but a Stage-Player, or one who acts anothers part[?]" (cited in
Barish 91 ) . The Player is a ltshifting companion, "act [ingl twenty parts and perçons at once for his advantagen (Burton cited in Barish 102). Unsurprisingly, Prynne voices his disgust with players' lies in the ter- of the most
conservative social theory : As God hath given a uniform distinct and proper being to every creature, the bounds of which may not be exceeded-..He enjoynes al1 men at al1 times, to be such in shew, as they are in truth ...[and] to act themselves, not others. (cited in Barish 92) Stephen Gosson's association of the player's hypocrisy with social evil is even more explicit; he writes that for a meane person to take upon him the title of a Prince with counterfeit porte, and traine, is by outwarde signes to shewe them selves otherwise then they are, and so within the compasse of a lye .... If privat men be suffered to forsake theire calling because they desire to walke gentlemen like in sattine and velvet, with a buckler at theire heeles, proportion is so broken, unitie dissolved, hamony confounded, that the whole body must be dismembred. (5, 7) In this way the Playerts activity on stage became a symhol of the dissolution of order occasioned by the kinds of performance that go on in Whigham's court and countless other sites of social contest. Moreover, the player was condemned as a parvenu himself, who, on the profits of his mendacious labour, contributed to the social evil he
represented on stage; thus, Gosson complains that "the very hyerlings of some of our players ...iet under gentlemens noses in sutes of silke, exercising themselves too prating on the stage, and common scoffing when they corne abroade, where they looke askance over the shoulder at every man, of whom the Sunday before they begged an almes" (in Chambers 204). Against this anti-theatrical tradition, whose roots lie both in Puritanism and in Platols determination to expel the lying artist from his commonwealth, stands the humanist tradition exemplified by Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dicmity of Man and other early modern texts which glorify man's ability "to transforme him selfe into what he most will[s], takynge like a chameleon the colour of al1
those things unto the whiche with thaffecte he is most nyghe" as his most godlike trait (cited in Barish 111). Was the player a brilliant example of man's noble ability to
rise to Olympian heights by his own will, merit, and effort, or was he simply a pernicious liar? Brachiano claims in The White Devi1 that "[w]oman to man / 1s either a god or a wolfrl (IV.ii.89-90). Most critical examinations of the
place of the player in early modern society seem to veer similarly between two absolute poles (see Barish 96-117, Worthen 10-69), limiting the possible readings of one of the most representative figures in a culture that was theatrical
on so many levels. There is evidence that at least some early modern playgoers, unlike contemporary critics, were capable of a sophisticated, ambiguous understanding of the actor's art (perhaps because so many citizens of early modern England practised some form of that art in daily life). As evidence of this, we have the tributes paid to Richard Burbage after his death. One of Thomas May's characters in The Heir praises Burbagels Hieronimo in The S~anishTracredv thus:
I have seen the bave paint grief In such a lively colour, that for false And acted passion he has drame true teaxes From the spectators. Ladies in the boxes Kept time with sighs, and teares to his sad accents As had he truely been the man he seemtd- (cited in Gurr 1980:lll)
The tribute is remarkable in that it suggests an ability to
recognize the element of "false / And acted passion1' in the player's art without treating that passion as an outright
lie. Many Jacobean writers, both pro- and anti-theatrical,
suggest that audiences accepted plays as real; Webster
himself, in his ItCharacter of an Excellent Actor, " argues that "what we see [the actor] personate, we think truly done before usn (43). Yet May's "Ladies in the boxes" are not so much dupes as CO-actors with Burbage, their motions keeping
time to his performance just as they would have done "had he
truely been the man he seemtd.It Are they the deluded targets of a falsehood, or is it simply that they have paid to see good acting and that, unlike the caurtly audience, they are willing ta appreciate what they see? Perhaps some members of this audience (the "ladies," for instance?) even get a specific form of pleasure from seeing an actor successfully personate a man whose manipulations of theatricality help him to bring dom a repressive order. Perhaps, as Montrose eloquently suggests, "if al1 the men and women [are], indeed, merely players[,] then people might go to the playhouse to learn, from experts, how to playw (1996:211). Then again, May still describes Burbage (affectionately?) as a knave.
III
One rnight argue that May's testimony to the spectators' attitude toward Burbage is bad evidence, the partisan tribute of a playwright. It remains useful because May's
positioning in this culture is pretty much that of the man we began with, John Webster. Where is Webster in al1 this?
He was "the son of a wealthy coach-maker, living at the
corner of Cow Lane and Hosier Lane, West Srnithfield, in the
parish of St- Sepulchre-without-Newgatel' and was born about
1580 (Bradbrook 1)- Most of his Iife centred, as Bradbrook
remarks, around the parish in which he was born, and he owed his education at the reputable Merchant Taylor's school to his father's guild membership (l), yet he was an ambitious
man who authored a spectacular Lord Mayor's pageant and an elegy to Prince Henry as well as The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi- His appeal to the reader of The White Devil, with its classical tags directed at those who (unlike the auditors at Vittoria's trial) understand Latin, suggests that Webster was himself engaged in a struggle for upward mobility in which his plays were a social "action"; yet that same appeal contains its slam to the upwardly mobile who are
interested only in what is new, not in what is good- Henry Fitzgeoffrey's depiction of Webster as "crabbed Websterio, / The playwright-cartwright (whether-either)" (cited in Bradbrook 169), though slighting, is perhaps a just representation of Webster's ambiguous position, a position
in its turn representative of the ambiguities we have seen in early modern English society. Such ambiguities seem to be everywhere- De Flores insists on his gentility but reminds Beatrice-Joanna that she is "the deed's creature"; discourses of order and stability seem to undercut themselves from within; one must perform in order to rise, yet courtly performances seem to cancel themselves out; women are anything but steady looking glasses for the men who seek to define themselves through their wives, daughters, sisters, patronesses. In the theatre things are even less clear, as dominant and marginal orders in society not only struggle for the right to judge the spectacle, but are actually mixed together in the playhouse audience. And the actor is the most mysterious cxeature of all, a jumble of cultural constructions. It would be Eoolish to look for definite, absolute answers to the questions that need to be asked about Webster's malcontents when such answers are so difficult to find in the culture that produced them. Rather, I hope to examine Flamineo and Bosola as figures through whom conflicting ideas about social struggle and theatricality are questioned and pla~edwith. 1 will be looking at Webster's malcontents in some of the social situations we have already seen: involved in the performative aaon between hereditary aristocrat and social climber, and in the desperate effort to stage-manage women's performances in
order to construct a stabilizing mirror for their own identities. 1 shall also examine Webster's representation of Flamineo's and Bosola's death scenes, moments of theatricality so intense that they spi11 over into metatheatricality. What can such moments tell us about early modern actors, audiences, and the "meta-socialw relation between the two? Like their creator and his culture, 1 would argue, Flamineo and Bosola evince a deeply ambivalent fascination with theatricality -- with "action" - - as one of the primary tools of social life. In his dedicatory poem to The Duchess of Malfi, Thomas Middleton praises Webster's achievement, writing that every worthy man 1s his owne Marble; and his Merit can Cut him to any Figure, and expresse More Art, then Deaths Cathedra11 Palaces, Where Royal1 ashes keepe their Court. (Duchess 4)
The questions of whether one can really be one's own marble, what sort of art might be needed to cut into the block of oneself, and just how violent the whole operation might turn out to be, are those asked by Webster's theatrical malcontents. Chapter One: Distance and Desire, or, "1s This the End of Service?"
-..but while these clothes were in the making, 1 perceived that cost would but draw more curious eyes to observe deformities* So that from these checks a new counsell rose up in me, to take away al1 opinion of seriousnesse from these perplexed pedegrees; and to this end carelessly cast them into that hypocriticall figure Ironia, wherein commonly men -- to keep above their workes -- seeme to make toies of the uttermost they can doe. -- Fulke Greville, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney
The audience The Duchess of Malfi f irst introduced to Webster's malcontent Bosola through the eyes of a highly successful young courtier, Antonio. The Duchess' steward begins the play with a vision of courtly order that attempts to reconcile the conservative social mode1 where everyone, from the prince on top dom to the beggar on the bottom, performs his "office" cheerfully, with the more progressive vision that preaches the ability of men's social actions to change the state and their place in it. Antonio enthusiastically praises the King of France for establishing a court in which the prince retains his traditional place as "headtt(1. i .l4) precisely by encouraging the active influence of a "most provident council, who dare freely / Inform him the corruption of the tintest' (17-8 As if on cue, on cornes Bosola, whom Antonio describes as "the only court-gall" 123); he is a man who dares very freely proclaim "the corruption of the times," yet, remarks Antonio, 1 observe his railing 1s not for simple love of piety. Indeed, he rails at those things which he wants; Would be as lecherous, covetous, or proud, Bloody, or envious, as any man, If he had means to be so. (I.i.23-28) Here, Antonio points to two of the most important characteristics of the malcontent's persona. One is an overwhelming desire for the "means" he lacks, the position denied him; the other is his disdain for these things, his fastidious distance £rom his own social-climbing actions. These contradictory motions of desire and distancing are enacted by Flamineo during Brachiano's death scene in The White Devil, when the malcontent sententiously remarks to the disguised Francisco on the "solitariness [that] is about dying princes ...[fllatterers are but the shadows of princes' bodies, the least thick cloud makes them invisible" (V.ii.43, 46-47). A moment later, however, Flamineo admits that he himself "had as good a will to cozen [Brachiano], as eler an officer of them all. But 1 had not cunning enough to do it" (V.iii.58-60). Desire and distance; the will to cozen and the cunning to do it. These are the means of the malcontent's social actions at courts dominated by what Whigham calls "a rhetorical imperative of performance" (1984:32). Both
Flamineo and Bosola are determined to If thrive some way" (Duchess I.i.37), driven by what Thomas Gainsford terms "the 34 project ...of bettering [their] estates, and husbandly desires to fil1 [their] p~rse[s]~(45) in a world where the traditional definitions of gentlemen and commoners, wise
princes and provident councils, are quickly breaking dom. Yet the malcontents' knowledge of this breakdown, while enabling their determined social climbing, also forces them to distance themselves from it, for to differing extents both men are aware that the summit they aspire to is no
haven of purity and light, but a "rank pasturew of corruption and weakness (Duchess Li.304). The distance constructed by the malcontent between himself and his
ambition is, however, not simple self-disgust and not merely a form of rationalization or self-deception; it is also a useful tool in his quest to supplant those he appears to serve and to seem worthy of preferment, giving the impression that, if he "env[ies] those that stand above [his] reach, / Yet Che] strivecs] not to corne near 'em" (Duchess I.i.279-280). Whether desire is real and distance feigned, or vice versa, is never absolutely clear. At once dissembling and castigating the voracious social desires which consume them, Flamineo and Bosola engage in a performative struggle with the princely patrons who govern their preferment, both sides striving, in Whighamfs words, to write themselves upon the slate of the other (1996:5). Why, and what, should a prince need to perform? Conservative early modern social theory might suggest that the prince need only be faithful to his llvocation,callyng, and office" (Montrose 1996:21), presumably, like Antonio's King of France, maintaining his power and authority at the "head" of the social order by his own virtue and the advice of a "provident council." In The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli offers a more cynical recipe for the successful princely performance, remarking that [i]t is not necessary ...for a prince to have al1 the [virtuous] qualities, but it is very necessary to seem to have them. 1 would even be bold to say that to possess them and always to observe them is dangerous, but to appear to possess them is useful. Thus it is well to seem merciful, faithful, humane, sincere, religious, and also to be so; but you must have a mind so disposed that when it is needful to be otherwise you may be able to change to the opposite qualities. (65) The successful prince must be ''a great feigner and dissemblerft(Machiavelli 64); Antonio's ideal ruler is the model for his subjects because of his purity and virtue (Duchess I.i.5-15), while Machiavellils plays his proper role as model for the successful courtier, whose primary characteristic according to Puttenham is "cunningly to be able to dissemble" (299). Certainly, the courts of Malfi and Rome bear little resemblance to Antonio's ideal court, that "work of heavenfl in which degree is governed by divine providence (I.i.10); this is a world whose great aristocrats are distinguished by "perverse and turbulent nature[sJ1' (Duchess I.i.169) and in which Flamineo's father paradoxically lgprove[s]himself a 36 gentleman" by "sell[ing] all's landN (White Devi1 I.ii.315- 316). These courts are not even governed by men who are good at seeminq to have virtuous qualities. Andrea Henderson remarks that ''the cardinal and Ferdinand [in The Duchess of Malfi] are consummate showmen whose shows oppress their audience" (195); if so, it is surprising that Antonio, Delio, and the Duchess' other courtiers are so easily able to penetrate to the heazt of their performances. The Cardinal fails to become Pope because he "bestowCs] bribes so largely, and so impudentlyw that even the Church of Rome is repulsed (I.i.165), and Ferdinand's courtiers are widely aware that "[wlhat appears in him mirth is merely outside; / If he laughs heartily, it is to laugh / All honesty out of fashiont' (1.i. 170-172; cf. al so III. iii. 54-55). Indeed, Ferdinand in particular is anything but a consummate showman. He is apparently enthusiastic about the Machiavellian ideal of princeliness, as his declaration, "He that can compass me, and know my drifts, / May Say he hath put a girdle 'bout the world, / And sounded al1 her quicksands," suggests (III.i.84-86). But the Duke suffers from a dangerous lack of sprezzatura: it is frequently obvious that he is desperately tryinq to perform his owri aristocracy, and, as Whigham remarks, l'the habituai, even frenetic iteration of such demonstrations suggests the defensers instantaneous decayw (1996:195). When a couple of courtiers giggle at anotherts joke, the great Calabrian Duke instantly raps them on the knuckles: 'Why do you laugh?
Methinks, you that are courtiers should be my touchwood,
take fire when 1 give fire; that is, laugh when 1 laugh, were the subject never so witty" (1.122-125) Ferdinand's theory of other r>eopletscourtesy -- his demand for courtly deference -- is by the book, but his paranoid insistence on his own role as fountainhead of identity undercuts that
role. His command is far from being naturalized "without
effort and almost without any thought about it," as
Castiglione's Count Ludovico demands (43). The Duchess of Malfi is in many ways a less ambiguous play than The White Devil, and Ferdinand's severe difficulties in maintaining his aristocracy are much more evident than those of the Duke Brachiano who can plump dom on his own (admittedly rich) gown in a public assembly rather than accepting his unwelcoming hostst offer of a chair (White Devil III.ii.4-7). Brachiano is obviously capable of bravura acts of sprezzatura, but he has his own problems with performance. His roaring response to the criticisms of his peers Francisco and Monticelso, "Have you proclaimed a triumph that you bait / A lion thus?" (1I.i-82- 83), smacks a little of the same over-iteration from which Ferdinand's aristocratie performances suffer. (Indeed, Brachianots whole demeanour in this scene is rather like a series of variations on "Itmthe King of the Castle, and youfre the dirty rascal.") Unlike his ultimately more 38 successful rival, Francisco, Brachiano has no talent for dissimulating his feelings. He storms out of his mistress' trial on a wave of princely bluster, reminding Monticelso that flNemorsle impune lacessitfy( III. ii. 179 ) , but this concerted display of offended majesty is ill-timed, leaving Vittoria alone in an arena where, as she says, "[tlhe wolf may prey the betteru (ZII.ii.180). Machiavelli remarks that "one must be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves. Those that wish to be only lions do not understand this ...[but1 those that have been best able to imitate the fox have succeeded best" (64). His front of aristocratic self-confidence may be considerably more convincing than poor Ferdinand's, but faced with insidiously cunning enemies, Brachiano is weakened by his wish to be only a lion. Brachiano's worst excesses of dangerously undissimulated temper occur at points when his relationship with Vittoria is questioned. Indeed, their affair functions in The White Devi1 to epitomize the various reasons for Brachiano's inadequacy as a prince. In terms of conservative social discourse like that of Cornelia, who believes that "[tlhe lives of princes should like dials move, / Whose regular example is so strong, / They make the times by them go right or wrongw (I.ii.285-287), Brachianots adultery makes him an unworthy, muddied fountainhead for the identity of his subjects. In Machiavellian terms, 39 Brachiano's open passion for Vittoria is al1 too obvious a performance of the vulnerability a prince must eschew. He is "quite lost," as he tells Flamineo (I.ii.3), voicing his joy at Vittoria's willingness to hear his suit by decribing himself as "happy above thought, because 'bove merit" (I.ii.16). Brachiano's self-debasing adoration opens a breach in his aristocratie persona, a breach unto which his seemingly obsequious secretary immediately rushes. In fact, Brachiano's inadequate performance of his own princeliness leaves a large gap open on the courtly stage for Flamineo to perform in. His performance, founded on Brachiano's demonstration of the radical contingency of al1 courtly power, involves enactments both of Flamineo's ambition and of his tactics for distancing himself from that ambition. Flamineols language quickly slides into "a jocular tone of masculine equality with Brachiano" (Luckyj
1989 :36 ) , and is couched in misogynist tenus which work to degrade Brachiano's passion and, by extension, to degrade the great Duke himself. Women are coy, Flamineo tells Brachiano, because Yhey know Our desire is increased by the difficulty of enj0ying.J; ilf the buttery hatch at court stood continually open there would be nothing so passionate crowding" (I.ii.21-22, 23-25). The mention of court is anything but accidental; in demystifying women's coyness to their suitors, Flamineo is also demystifying princes' withholding of desirable commodities (from beer on a hot day 40 to coveted estates) from their suitors. Princes' doings are not, as Guazzo tells us, "yrreprehensible and incomprehensible" (198), but spring from the same "politicl' motives that drive sexually savvy women (I.ii.21).
Brachiano puts a great deal of emphasis on his own transcendent aristocratic power as an enabling factor in his relationship with Vittoria, assuring her, 111'11 seat you above law and above scandalfl(I.ii.261). Flamineo implies, however, that the Dukets desperate desire for Vittoria makes him less a princely figure than a mere suitor like any other. Vittoria is like the court itself, Ira summer bird- cage in a garden," and the love-struck Brachiano is equated with the upward-looking courtier as "the birds that are without, despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out" (I.ii.43-47).
The malcontent's metaphor cuts two ways, the shifting of tenor and vehicle implying both that Brachiano's aristocratic status is far from mystical in the first place and that his passion for Vittoria has made him as vulnerable as his own courtiers. Flamineo's apparently reductive vision of love may thus be read as a displaced vision of his own intense desire to I1bear [his] beard out of the level / Of my lord's stirrup" (I.ii.311-312); his display of metaphorical virtuosity is not so much an attempt to cut to the heart of Brachiano's love for Vittoria as an attempt to perform both Flamineots own "despair to get in" and his ironical view of that despair (despair which is ridiculous since, after all, Brachiano is in just as great a despair to
get out of court into Vittoria's bed, and in any case who wants to serve a drip like this Duke if he can help it?). In his Life of Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville remarks on his own efforts ta avoid "draw[ing] ...curious eyes to observe deformities" in his writing by "casting [it] into that hypocriticall figure Ironia, wherein commonly men -- to keep above their workes -- seem to make toies of the uttermost they can doe" (154). Similarly, Flamineo tries to avoid a Brachiano-esque, weakening display of desire, to
"keepe above [his] workes" by casting both his Duke's and his own desire into an ironical mode. Yet, of course, like Greville's irony, Flamineo's is ultimately also a symptom of
his need for acceptance; it is a performance of his witty worthiness to serve Brachiano and a stage in his larger "worlt1 of pandering to his own sister. It seems to make a toy of the uttermost Flamineo can do, but at the same tinte it & the uttermost he can do, and in the end it leaves him watching as the Duke gets the girl and doesn't even thank his secretary for a job well done.
In The Duchess of Malfi, the ex-galley slave Bosola dreams like Flamineo of lthang[ing] on [his patrons'] ears like a horseleech till 1 were full and then drop[ping] offu (I.i.52-54). He too longs to bear his beard out of his 42 lord's stirrup for good by getting past the terrible need to serve men he despises. But Webster complicates the master/servant relationship considerably in The Duchess of Malfi, and, as Frank Whigham has argued, also presents in
Bosola a man who "expects... his service to his prince to nourish and found him with the life-giving social milk of rule and fealty which Puttenham described. But instead he merely spends himself, and gets paid" (1996:217). Whigham's Bosola is the epitome of Marx's alienated labourer, longing anachronistically and perhaps unconsciously for a return to the good old feudal days when service Irderived absolute worth from a collective cultural judgementl' ( Whigham 1996:216). Flamineo makes his cynical disdain for his patron quite unambiguously clear in their first scene together; Bosola, despite his insulting references to the
Arragonian brethren, also believes that aristocratie "bountytfshould ideally llmakemen truly nobletf(1. i. 271-
272). Still, he is disappointed to discover that Ferdinand is merely a lrcorrupter"( 1. i -265) , and attempts to distance himself from his longing for feudal fulfilment by casting it into the "figure Ironia, which we cal1 the drye mocke, " the use of which constitutes for Puttenham a kind of dissembling (Puttenham 189). In the ironie arena, no one is more 'lcunningly.. . able to dissemblel' than Bosola- Throughout his Eirst encounter with his future henchman, Duke Ferdinand is involved in one of his elaborate 43 performances of his own par sibi nobility, telling Bosola, "1 would not have [the Duchess] marry again. ...Do not you ask the reason, but be satisfied / 1 Say 1 would notw (I.i.256-258). Bosola is immediately able to undercut this pose. "It seems you would create me / One of your familiarsI1 (I.i.258-259), he remarks snidely, with one of the complex puns that are his specialty. Ferdinand accepts the meaning for "familiar" Bosola offers, that of "a very quaint invisible devil in flesh, / An intelligencerN (Li-259-260), but the word also describes a person who is "familiar" with another, speaking to him on just the level of equality Ferdinand attempts to deny Bosola. Perhaps it also implies that Bosola is more "familiar" with the reasons behind Ferdinand's wish to spy on his sister than the latter would prefer to believe, just as Antonio is more "familiar" with the personality behind Ferdinand's mask than the Duke might think (I.i.169-186). In fact, Bosola's performance in his first scene with
Ferdinand is a kind of extended pun on his position as needy suitor seeking the nourishment of service to his prince. Like Flamineo's metaphors, Bosola's puns admit the double meanings of desire and distance which govern his actions. The new-created "familiarl"s lfdetached delight in verbal play" does not necessarily "work against the emotional thrust of [his] lines" (Luckyj 1994:37); rather, a pun like
"Take your devils / Which hell calls angelsw (I.i.263-264) uses verbal play to reflect an emotional contradiction between Bosola's desire for "angels" and his urge to salvage
his saving disdain for the corrupting influence of p de vil^.^^ His last, seemingly gratuitous flourish, "What's my place? / The provisorship O' thr horse? Say, then, my corruption / Grew out of horse-dungIt (I.i.285-287), is a masterpiece of its kind, neatly demonstrating Bosola's repulsion for the man who has " [made] him an impudent traitor" (1. i. 274) by equating the gracious patron with horse-dung. At the same time, the pun conceals its outrageously class-transgressive insult behind a veil of word-play purporting to display the verbal dexterity suitable to the courtier Bosola has just (at long last) become. The whole scenario would be a triumph for Bosola if its actual content didn't so clearly demonstrate his overwhelming desire to thrive at any price. And indeed, Bosolals final words to Ferdinand recognize the devastating results of this desire: "1 am your creaturetr (I.i.287). Louis Montrose remarks on "the ambiguity of the Elizabethan term, license, which implied that heterodoxy might be effectively controlled precisely by allowing it a conspicuously authorized expressionr1(1996:104). By making Bosola his "creature, " Ferdinand gives him an odd form of license, for the Duke (with surprising theatrical acuity) realizes that Bosolars carping criticism of the established order will create the useful illusion that he is not a 45 social climber and therefore not a threat to the objects of his surveillance (I.i.277-282). The intelligences's very fa11 into servitude offers him the chance he requires to rail against his masters and to demonstrate his own distance from his demeaning work. As Greenblatt remarks, "power ...depends on upon the registering and even the production of potentially unsettling perspectives" (1988:37). Antonio misinterprets Bosola's "out-of-fashion melancholytlas hfs performative attempt to avoid appearing "[pluffed up with [his] preferrnent'' (II.i.92-93), but what he is seeing is in fact Ferdinand's manipulation of Bosola's disdain for servitude, a manipulation which will eventually lead to Antonio's own ruin. If Bosolats identity as "court-gall" is undermined by the fact that he is really being paid to uphold the conservative power of Ferdinand, the more overtly sycophantic Flamineo actually manages to use performance to slip more completely out from under his patron's repressive thumb. His self-willed manipulations of his public persona
corne to a head when, declaring himself unable to Veign a whining passion for the death of [I~abella],~he decides instead to "feign a mad humour for the disgrace of [Vittoria]" (111.ii.304-307). Presumably the difference between these two performative options is that, while the former would require Flamineo to demonstrate straightforward grief, the latter gives him the opportunity to give another performance of his disgust with courtly reward and
punishment. Flamineofs supposed madness, which enables him to Valk to any man [and] hear no man" (IILii.309), makes him, more than ever, a player who can directly address his audience while ignoring their responses from within the useful frame of his fiction, At the same time, Flamineo's feigned "mad humourw underlines how difficult it is to
separate truth from falsehood in such performances. Flamineo's mad scene is the piece-de-resistance of his self-fashioning as a man driven by desire but striving to maintain a vital distance between himself and the objects of bis ambition. He rails against the whole unjust system demonstrated earlier when Brachiano won Vittoria and Flamineo nothing, despite Flamineo's superior performance:
Who shall do me right now? 1s this the end of service?..,Would 1 had rotted in some surgeon's house at Venice, built upon the pox as well as on piles, ere 1 had served Brachiano" (Iii.3, 8-10) As usual, Flamineo's metaphor functions as a criticism of his patron, and specifically of Brachiano's lascivious desire for Vittoria, which would make him likelier surgeon-fodder than Flamineo himself is. Soon, however, the malcontentts diatribe veers off into general reflections on the corrupting power of money -- "0 Gold, what a god art thou!" (IILiii.21) -- and of social ambition, without which '%O many early mushrooms, whose best growth sprang from a dunghill, should not aspire to gentility" (III.iii.48-49). As Luckyj notes, the reference to upwardly mobile "early mushrooms" is self- reflexive, and Flamineo both "rails at the contaminated world and bitterly mocks his own involvement in it" (1989:122). By feigning madness, a performance which places
him in an ironically distanced relationship to his own public persona, Flamineo is able actually to flaunt his
disgust with his position without giving up his determined aspiration to gentility. The brilliant balancing act of Flamineo ' s "madfgscene is immediately undercut by the malcontent's demonstration that his social longing is not simply a ffhusbandlydesire to
fil1 [his] purse" (Gainsford 45), but a more complex desire for a place in a group. Peter Thomson remarks that "Flamineo is the play's most consistent observer" (36)- If
so, his "strange encounterm with Ludovico (III. iii. 65) cm be interpreted as an effort to escape the loneliness of that position through the creation of a sort of malcontent's brotherhood: "Let's be unsociably sociablett(III.iii.76). Flamineo himself daims that his conversation with Ludovico is merely a histrionic attempt to sound the "banished count'sm motives for returning to Rome (IIIAii.59-65), while Ewbank suggests that this scene is little more than "a very blatant demonstration of language as attitudinising" (175). Still, the series of baroque metaphors by which Flamineo attempts to seal his bond of "housekeepingl'with 48 Ludovico suggests the intensity of the desire that occasions
al1 this self-display. The malcontent vows never to part with Ludovico till the beggary of courtiers The discontent of churchmen, want of soldiers, And al1 the creatures that bang manacled, Worse than strappadoed, on the lowest felly Of Fortune's wheel, be taught in our two lives To scorn that world which life of means deprives. (III.iii.91-96) The speech is more than another reflection of the contending forces of ambition and scorn in Flamineo's breast. It is an act of abstract identification with al1 those tortured on Fortune's wheel, and a more concrete attempt at active identification with another sufferer on the same wheel. The end of Flamineo's service to Brachiano has, so far, been nothing but continued servitude and the public humiliation of himself and his sister, His encounter with Ludovico offers the evanescent possibility of a new affiliation in which the desire for a fixed place in society can be achieved throuqh a shared disdain for the courtly system which seems incapable of fulfilling that desire. Of course, Ludovico drops Flamineo like an outdated fashion the moment he receives his pardon, and indeed immediately allies himself with the aristocratie torturers of the arraignment scene, informing his erstwhile friend that Vittoria is "a damnable whoreN (III.iii.109). As Bosola tells Antonio, in the court are but like beds in the hospital, where this man's head lies at that man's foot, and so fower and lower" (Duchess 1-i-67-69). Ludovico's pardon puts his foot above Flamineo's head, and he responds performatively, confirming his place by giving his inferior a swift kick. There are not many tropes left to Flamineo to combat Ludovico's performance, yet the malcontent is nothing if not a consummate showman, and with his native "experimental sensatïonalisrn-.., he turns the tables very deliberately on Ludovico" (Thomson 41) by challenging him to a duel. "See, now 1 laugh tootl (III.iii.122), he taunts the Count, who is left raging
"[tlhat e'er Che] should be forced to right [himlself / Upon a pander'' (IILiii,124-125)- Back on the dangerous stage of social action, Flamineo has once again managed to assert his equality with his social rival even while "laugh[inglU at their joint situation and thus "turn[ing] laughter into a weapon against huma. pretensions" (Thomson 42)- But the end result of his long, bravura performance in this scene is a dismissal, Just as the English Ambassador had responded to the malcontent's feigned madness with "Fie, fie, Flamineo"
(IILiii-311, so Ludovico determines to "forget hiru," since "al1 his reputation -- / Nay al1 the goodness of his family -- / 1s not worth half this earthquaken (IIZ.iii.134, 130- 132). The search for some way of transcending or escaping the endless courtly cycle of contending performances goes on, Flamineo tries to achieve this end through his abortive pact with Ludovico; Bosola goes so far as to try to achieve it by cementing a.emotional -- indeed, an almost romantic -- master-semant bond between himself and Ferdinand- The evanescent possibility of such a bond appears in The Duchess of Malfi in the scene where Ferdinand and Bosola pool their secrets before Ferdinand's armed invasion of the Duchess'
bedchamber. The Duke goes off on one of his binges of aristocratic self-mystification, implying that his purposes are "yrreprehensible and incomprehensiblew (Guazzo 198):
BOSOLA. What do you intend to do? FERDINAND. Can you guess? BOSOLA. No . FERDINAND. Do not ask, then: He that can compass me, and know my drifts, May Say he hath put girdle 'bout the world, And sounded al1 her quicksands. (1II.i-82-86) Whigham tells us that the patrician's theatricality is often bound up in the performance of "the supposedly total opacity of the governing class to those below ..&] presented as evidence of a discontinuity in the sociointellectual scaletl
(1984:64). Bosola's startlingly impudent response demystifies this performance and goes so far as to rebuke Ferdinand's unseemly boasting: "you / Are your own chronicle too much, and grossly / Flatter yourselft' (III.i.87-89), he tells his prince. In effect, Bosola accuses Ferdinand of being little better than one of his own flattering courtiers, and in so doing sharply distances himself from such acts of flattery. So far, the scene presents another typical day on the courtly stage, with rival actors striving to write themselves on the slates of each other. But Ferdinand's response to Bosola's criticism is surprising: Give me your hand; I thank thee 1 never gave pension but to flatterers, Till 1 entertained thee. Farewell, That friend a great man's ruin strongly checks, Who rails into his belief al1 his defects. (1II.i-89-93) This small, oft-ignored moment can have a good deal of power on stage; positioned right before the affectionate bedchamber scene between the Duchess, Antonio, and Cariola, it similarly enacts a kind of calm before the storm of Ferdinand's verbal attack on his sister and Antonio's flight from the court. Like the intimacy between the Duchess and her husband, Ferdinand's brief intimacy with his henchman is articulated in terms of a rare moment of non-violent physical contact: "Give me your hand. l' Moreover, it briefly, tantalizingly positions Ferdinand as a virtuous prince who, like the King of France, is open to the advice of "a most provident council, who dare[sJ freely / Inform him the corruption of the times" (I-i.17-18). 1s this a mere falsehood, another inadequate performance on Ferdinand's part? The Duke is erratic and truth bard to sort from lies, but even if his graciousness here is the hollowest aristocratic shtick, at least it performs a different sort of aristocracy than usual: a promising reaching out to community instead of a withdrawal from it. For this moment, Bosola is where he wants to be: praised, preferred, treated almost affectionately as a
"friend," and al1 for being, in one sense, "simply honestfl
(II.i.88). Itfsa malcontent's wish-fulfilment fantasy, when his determined distance from courtly corruption results, at long last, in reward rather than punishment; and it al1 works according to the plan laid out in Guazzofs Civile Conversation, where the Italian mites that "if
[anyone] be faulty any way, by frequenting the companie of others, one or other ..., by one way or another, will make him to understande his faultw (115). Unfortunately for Bosola, the apparent simplicity of this courtly moment is illusory; Ferdinand will quickly get tired of "study[ing] in the book / Of anotherfs heartfl(1V.i-16-17), and even Bosola's apparently honest advice is fatally tangled up in his dissimulating effort to best Ferdinand in the courtly ason. Indeed, in some ways his criticism of Ferdinand is an act of submission, a plea to be placed in the role of "provident council." A similarly tangled performance of honesty, defiance and submission on the part of the malcontent is occasioned in The White Devil by Brachianofs jealousy of Vittoria in the House of Convertites- No glimpses of affection here, however; the Duke bosses his secretary and Flamineo responds with barely concealed impatience (1V.ii-14-23). When Brachiano astounds his secretary by referring to Vittoria as 53
a 'lwhore"and to her brother as a "pander" (IV. ii -42, 47 ) ,
the latter responds indignantly: What me, my lord, am 1 your dog? / ...Would you have your neck broke? / I tell you duke, I am not in Russia; / My shins must be kept wholel' (IV.ii.48, 52-54). This magnificent act of defiance not only refuses to recognize Brachianols absolute authority over his servant, but reminds the Duke that he is, like the
Cardinal to Bosola, in debt to Flamineo for murder. In a moment, however, Flamineo is forced to recognize the enduring gap between himself and his master, responding to
Brachiano's threatening question, "Do you know me?" (IV.ii.54): O my lord! Methodically. As in this world there are degrees of evils: So in this world there are degrees of devils. You're a great Duke; 1 your poor secretary. (IV.ii.55-58) Yet the terms of hierarchical reinscription here are insidious, and not ones that would please any early modem homilist. Flamineo recognizes the idea of "degree" only through "a perspective / That shows us hell" (Duchess IV.ii.358-359); for him, the only meaning of Brachiano's greatness is his responsibility for a greater degree of evil than Flamineo's. Thus, the malcontent's apparent act of submission is really an ironic critique, and a reminder to Brachiano that great Duke and poor secretary are both caught up in the web of their shared crimes. The House of Convertites scene closes with Flamineo's recounting of the ambiguous parable of the crocodile who tries to eat the little bird that gives it "present remedyn and the bird's retaliatory wounding of the crocodile IVii.28231) As Luckyj remarks, "the tale's precise meaning is less important than the general paradox of love and pain that it explores..-. The three protagonists of The White Devil are bound together in a similar symbiosis; their self-interest and their painful manipulation of one another somehow coexist with their mutual desire and even loveN (1989:14). The tale of the crocodile is another performance of the malcontent's conflicted attitude toward the system of courtly reward and punishment which can result in the
"ingratituden (IV.ii.237) of the hungry crocodile or of the jealous Brachiano who performs his own aristocratie power at Flamineo's expense. Obviously, Webster is depicting a Flamineo well aware that he is walking a very precarious tightrope and that his alternating performances of distance and desire will not necessarily Save him from the crocodile's jaws. It is at this point that the playwright chooses to turn his malcontent away £rom the courtly audience of Brachiano, Ludovico and the rest, as Flamineo instead offers a defense of his conduct to the audience in the playhouse: It may appear to some ridiculous Thus to talk have and madman; and sornetimes Corne in with a dried sentence, stuffed with sage. But thiç allows my varying of shapes, 'Knaves do grow great by being great men's apes-' (IV-ii.239-243) This aside is a very deliberate reminder that the malcontent's performances are not only courtly ones to be evaluated by great men and ambitious rivals, but that their ultimate evaluation depends on a theatrical audience whose relation to them is not that of Brachiano or Ludovico. You may be laughing at me or despising me, says the player
Flamineo to his audience, but 1 need these theatrics in order to "grow great, " and who are you to judge that project? One remembers the social heterogeneity of the early modern audience and its "seizures of the will" (to use Whigham's term) by a judging auditory of women, merchants, apprentices, clowns and beggars; one remembers Anthony Mundayts anti-theatrical clairn that whosoeuer shal visit the chappel of Satan, 1 meane the Theater, shal finde there no want of yong ruffians, nor lacke of harlots, vtterlie past al shame: who presse to the fore-frunt of the scaffoldes, to the end to showe their impudencie, and to be an object to al mens eies. (in Chambers 211)
Will such an audience judge Flamineo's "varying of shapes" as harshly as Brachiano does?
If the evidence of the anti-theatricalists is anything to go by, the early modem audience would likely have recognized the malcontent's performative dialectic between desire and distance. Stephen Gosson, in one of his less vituperative moods, remarks that 'l[the Players] seek not to hurte, but desire too please ...y et the corne whiche they sell, is full of cockle, and the drinke that they drawe, 56 ouercharged with dregges" (in Chambers 204). Gosson depicts the early modem actor as one who, like the malcontent, in a sense ''desires too please," but he also suggests the presence of contradictory elements in the playerls apparently harmless performances. Geoffrey Fenton goes further in A Forme of Christian Pollicie (1574); "great is the errour of the magistrate to geue sufferance to these players," he writes, "who on a scaffold, babling vaine newes to the sclander of the world, put there in scoffing the vertues of honest menw (in Chambers 195). The players who seem to want to "pleaserlare really engaged, again like the malcontent, in undercutting admocking the audience on which they depend for survival: "they cosen and mocke us with vain words, and we pay them good monie" (I.G. cited in
Marin 97) * Thus, the spectator is encouraged by the anti- theatricalists to reject players on the grounds that these English Flamineos and Bosolas are engaged in an effort to tlcosen"and manipulate their audiences, But the terms of anti-theatrical discourse are notoriously self- contradictory, and the fact that "we pay them good monie" means, of course, that the player's "wages and dependence prove him to be the servaunt of the people" (Cocke in Chambers 256). The theatrical audience, as Flamineo's appeal suggests, is not simply wcosened," but also finds itself in the aristocratts position, invited to distinguish between good performances and bad ones and to judge the motives behind these performances- Bosola reminds this audience that "every quality i'th' world / Prefers but gain or commendation: / -..And men that paint weeds to the life are praised" (Duchess IIIAi.328-331); we're al1 in the same business, and a good act deserves good applause. Would the f irst audience of The Duchess of Malf i have been more willing to give that applause to John Lowin than Ferdinand is to give it to Bosola? Ferdinand's suggestion is, in fact, that they would not have been, or at least that their applause would have taken the form of curses. Lowin gets a back-handed compliment in the text of The Duchess of Malfi when Ferdinand tells Bosola, "For thee, (as we observe in tragedies / That a good actor many times is cursed / For playing a villain's part) I hate thee for [the Duchess' murder] / And for my sake Say thou hast done much il1 welln (IVAi.287-291). Ferdinand's assumption here is that the theatrical audience will condemn the "villain's" actions as wholeheartedly as he does the rnurder of the Duchess; one might argue that many in an early modern audience probably had more sympathy for the project of a social-climbing villain than Ferdinand does, but on the other hand Ferdinand is the one who commanded the Duchess' death in the first place and & still condemns Bosola for it, Audience reactions are notoriously hard to gauge or predict, and, especially in the case of the courtly, aristocratic audience, apt to have a tinge of the arbitrary about them. In his encounter with Bosola after the Duchess' death, Ferdinand gives one last blazing performance of his patrician irreprehensibility and incomprehensibility, attempting to ignore his part in his sister's death and condemning the acts of his suborned lieutenant (as
Bolingbroke does in Richard II and John does to Hubert in
Kins John). In this penultimate scene the acron, Bosola attempts to top Ferdinand's performance with one of his own which continues to assert both desire for preferment and distance from its means; but in the malcontent's desperation desire wins out, his language thickened with an almost plaintive longing: Let me know Wherefore I should be thus neglected? sir, I served your tyranny; and rather strove To satisfy yourself, than al1 the world; And though 1 loathed the evil, yet 1 lov'd You that did counsel it; and rather sought To appear a true servant, than an honest man- (IV.ii.327-333) This is at once the ultimate act of hypocrisy -- an appeal to the aristocrat's sense of obligation to a social role and to service relations that Bosola has been mocking al1 along -- and the ultimate demonstration of genuine desire. In any case, it is unsuccessful, because at this point Ferdinand's performance of his own aristocratic incomprehensibility and distance ftom prosaic reality 59 reaches both its apogee and its nexus. "1'11 go hunt the badger by owl-light: / 'Tis a de& of darknessn (1V.ii-334- 335)' he mutters, and exits "much distractedw (IV.ii.336). Madness, the deepest form of alienation from the "realV1 world, removes him altogether from conscious playing on the courtly stage; it proves, at last, that "Ferdinand is ...sui seneris, unique, a peerless class of onen (Whigham
1994:201), but, as we see when he next appears surrounded by gaping courtiers and "forwardW doctors (V.ii-84), it also proves his absolute, ignoble vulnerability, Bradbrook remarks that "Ferdinand shares with Bosola, his spy, a capacity for pain; the pain hidden behind an outward facade is the thread of life that runs through scenes of external violence" (159). Both men are painfully vulnerable in their longing for the validation their audiences continually refuse to grant- Seeking such validation, they seem at times almost ready to fa11 into one anotherts arms, only to immediatelp re-assert themselves by trying to stab one another in the back. The Duchess of
Malfi is full of such abortive attempts at community; the chaotic world of The White Devil is more usually characterized by vicious contests for supremacy. The poisoning of Brachiano suggests the ultimate stalemate of this courtly struggle for performative recognition: the aristocratie lion who raged so magnificently subsides into "several kinds of distraction" (V.iii.84), and his "poor secretary" is left with the knowledge that neither his desire nor his ironic distance from it has been able to help
him to prefennent, He refuses to grieve for Brachiano, and mocks the performances of those who counterfeit sorrow for the Duke's death; when Francisco rebukes him, "Corne, you have thrived well under him" (V.iii.56), he shakes his head
ruefully : Faith, like a wolf in a woman's breast; I have been fed with poultry; but for money, understand me, 1 had as good a will to cozen him, as e'er an officer of them all. But I had not cunning enough to do it. (V.iii.57-60) Unlike Bosola's, the final act in Flamineots interlude of service does not involve an attempt on the malcontent's part to distance himself from his actions by blaming them on his duty to his patron. On the contrary, Flamineo depicts himself as the "wolfttin the relationship; he used Brachiano rather than loving him, and freely admits that he is part of the courtly corruption he mocked. Yet, even the admission is a final act of distancing from the "will to cozen," presenting Flamineo's ironic view of himself and suggesting that, just maybe, the "maze of conscience in [his] breast" is as strong a force as his desire for advancement Vivl8) In this case, however, why does he profess his desire to "speak with this Duke yet" (V.iii.208)? Bosola's final attempt to re-establish himself with Ferdinand is couched in terms of the possibility of a persona1 understanding between the two men, and perhaps, indeed, such a relationship, rather than some more straightforward form of courtly reward and punishment, is the malcontent's only possible means of real social advancement. In this case, preferment could never be a simple matter of bearing one's beard out of the level of the lord's stirrup for good; rather, it would have to involve a permanent dance of rapprochement and possible rejection between the aristocrat and the courtier. Flamineo suggests,
in fact, that the identities of lord and servant are far more bound together than a simple vertical mode1 of social relations might assume: Misery of princes, That must of force be censured by their slaves! Not only blamed for doing things are ill, But for not doing al1 that all men will. One were better be a thresher. Ud's death, 1 would fain speak with this Duke yet. (White Devif V.iii.203-208) Flamineo's continued wish to speak with the dead Brachiano
may indicate that his rabid desire for preferment survives even the patron's dissolution, placing him on a par with the Bosola who pours out his frustrated desire to Ferdinand. On
the other hand, what Flamineo seems to want to sav to Brachiano is that their performances have been to some extent equivalent, each fatally censured by the other; "one were better be a thresher," indeed. "1 stand like one / That long hath ta'en a sweet and golden dream. / 1 am angty with myself, now that 1 wake," Bosola tells Ferdinand
(Duchess IV.ii.323-325). Perhaps al1 the players in this 62 performative aaon have been deluded, struggling for stable places that are always destabilized. Perhaps desire for advancement and distance from that project finally corne dom to much the same thing. On his deathbed, Brachiano gains a good deal of insight into the labyrinthine workings of his own court; among his "several kinds of distraction" is a vision of Flamineo "dancing on the ropes there: and he carries / A money-bag in each hand, to keep him even, / For fear of breaking's neckW (V.iii.112-114). The tight-rope on which Flamineo, like
Bosola, dances is the site of the have's precarious attempt to grow great by shape-shifting; he tries to "keep him even" by balancing his desperate desire to "thrive" with his cynical view of the summit he tries to reach and his ironic distance from his own longing. For both Bosola and Flamineo, the effort to "keep above their worksn is a futile one; the malcontent proves just as vulnerable as the great man he imitates, as vulnerable as any player to the whims and judgements of his audience. Yet, as John Stockwood complained, consummate actors are stubborn creatures; thrown out of one playhouse they build themselves another, "as who woulde Say, 'There, let them saye what they will saye, we will playtt'(cited in Mullaney 18). Faced with the failure of the service relationship and its performance dialectics, the malcontent turns to other stages and new attempts to write himself upon the slate of another. Chapter Two: The Art to Hide: The Malcontent and His Lady
Let men say what they list, 1 will doe none otherwyse than my heade and mynd haue already framed. Semblably, I neede not make accompt to any persone for my fact, my body and reputation beynge in full libertie and freedome. -- The Duchess of Amalfi, in Painter's The Palace of Pleasure
In The Duchess of Malfi, Bosola has the particularly charming habit of button-holing an Old Lady of the Duchess' court and lambasting her with misogynist invective. "You are still abusing women[?] lr she asks him impatiently in the middle of his second attack on her; "Who I?" responds Bosola, no, only (by the way now and then) mention your frailties. ...[S]ome of you give entertainment for pure love; but more, for more precious reward. ...If we have the same golden showers that rained in the time of Jupiter the Thunderer, you have the same Danaes still, to hold up their laps to receive them. ..: -- go, go, give your foster-daughters good counsel: tell them that the devil takes delight to hang at a woman's girdle, like a false rusty watch, that she cannot discern how the time passes. (II.ii.13-20, 24-27) If apprentice Joseph Swetnam, soon to be the author of the infamous Arraianment of Lewde. Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women (16151, had been in the audience at the f irst performance of The Duchess of Malfi, he would surely have responded to such speeches with recognition and approval. The ter- of Bosolats complaint are familiar ones: women are promiscuous, sexually and economically rapacious to the 64 extent that they neglect time itself, and so untrustworthy
that it is difficult to tell who is "giv[ing] entertainment for pure lovew and who "for more precious reward" (the latter, as Bosola suggests, being the statistically safer bet) . Here, then, is another vital component of the malcontent's theatricality: his performance of cynical understanding of, and disdain for, women. His misogyny, moreover, is closely related to his attempt to improve his own social position by "manipulating the distracted desires of others in the sphere of se~uality~(Callaghan 139)- As we saw in the previous chapter, Flamineo% blithe deflation of Vittoria's coy response to Brachianofs advances as "but the superficies of lust most women have ...[since] they are politic; they know our desire is increased by the difficulty of enjoying" (White Devi1 1-ii.18-22) is a covert missile in his class war on the lustful Duke- On a more literal level, Flamineo's manipulation of Brachiano's image of Vittoria is symptomatic of the malcontent's use of his sister as a tool in his own struggle to iashion a socially powerful self.
Stephen Gxeenblatt writes that "the power to impose a shape upon oneself is an aspect of the more general power to control identity -- that of others at least as often as one's own" (1984:l). Both in their vocal misogyny and in their multivalent attempts to control the actions, bodies, and images of female characters in The White Devi1 and The 65 Duchess of Malfi, Flamineo and Bosola set themselves up as playwright figures, seeking to control, not only the actions and choices of the female character, but also the very re~resentationof that character both to the fictional court and to the playhouse audience. Lisa Jardine, for one, believes that these efforts are sources of real patriarchal power for the malcontent; she writes that "only men surround the Duchess [of Malfi]; the audience can do little more than accept their version of her behaviour and motives" (72). 1s the performance dialectic between the malcontent and the women he attempts to define and control really this simple? 1 argue, rather, that the major female characters in Webster's tragedies offer a profound -- and a profoundly performative -- challenge to the malcontent's self- fashioning. Attempting to use women as means to their own social advancement and self-assertion, Flamineo and Bosola are instead faced with rival actors. The heroines of both The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi are from the outset eminently capable of challenging masculine equanimity, as Brachiano's vulnerable claim that he is "[qluite lost" to Vittoria (I.ii.3) and Antonio's effusive praises of the Duchess (I.i.186-209) suggest. Some of their disturbing power comes from their ambiguous positions in the social hierarchies we saw in the introduction; the "duetie and ordre" of a widow, especially a rich and pwerful one like the Duchess of Malfi, is a proverbial source of anxiety in early modern texts
(Jankowski 229), and if Vittoria enters The White Devi1 still tenuously fixed in her duty as the wife of Camillo, she is soon dancing some place between the categories of wife, whore, and (al1 too conveniently) widow. The desires of Brachiano and Antonio are directed toward women whose subject-positions are remarkably unstable and hard to contain - Both men respoad to their desire in the well-worn terms of Petrarchan discourse, each hyperbolically protesting the lady's glorious qualities and his own unworthiaess.
Petrarchan idealisation has been widely interpreted as a strategy of control and possession, absorbing the "feu of instability [in] womanl' into a poetic discourse which transforms lack, longing, and the worrying absence of the beloved into conventionalized poetic tropes whose expert manipulation demonstrates the courtly refinement of the male speaker (Stallybrass 128). The hammering misogyny of Ferdinand as he reminds the Duchess that "women like that part which, like the lamprey, / Hath never a bone in ' tl' (1-iL44-45) is the flip side of Petrarchism, sgrnptomatic of the attempt to deiine or represent unstable woman as a fixed terni in a conventional discourse- As Stallybrass remarks, ntwoman,' unlike man, is produced as a pro~ertycategory" (127)- The two property-laden aristocrats, Brachiano and
Ferdinand, are in their differing ways attempting to annex to be raised" (III. ii.326-327, 330). Here, the patron becomes the audience who, instead of directly watching the malcontent's performance of social ambition, is presented with the desired spectacle of the woman through the malcontent's agency. If the aristocrat responds unfavourably to the malcontent as actor, Bosola is convinced that his revelation of the Duchess' ''haviorW will certainly raise his social status; similarly, Flamineo refers to his pandering as "a path so open and so free / To [his] prefermentw (I.ii.326-327). In this scenario, woman is less actress than presented spectacle, a stage-managed body who as "an object of exchange constitutes 'a sign and a value' that opens a channel of exchange [and] ...performs the swibolic or ritualistic purpose of consolidating the interna1 bonds" between men (Butler 38). As Judith Butler remarks, woman in this system of exchange "does not have an identity ...[but] reflects masculine identity precisely through being the site of its absence'' (39). In his representations of woman both to the other characters on stage and to the playhouse audience, the malcontent, playwright-like, actively seeks to produce an image of femininity which can function as a Vooking-glass" for male identity (Dod and Cleaver in
Aughterson 81). But this glass is a dark one; Flamineo explicitly undercuts the positive image of woman as mirror, suggesting to Ludovico that "[i]t would do well instead of ?-ooking-glasses / To set's one's face each morning by a saucer / Of a witch's congealed blood" (III.iii,88-90)- It is through the production of a demonized image of woman -- as witch, as whore, as "grotesque body" (Stallybrass 126) -- that the malcontent will mite himself man upon the slate
Thus, Bosola worms his way into knowledge the Duchess' pregnant body -- and re-produces that body for the playhouse audience which he addresses directly -- through a series of images that are at once negative and scopophilic: I observe our duchess 1s sick a-days, she pukes, her stomach seethes, The fins of her eyelids look most teeming blue, She wanes i'th'cheek, and waxes fat i'th'flank; And (contrary to our Italian fashion) Wears a loose-bodied gown -- there's somewhat in 't! (II.i.63-67) This speech attests to Bosolals attempt to convince himself of his understanding of, control over and superiority to the Duchesst pregnant body through his ability to observe and decode its signs and, by his repulsion, to signify the difference between masculine and feminine semiotics, Significantly, however, mere observed knowledge, though it may be enough for Ferdinand, is not enough for the malcontent; he puts into motion "a trick may chance discover [the truth], / A pretty one" (II.i.69-70). Instead of simply watching the Duchess and re-producing her to his various audiences, Bosola sets out in the apricocks scene actively to stage her, to produce her by forcing her body into the actions he wills. Bosola's t'pretty'l little performance with the apricocks is a carefully staged and scripted manipulation of the Duchess and her body which grants Bosola the certain knavledge he has been seeking: Vo, so, there's no question but her techiness and most vulturous eating of the apricocks are apparent signs of breeding" (11.ii.l-3). Flamineo similarly stages his sister as the object of his knowledge and control when he hands her over to Brachiano for the first tirne:
Corne sister, darkness hides your blush; women are like cursed dags, civility keeps them tied al1 daytime, but they are let loose at midnight; then they do most good or most mischief. (I.ii.196-199) Brachiano may not be able to see Vittoria's blush in the night, but Flamineo can; he knows that women, like chained and vicious dogs, are really longing to do in the dark precisely the things they are restrained from doing in the light. How does he know this? The image of Vittoria conjured by Flamineo springs out of cultural tropes which suggest that al1 women are inherently lascivious; as a character remarks in Beaumont and Fletcher's The Woman- Hater, "it is so rare a thing to bee honest amongst you [women], that some one man in an age, may perhaps suspect some two women to be honest, but muer beleeue it verily" (cited in Woodbridge 177). What is important here is that Flamineo produces Vittoria in this light for Brachiano in order to assert both his own knowledge of her and her certain availability to Brachiano's knowledge. Flamineo, in other words, is staging the sister required to provide an open and free path to his preferment-
But the staged woman does not function in the malcontent's social struggle merely as an item of exchange.
Rather, the rnisogynist image of woman produced by the malcontent is itself an act of social self-assertion, a declaration of equivalence between al1 women on the one hand and al1 men on the other. Peter Stallybrass remarks that To emphasize gender is to construct women-as-the-same: women are constituted as a single category, set over against the category of men. ...Oppressed groups.. ., by denying the class differentiation of women, may attack aristocratie privilege. But when the elimination of class boundaries is produced by the collapsing of women into a single undifferentiated group, that elimination is commonly articulated within misogynistic discourse. (133) Thus, Bosola's contention that the souls of princes are equivalent to those of 'Imeaner perçonsw because "the like passions sway them" (II.i.103-104) is preceded by his revolted denigration of female cosmesis and feminine sexuality (II.i.21-44) and followed by the apricock trick, which classes the Duchess' body as generically feminine, vulnerable, and (to Bosola) more than a little repulsive. The class aspirations of Flamineots misogyny are even clearer: "Trust a woman? Never, never. Brachiano be my precedent: we lay our souls to pawn to the devil for a little pleasure and a woman makes the bill of sale" (V.158-16) Callaghan argues that "the malcontents'
real purpose of attacking class differentiation between men eludes them as it becomes displaced ont0 the process of
gender dif ferentiationgt; here, however, gender differentiation serves the malcontent's purpose as Flamineo and his Duke become "we," defined by their difference from traitorous woman, As Whigham points out, such acts of denigration have multiple social reverberations. He notes that [rlioting apprentices may have achieved both rebellious and cathartic release and a recuperative group-construction by attacking 'appropriate' women- Brothels can be seen as similarly gendered institutions, differently degraded, and so perhaps are targets for the apprentices' displacement of anger at masters' oppressions; yet to pillory such women is to seize the position of bourgeois moral condescension, of potential class unity with the masters . ( 14 ) Whighamts apprentices bring us back around to his other example of this process, that of the courtier's revolted reaction to painted women. Apprentices may be seeking identity with their masters by attacking prostitutes just as Flamineo seeks identity with his master by producinq his sister's prostitution, but they are also lashing out against displaced images of themselves- Woman functions as a convenient receptacle for -- and diffusor of -- the social actorls repulsion with his own histrionics. When Bosola tells the Old Lady that %orne of you give entertainment for pure love; but more, for more precious 73 reward" (II.ii.15-17), he might be talking about himself; he has displaced his own admitted lust for reward (I.i.52-54), as well as his half-acknowledged dream of service offered for love instead of money (IV.ii.329-333), ont0 an image of prostituted femininity. Compared to Bosola, Flamineo seems "adolescent, exuberant and playfulIt (Bliss 123), and his displacements of guilt are often less torturous and more overt than Bosola's, frequently taking the form of simply blaming women for his misdemeanours. Thus, as Callaghan remarks, Flamineo claims that he would not have been forced to use devious behaviour in his attempt to rise if "the common'st courtezan in Rome / Had been [his] motber rather than [Cornelia]" (I.ii.332-333). Even more explicitly, he turns Vittoria's charge that men are "dissembling" into a misogynist abrogation of responsibility: "We sucked that, sister, / From women's breasts in our first infancyl' (IV.ii.179-180). But this last image is a worryingly ambiguous one, suggesting not so much differentiation as a sort of prima1 diffusion of female identity into male. As Stallybrass writes, ''the abrupt 'independence' of [the malcontent's] discourse obscures the structural dependency he shares with the court lady" (134). Moreover, on the early modern English stage the female characters the malcontent so abuses were really played by young male actors. The misogynistic attacks on the Duchess and Vittoria may have served to assert the fictional femininity of the boy actor's body as well as to contain the threatening femininity of the stage heroine. In terms of theatrical production, however, both malcontent and lady were the personae of those notorious arch-dissimulators, male players, who, as Katharine Eisamann Maus has noted, "were subject to attack from the same rhetorical position [as women] ...so that suspicion of the theater and suspicion of female sexuality can be considered two manifestations of the same anxietytt(603). Cocke writes of his "Common PlayerM that "taklen] at the best, he is but a shifting companion, for hee lives effectually by putting on, and putting off" (in Chambers 257); woman too is an arch-hypocrite, living "within the compasse of a lyett
(Gosson 5). Thus, Swetnam cornplains that in the most part you shall find [women] dissembling in their deeds, and in al1 their actions subtil1 and dangerous, -.[for] they bear two tongues in one mouth like Iudas, and two hearts in one breast like Magus; the one full of smiles, the other full of frownes, and al1 to deceive the simple and plaine-meaning man. (4-5) Trust a woman? Never, never -- one might as well trust an actor. One might as well trust the malcontent whose "winding and indirectt1ascent of the social mountain is accomplished through his tlvaryingof shapes" (The White
Devil IAi.352; IV.ii.242). The problem here for the malcontent is not simply that the overlap between the terms of his misogynist discourse and the terms of the anti-theatrical discourse which critiques his shape-shifting threatens to turn his displacement of his guilt onto women into outright self- condenmation. After all, this is a risk native to most such displacements. The problem is that, in recognizing the structural analogy between himself as actor and the woman he tries to manipulate, the malcontent simultaneously recognizes her dangerous histrionic power and hence the limits of his control over her. He wants to be a playwright, and many playwrights have a need to believe that agency lies with them and not with the players who execute their designs. "Of thy selfe thou canst Say nothing,"
Robert Greene reminds the actor of his plays,
and if the Cobler hath taught thee to Say Ave Caesar, disdain not thy tutor, because thou pratest in a Kings chamber. ... I graunt your action, though it be a kind of mechanical labour; yet wel done 'tis worthie of praise: but you worthlesse, if for so small a toy you waxe proud, (in Chambers 236) Clearly, Greene's invective is a response to the "pride" of players who do not see thexnselves as marionettes, who do not accept the definition of their artful personations as "a kind of mechanical labour." Moreover, Greene's cornplaint is couched in terms of class difference: the play= who has advanced socially by his art looks dom disdainfully u- the playwright-tutor who has taught him those successful lines. For Flamineo, Vittoria's repudiation of him once she has bftcome Brachiqo's Duchess smacks of a similar sort of ingratitude (V.vi.7-20). 1s the playwright's position really the powerful one Jardine implies when she writes that
"the audience cm do little more than accept [the male) version of [fernale] behaviour and motives"? Or has the malcontent actually landed himself in the middle of yet
another struggle between rival self-fashioners? Both Vittoria and the Duchess prove themselves acutely aware of, and resistant to, male efforts to produce and define them. Vittoria's behaviour at her arraignment is the
most blazing example of this refusal. "1 scorn to hold my life / At yours or any man's entreaty, sir," she tells Monticelso def iantly: For know that al1 your strict combined heads, Which strike against this mine of diamonds, Shall prove but glassen hammers, they shall break; These are but feigned shadows of my evils. Terrify babes, my lord, with painted devils, 1 am past such needless palsy, for your names Of Whore and Murd'ress, they proceed from you, As if a man should spit against the wind, The filth returns in's face. (III.ii.138-139, 142-151) The repeated antitheses between "my" and "your, " "1" and "youW in this sequence underline Vittoria's assertion of her own control over her identity, as does the pun by which she refers tu herself as "this mine of diamonds": her body and
identity are her own, not Monticelsols. His attempt to produce a "characterW of her through a series of anti- feminist tropes (III.ii .79-lO2 ) I'proceeds from [him] " ;
"[tlhis character scapes me," she shrugs (IILii.102). Vittoria defines herself by negating Monticelso's effort to contain her within misogynist cultural constructions of fentininity, But can Camillors widow offer a positive alternative to the Cardinal's slanders? She counters with a determined self-definition:
Sum up my faults 1 pray, and you shall find That beauty and gay clothes, a rnerry heart, And a good stomach to feast, are all, Al1 the poor crimes that you can charge me with[,] (III,ii.207-210) Vittoriats self-assertion is richly ambiguous. For one thing, the apparently positive qualities which constitute al1 her tfpoorcrimesn are in fact viewed as signs of female criminality in many Jacobean conduct books; "gay ~lothes,'~ in particular, are frequently read as a sign of feminine class transgression and licentiousness, Thus, Brathwait reproves gentlewomen who '?wear...Apparell aboue their degree, exceeding their estate in precious attiret'and "their vanity, who take delight in wearing great sleeues, mishapen Elephantine bodies, traines sweeping the earth, with huge poakes to shroud their phantasticke heads, as if they had committed some egregious fact which deserued that censure" (13, 15). The mention of "rnishapen Elephantine bodies," recalls Bosola's disgust with the "bawd farthingales" which hide the Duchessr pregnancy (ILi.148). According to Vittoria, the assumption that "gay clothesn at once hide and signify "some egregious fact" or crime is erroneous; she suggests that they hide nothing and signify only themselves. Maus remarks that "the histrionic personality of the actor or the secïuctress is threatening because it alienates appearances from a real state of affairs" (607); Vittoria repudiates this dichotomy, arguing that her appearance is the real state of affairs, Yet, Vittoria's "cloth of tissuen is apparently Brachiano's gift, an index both of her adultery and her ambition to rise above the "poor fortunew of her husband (I:I.i,54-55). And while we should be cautious about accepting Flamineols self-interested interpretation of Vittoria's dream as an incitement to murder (1-ii,255-256), we should also be wary of exonerating Vittoria from any culpability in the assassinations of Isabella and Camillo,
From the moment Flamineo hands Vittoria over to Brachiano, the malcontent's sister actively seeks to fashion a self that is not necessarily the contained one most useful to her brother, "Sure sir a loathed cruelty in ladies / 1s as to doctors many funerals: / It takes away their credit, " she tells Brachiano (I,ii,209-211)- Slipping out from under the Petrarchan dichotomy between distant beauty and lascivious whore, Vittoria proveû that she is in fact as much a shape- shifter, a manipulator of appearances, as her brother. Luckyj comments on the complexity of the arraignment scene, in which we are continually reminded both that there is "something fine, proud, and wonderfully defiant" about
Vittoria (Nightingale cited in White Devil xxvi) and that 79 she is far from being an innocent victim. Like Flamineots feigned madness, Vittoria's behaviour at her trial dramatizes the thin line between performance as reality, as a means for self-fashioning in which a character reveals the truth about him or herself, and performance as arch-lie.
Walking this line, Vittoria declares her own independence, but is also constrained by cultural constructions of woman as wdissembling in Cher] deeds, and in al1 Cher] actions subtil1 and dangerous." Considering that "Vittoria's condemnation and subsequent imprisoriment are a foregone conclusiont' for her aristocratic male judges (Luckyj 116), perhaps the heroine's position as a socially disadvantaged woman precludes any real escape into positive self- def inition.
If Vittoria does not wholly manage to escape the identity Monticelso has produced for her, however, the Cardinal is far from being wholly successful in writing her as a mere whore. The clash between Vittoria and the brother who attempts to use her as the vehicle for his own social advancement dramatizes precisely this impasse in the battle between self-styled playwright and rebellious actress. Flamineo, in his misogynist invective, uses his relatively powerful position as a man to mitigate his powerlessness as a servant and to displace his own anxiety and self-disgust onto women. Vittoria, working from the lower position in both gender and class hierarchies, still refuses to be written as mere object of exchange and receptacle for blame. And in their strange, social-climbing symbiosis, in which each needs but also competes with the other, neither can try to define the other without simultaneously affecting his or her own self-definition. When Vittoria turns on her brother in the House of
Convertites, the scene almost becomes a comedy of duelling self-fashioners: FLAMINE0 Turn to my lord, good sister. VITTORIA Hence you pander. FLAMINE0 Pander! Am 1 the author of your sin? VITTORIA Yes: he's a base thief that a thief lets in. (IV.ii.133-135) Following a scene with Brachiano in which Vittoria asserts herself both by admitting her own guilt as Brachiano's mistress and by accusing Brachiano of a hypocritical refusa1 to recognize that he "hath [had] the honour to advance Vittoria / To this incontinent collegen (IV.ii.113-114), Flamineo tries to manipulate his sister back into her position as object of exchange between himself and his patron. She responds by branding him a "pander," accusing her brother of manipulating her body and implying that her image as whore "proceeds from [him]" as well as from Brachiano. Flamineo, with his usual penchant for blame- shifting, refuses to be written a pander in the play of victimization Vittoria is writing for herself; he places the agencyfor sin squarely on Vittoria's shoulders. His sister throwq Pjkal responsibility back at Flamineo in notably class-based terms; her brother is a "baseCr] thief" than Brachiano, not only proving himself wicked by coldly manipulating the Dukefs passion to his own ends, but proving himself "base," low-born, by bowing and scraping while the
Duke sweeps into his house and steals his family honour, Both siblings' self-fashioning projects are compromised in this battle. Flamineo evades blame for his sisterts degradation by a misogynist displacement of guilt ont0 her sinfulness, but in the process denies that he is "the author of [her] sin." By explicitly removing himself from the position of playwright, he negates his agency in the transaction with Brachiano by which he sought preferment. Vittoria, meanwhile, as in the arraignment scene, has refused a male definition of herself but failed to offer a viable alternative. She reinscribes herself as the treasure, the object, which the thief Brachiano steals while the baser thief Flamineo holds the door. Complaining that her brother, as "pander," has manipulated her, Vittoria continues to accede to her status as manipulable cornmodity. If anything definite cornes out of this tangle, it is that displacement is an untrustworthy tool for the self- fashioner, At the end of the House of Convertites scene, Vittoria retires into an altogether ambiguous silence, while Flamineo has one of his frenetically chatty spells and suddenly reels off his multivalent story about the crocodile and the little bird. Brachiano, obviously displeased, offers the most straightforward reading of his secretaryls fable: "Your application is, 1 have not rewarded / The service you have done met1(IV.ii.232-233). Back-tracking, F13mineo re-writes the terms of his allegory; now, Vittoria is the powerful
crocodile "blemished in Cher] fame," Brachiano is the little bird who "cures it," and Flamineo himself is nowhere in the picture (IV.ii.234-235). Again, in order to avoid the censure of his aristocratic patron, the malcontent
constructs a narrative of agency for his sister and writes himself out of it. Meanwhile, Vittoria says nothing, not even when Brachiano promises her ''a Duchesst titlew (IV.ii.217). 1s she resting in triumph after a brilliantly duplicitous performance of victimization through which she has got
exactly what she wanted? Or bas her indictment of male manipulation and hypocrisy been an utterly sincere repudiation of the courtly stage and her place on it? Or is her behaviour again ambivalent, at once rebelling against masculine stage-management and finally, silently acceding to it? Uncertainties abound, but if Flamineo and Vittoria are indeed both involved in that struggle for "high prefermentw to which Vittoria alludes when she accuses Brachiano of having landed her in a brothel rather than the promised presence chamber (IV.ii.llS), then Vittoria emerges from the House of Convertites scene with something of an edge. The Duke is angry at his secretary for "bra~[ing]'~him (V.ii.79); he is thrilled that Vittoria has proven her love by doing so. It is Vittoria, not Flamineo, who takes a step up the social ladder in this scene. Even in this success she remains ambiguous, dependent on Brachiano's power to define her, almost cipher-like at the very moment when her self-fashioning project seems to be succeeding. It would be difficult to say the same of the heroine of Webster's next tragedy, but then she does not have to wait for a lustful Brachiano to offer her "a Duchesse title." Already an aristocrat, and placed in a position of quasi-masculine authoritp by "the fact that she rules Malfi as Regent for her son, the minor heir to the Duke of Malfi, her dead husbandw (Jankowski 223), the Duchess of Malfi has a great deal more power to control identity than does the impoverished Vittoria Corrombona. If Vittoria frequently defines herself by refusing to be contained by misogynist constructions, the Duchess is an active and aristocratic self-fashioner who assumes her own power to shape the world around her. Painter's Duchess of
Amalfi in The Palace of Pleasure (1567), Webster's source, declares, let men say what they list, I will doe none otherwyse than my heade and mynd have already framed. Semblably 1 neede not make accompt to any persone for my fact, my body, and reputation beynge in full libertie and freedome. (cited in Jankowski 231) Fighting words indeed. The Duchess' sentiment is not endorsed by Painter, who partially blames his heroine for her own fa11 and those of the men around her, remarking that
bicause a woman being as it were the Image of sweetnesse, curtesie and shamefastnesse, so soone as she steppeth out of the right tracte, and leueth the smel of her duetie and mode~tie,~~.thrustethhir selfe into infinite troubles and causeth the ruine of such which should be honored, and praised, if womens cllurement sollicited them not to follie. (cited in Jardine 76) Despite her position as sovereign, Painter's Duchess is condeinned for failing to conform to the Petrarchan containment of woman as "the Image of sweetnesse, curtesie, and shamefa~tnesse'~;according to patriarchal conduct book definitions, she is classed as unruly and reprehensible, slotted into the misogynist's category of women who have caused men ' s ltruine'lby their lt allurement .It However, this latter category -- that of the dangerous, powerful woman constructed by Swetnam, Flamineo and Bosola -- threatens to enable rather than to discourage woman's self-fashioning.
In Webster's play, the Duchessf brothers atternpt to forestall her self-determination on the marriage market by reminding her that Vhey are most luxurious / Will wed twicett (I.ii.7-8) and that Vhey whose faces do belie their hearts / Are witches ere they arrive at twenty years, / Aye, and give the devil suck* (I.i.309-311). The Duchess, like Vittoria, seems to conform to such constructions of feminine evil and deceit when she lies to her brothers: t'Will you hear me? / 1'11 never marryw (I.i.301-302). She is also, however, able to undercut her brothersl misogynist playwriting by revealing it as such with her mocking remark to Ferdinand, "1 think this speech between you both was studied, / It came so roundly off" (I.i-329-330). Moreover, she goes so far as to recast the entire discourse of remarriage into her own terms: "Diamonds are of most value,/
They Say, that have passed through most jewellersf handsw (I.i.299-300). Catherine Belsey reads the Duchessr remarriage as an attempt to enter ''a private realrn of warrnth and fruitfulness separate from the turbulent world of politics" (198), but the Duchessf inversion of the Cinderella story is also an act of highly politicized self-fashioning, in which the Duchess rewrites her womanhood by entering into a sexual relationship with Antonio where she retains much of her power and self-deterraination. "1 would have you lead your fortune by the hand / Unto your marriage bed / (You speak in me this, for we now are one)," the Duchess tells Antonio
(I.i.495-497); they are one, but it is still the Duchess who is speaking and comanding, and Antonio's identity seems to have been assimilated into hers rather than the other way around. This is the woman who jokes, When 1 wax grey, 1 will have al1 the court / Powder their hair with arras, to be like mew (III.ii.59-60). If the malcontent's jests attest to his tightrope-walking attempt to succeed socially, the Duchesst bear witness to the consummate s~rezzaturawith 86 which, despite her awareness of the precariousness of her position, she performs her princely insouciance and control.
Even as Bosola's apricock trick speaks his manipulation and denigration of a degraded image of the female body, the Duchess' joyous gobbling of the fruit -- "They taste of musk, methinks; indeed they do'' (II.i.136) --effectively ignores such opprobrium and re-writes her fecundity in positive terms.
If Bosola thinks he can write the Duchess fie needs from his position of male power, she assumes that she can manage Bosola from her position of aristocratic power. The scene of Antonio1s mock-banishment attests to the impasse between these two putative playwrights; the Duchess, having given a successful imitation of the great lady repudiating the rogue steward, turns her attentions to Bosola. Continuing in her chosen part, she attempts to sound Bosola and to produce from him the answers she seeks, drawing out each section of his extended encomium to the departed Antonio. Unfortunately for her project, it is contained within Bosola's project of producing her confession of her husband's name, Still, as Whigham remarks, "the duchess has ratified elevation by merit, and Bosola's applause betrays his own authentic experience of the dreamw (1996:219). It is hard to Say for certain that Bosola is not acting on the Duchess' stage as well as on his own. At the end of the scene, the Duchess effectively signs her own death warrant 87 by placing herself in Bosola's care: "Sir, your direction /
Shall lead me by the bandn (III-ii-312-313). But she does not so much cede to the malcontent as authorize him; autocratically refusing Cariola's suggestions, she writes herself a Bosola who will be her helper and right-hand-man. It is a deluded choice, but the brave one of an aristocratic self-fashioner, Later, dragged onto the nightmare stage of Ferdinand's wax-show, the Duchess seems to lose al1 sense of power over
her own story, "1 account this world a tedious theatre, tr she cries, "For 1 do play a part in 't 'gainst my will"
(IV.i.84-85). These lines have often been taken as an indication of The Duchess of Malfi's fundamental anti- theatricality: Andrea Henderson writes that Webster's heroine "both recognizes the theatricality of her life and experiences it not as pleasurable self-extension but as
painful self-concealment" and loss (199; see also Worthen 63 passim). The Duchess is at her lowest point here, manipulated both by Ferdinand, who wishes "to bring her to despair" (IV.i.116), and by Bosola. Bidding the Duchess "[rlemember / [She] is a Christiann (IV-i-74-75), the malcontent seems to have cast her as the stoic heroine in a new play which will demonstrate his class-transgressive refusal of Ferdinand's will. "1 will Save your life," he tells his erstwhile mistress; "Now, by my life, 1 pity youVt (IV.i,85, 87). Bosola seems to be on the road to re- 88 defining himself through his relationship with the Duchess,
becoming the compassionate saviour she once thought him. 1s he at long last writing her into a scenario in which she
will be a passive "Image of sweetnesse," he the active hero who leaps class barriers with a single bound? Or is he writing himself back into her script? As the Duchess' ordeal moves into its last phase, the players on the stage dwindle to two major figures: the malcontent and the woman he has attempted to manipulate to his own ends. Of this encounter, Lee Bliss writes that
It[i]n his own perverse way, Bosola woos the Duchess while tormenting her. She alone challenges [his] carefully constructed philosophy ...[and he tries] to force the acquiescence that would justify his life" (151). Jacqueline
Pearson, too, notes that "the two are not only enemies but are also almost alliesn (87). This impression of ra~prochementbetween malcontent and Duchess seems to me due to Webster's emphasis on the structural similarities between the two figures at the point of the Duchess' death. Both try to surmount social disadvantages by stage-managing others, and both meet with only limited success. "1 shall shartly grow one / Of the miracles of pity," remarks the Duchess in caustic response to Bosola's compassion (I.i.94- 9-5); her ironic view of her own situation echoes the malcontent's tone, and indeed Bosola will echo her in the nexSdkt, sardonically remarking, "1 think 1 shall / Shortly 89 grow the common bier for churchyards- (VAi.311-312). The differentiating line between the Duchess and the malcontent is wavering. "1 am acquainted with sad misery, / As the tanntd galley-slave is with his oarw (IV.ii.27-28), the Duchess tells Cariola, reaching out metaphorically to identify herself with her torturer. 1s she losing her identity in his? Or is she in some sense re-staging her courtship with Antonio, assimilating yet another identity into her own? The final confrontation between Bosola and the Duchess suggests that each continues to try to stage the other- Bosola, significantly, can no longer bear to face the Duchess "in [his] own shape" (IV,i,134); retreating further into the strategies of performance, he puts on a little morality play, a tale of vanitas mundi in which he is Death (first a tomb-maker, then "the common bellman" to condemned prisoners) and she is the (almost) maiden [IV.ii-115-195). The play, he says, is meant "to bring (the Duchess] by degrees to mortification" (IV.ii.176-177); Bosola is staging another example of his distancing contemptus mundi which denigrates social distinction on the grounds that
"continually we bear about with us / A rotten and dead body" (II.i.56-57). "Thou art but a box of wom-seed, at best, but a salvatory of green rmunmy," he tells the Duchess, with a notable lack of courtly flattery (IV.ii.124-125). But the Duchess is having none of this levelling. Who 90
am I?" she asks (IV.ii.l23), and the question is not so much a testament to her loss of identity in Bosola's "tedious theatre" as a challenge. She knows the answer to her own
query: "1 am Duchess of Malfi still" (IV.ii.142). Bosola tries to re-write her social status as simply that which
"makes Cher] sleeps so broken" (IV,ii,143), but the Duchess intimates that he is being "very plainn -- impudently plain? -- in the presence of a Prince (IV.ii.145). She is even "a little merry" (IV.ii.lSl), actually making fun of the graveyard props of the malcontent's morality/mortality play. Critics have often wondered why the Duchess has no Christian name, why she fails to inscribe her chosen status as bourgeoise wife by responding to Bosola with, "1 am Giovanna Bologna still" (Bradbrook 154)- Might it not be that the identity of "Duchess of Malfi still," her class identity, is the one which continues to give the Duchess agency and power enough to combat Bosola's efforts at creating a stock suf fering heroine? The Duchess can die like a prince, perhaps more easily than she can live like one. At one point she almost pleads for death: "any way, for heaven-sake, / So 1 were out of your whispering" (IV.ii.222-223). Desperate to get off the stage on which she is the object of Ferdinand's scopophilia and Bosolafs "intelligence," she temporarily drops the role of brave aristocrat who gracefully bids her executioners do their work and who still more gracefully kneels before her 91 only true ruler, God. Her sudden expression of longing to die suggests the limits of her ability to resist Bosola's image of her and the stage-management by which he and
Ferdinand convince her that Antonio and his son are dead- Repudiating the world, she attests to the power both of the intelligencerts "whispering" and of his bleak view of existence, Dead, the Duchess is both dazzlingly more than a mere object of exchange between Bosola and Ferdinand, and ignominiously less; wrangling oves the reward for the murder, both men seem temporarily to lose sight of the
Duchesst body except as a prop in their struggle. Left alone with the woman he has killed, Bosola responds by re- writing her as his Beatrice and trying to kiss her back to life:
Return, fair soul, from darkness, and lead mine Out of this sensible hell: --she's warm, she breathes: Upon thy pale lips 1 will melt my heart, To store them with fresh colour[.] (IV.ii.342-345) In one sense, this is Bosolats final attempt to define himself by reducing the Duchess, his great aristocratie adversary, to a mere cultural trope: she will be bis
Petrarchan mistress and he will gain a new self-definition as her avenger. He will, in a sense, take Antonio's place and thus fulfil his dream of social advancement, But Bosolats kiss qlso suggests the tlwooingttBligs describes, a 92 reminded him, his Duchess; even in death she represents al1 that is desirable about the lofty height he has tried to depict as worthy only of disgust. Moreover, she is, in an odd sense, a reflection of himself, a would-be playwright
and social transgresser, a galley-slave whose project, like his, seems to have failed. By kissing her and naming himself her avenger, Bosola resolves on one last effort at self-fashioning, and this time he writes himself as for the Duchess, not against her. In their struggle for self- definition, who has won, who lost? As between the Duchess and Bosola, there is a kind of twisted love in the relationship between Flamineo and
Vittoria; perhaps it is this love, as much as the urge to protect the means of his ''preferment,'l that causes Flamineo to fly off the handle every time someone other than himself refers to his sister as a "whoreu (fII.iii.lO9; IV.ii.43)- But Vittoria is working from the same class position as her brother; she is never the glowing image of nobility for her brother that the Duchess becomes for Bosola, and the final struggle between them attests to such how vicious the performative war between two social-climbers fighting for survival can be. Of this scene, Bliss writes that "Flamineo and Vittoria ...willingly sacrifice each other in a bitter struggle for self-definition as well as self-preservation1, and] each refuses the otherls definitions" (128). Brachiano's death leaves Vittoria both executrix of his fortune (V.vi.7) and fugitive from his assassins (V.vi.40). She is now precariously at the top of the social ladder; when Flamineo flounces in demanding "reward for [his] long service" (V.vi.8), she responds with the disdain of a true aristocrat, bequeathing him only the curse of Cain (V.vi.14). Again, she writes herself by negating her brother's construction of a socially convenient sister; Vittoria is the powerful one this time, and will not be manipulated. Or so she thinks. To her demonization of him, Flamineo flings back one of his own: "Thou hast a devil in theew
(V.vi.17). He then proceeds, brandishing an impressive and deadly set of props, io put on a performance of the contenmtus mundi also espoused by Bosola: Pray thee good woman, do not trouble me With this vain worldly business; Say your prayers. 1 made a vow to my deceased lord Neither yourself nor 1 should outlive him The numb'ring of four hours. (V.vi.30-34) Where Bosola's disgust for the world seems in part an attempt to evade Ferdinand's aristocratic power, Flamineo's is a final, performative attempt to climb the social ladder at Vittoria's expense, even if that means identification with their "deceased lord," Brachiano. The mock suicide pact set up by Flamineo will be examined in more detail in the next chapter; in this context it is important simply to note Vittoriats reaction. She tries on a whole series of discontinuous poses in order to calm her apparently crazy 94 brother, veering from benefactress (V.vi.29) to preacher of orthodox Christian morality (V.vi.54-62) and finally, at Zanche's instigation, feigning acquiescence to Flamineo's plan. "Dissembling in Cher] deeds, and in al1 [her] actions subtil1 and dangerous," indeed- We are not dealing in anti-feminist tropes here,
however, so much as we are watching Webster's portrait of a fight to the death between two self-fashioners using al1 the performative weapons at their disposal. Convinced that they have killed Flamineo, Vittoria and Zanche "run to him and tread upon himw (V.vi.l17), and Vittoria's comment
explicitly writes the scene as the triumph of her identity at the expense of her brother's: "1 tread the fire out / That would have been my ruin'' (V.vi.122-123). However, "Vittoria's trick is contained by Flamineo's" (Bliss 129), and springing to his feet he writes her back into the misogynist discourse through which he strives to make himself equal with the Duke: "Trust a woman? Never, never.
Brachiano be my precedentw (V.vi.158-153). Thus, the malcontent seems to be winning this performative struggle until the real assassins enter and change the whole constitution of the stage. Vittoria falters a moment longer than her brother, begging for "gentle pityttin one last desperate use of the mask of feminine vulnerability (V.vi.181). Like the Duchess, however, Vittoria can die elegantly. And like the Duchess', Vittoria's death involves a performance of class identity, an insistence on the place in the social ladder to which she has climbed. She imperiously refuses to be killed af ter Zanche : You shall not kill her first. Behold my breast. 1 will be waited on in death; my servant Shall never go before me ....Yes, 1 shall welcome death As princes do some great ambassadors: 1'11 meet thy weapon halfway. (V.vi.214-219) The fact that Vittoria chooses to display her courage and princeliness by displaying her "breastI1 is striking, considering the physical realities of the Jacobean stage. The dying Duchess emphasizes her political rather than her gender identity, "Duchess of Malfi still"; and even when she refers to her "last womanrs fault" (IV.ii.226) she draws attention to the stream of words by which the proficient boy actor speaks himself woman rather than to the feminine body which the best boy actor can scarcely simulate. Vittorials exposure of her "breast, on the other hand, could only have foregrounded a boy actorls lack thereof. Why does Webster create this jarring theatrical moment, and why does he avoid such a moment in The Duchess of Malfi? Perhaps he simply learned a lesson from the giggles of the Red Bull audience, but critics are often too quick to ascribe differences between The White Devi1 and The Duchess of Malfi to the latter's superiority (see Bradbrook 142). The final struggle between the Duchess and Bosola asserts the structural similarities between the two but keeps gender and class boundaries largely intact; she is the aristocratie yet touchingly materna1 victim and he the conflicted hitman, or she is the absent Petrarchan mistress and he her grieving adorer. But the boy actor who bares Vittoria's "breastv foregrounds the fact that the femininity by which Webster's heroine has so often been defined is not a stable reality but is created by a skilled performance- 1s female identity, then, simply a construct built on, and created by, male identity? 1s Jardine correct in asserting that the final reality on this stage is a male reality typified by the body of the boy actor? Or is the boy actor who claims breasts for himself actually, as many early modern anti- theatricalists claim, a figure of frighteningly ambiguous gender? Does Webster, through his depiction of the subversive sibling relations between Flamineo and Vittoria, actually suggest that al1 gender identity.is fundamentally fluid and dependent on performance? Flamineo's final encomium to his sister, in which for once he defines himself by his resemblance to her rather than by differentiating hirnself from her, suggests that this may be the case: Thlart a noble sister -- 1 love thee now. If woman do breed man She ought to teach him manhood: fare thee well, Know many glorious women that are famed For masculine virtue have been vicious Only a happier silence did betide them. She hath no faults, who hath the art to hide them, (V.vi.239-245) 97 Apparently something of a reversal of Flamineots earlier misogyny, this is a strange tribute. Femininity is still associated with the "vicioust'; the glorious women who are famed for "masculine virtue" are so famed because they are able to hide their faults. 1s the "art to hide," the ability to perform, then, the acme of "masculine virtue," since it is this talent which lends the aura of glory to famous women and which, one assumes, they should teach the men they breed? Perhaps male and female identities are much more fluid than one might have thought, both built on dissembling performances: "We sucked that, sister, / From women's breasts in our first infancy" (1V.ii-179-180).
Flamineo's declaration of his own quasi-aristocratie independence, "1 would not live at any man's entreaty / Nor die at any's bidding" (V.vi.47-48) is an echo of Vittoria's defiant words to Monticelso (III-ii-138-139). Not only can he not climb socially without his sister, but the identity he seeks to achieve in that climb is revealed to be inextricably bound up with hers. So the womari turns out to be a very unpredictable tool for the malcontent's self-fashioning. The malcontent attexnpts to assert the difference between male and female that seexus to offer him the power of definition over women, but that difference, particularly in The White Devil, proves unstable, Moreover, in both The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, Webster's heroines are able to get or keep some degree of power over themselves because they, unlike Flamineo and Bosola, either achieve or possess comparatively powerful class positions. Perhaps Flamineo's final praise of Vittoria, like Bosola's wooing of the Duchesst corpse, is an attempt to grow great by being a great (wo)man's ape, proclaiming the fluidity of male and female identity in order to appropriate the woman's class power. Vittoria grew precariously great by achieving the personal relationship with Brachiano mavailable to Flamineo; perhaps Flamineo, declaring "Th'art a noble sister -- / 1 love thee now" (V,vi,239-240; emphasis mine) is, like Bosola kissing the lips of the woman he has killed, trying to take on that greatness by establishing a new relationship with his lady. The line between love and ambition is as difficult to draw as the line between man and woman, Much recent work on cross-dressing in the early modern theatre has suggested that, as Stephen Orgel writes, theatre here holds the mirror up to nature -- or more precisely to culture: this is a world in which masculinity is always in question, In the discourses of patriarchy, gender is the least certain of boundaries. ...[Tlhe dangerous possibility ...is articulated in innumerable ways throughout this society, . , ,that women might not be objects b t subjects, not the other but the self. (153)Y Moreover, the early modem playhouse audience included a
1 For another illuminating discussion of the ramifications of cross-dressing for gender differentiation, see Laura Levine, Men in Women's Clothinq: Anti Theatricalit~and Effeminization, 1579-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994)- 99 large number of women, and Jean Howard suggests that it is "possible that in the theater womem were licensed to look -- and in a larger sense to judge what they saw and to exercise autonomy -- in ways that problematized women's status as object within patriarchyn (79). In other words, the playhouse seems to have been a place where Swetnam's pat distinction between "dissembling" woman and "simple and plaine-meaning mantt (Swetnam 5) tended rather to dissolve than to solidify. Evervone was acting here; even the audience member was both spectacle and spectator, as John Northbrooke remarked of the woman who finds herself in the playhouse "where so many faces looke upon hir, and againe she uppon so manye" (cited in Howard 79). In the audience as on stage, members of various classes and of both genders seem to have been seizing the right to look as well as to be looked upon; yet these rights were carefully regulated by government controls and criticized by anti-theatrical pamphleteers. As Webster's malcontents discover, no one can completely write the identity of another, nar escape completely the position of actor in someone else's play. Chapter Three : "Another Voyagen: Death and the Malcontent
It is therefore Death alone that can suddenly make man to know himself. -- Sir Walter Raleigh, The Historv of the World The subject needs a myth of its end, as of its origin, to form its identity. -- Jean Baudrillard, "Political Economy and Death"
As Bosola is dying at the end of The Duchess of Malfi, Malateste asks him to explain the death of Antonio, that gentleman of great hopes who introduces Bosola to the audience at the begiming of the play and who is murdered by the malcontent in its final movement. He died "Ciln a mist," replies Bosola; "1 know not how: such a mistake as I/ Have often seen in a playn (V.v.94-96). The metatheatricality of Bosola's response is typical of the malcontent's encounter with death, but in what way does the death of the Duchess' unfortunate husband actually resemble "a play"? On the simplest level, Bosola's description may be taken as referring to the almost ludicrously coincidental aspect of Antonio's murder: the steward is stabbed in the dark by Bosola, who seems to have mistaken him for mad Duke Ferdinand. The malcontent thus unwittingly fulfils the commission of his despised new patron the Cardinal, who has commanded Bosola to kill the man the latter claims he "would have saved 'bove [his] own life" (V.iv.53). Antonio's murder typifies the tangle of social actions associated with the performative world of the rnalcontent: Bosola is at once defying aristocratie power by attempting to kill his old master Ferdinand, and submitting to it by executing (once again) an aristocrat's murderous will, According to Bosola, the defiance represents his intention, the submission that intention's inadvertent outcorne; but perhaps his act in killing Antonio is even more socially complex than his own analysis suggests. Antonio, after all, is almost Bosolals alter ego; as Whigham remarks, "to noble eyes both are servants -- men in the way of opportunity" (1996:212). Over the course of the play Bosola has corne to fisticuffs with Antonio (ILiv.10-50), eulogized him as the ideal gentleman (III.ii.241-273), denigrated him as a "base, low fellow" (III-v-117), and finally taken on (and thus ousted Antonio from) his role as the Duchess' rightful avenger (IV.ii 368-375) . In killing Antonio, he kills a kind of ideal version of himself; he also kills his rival in the strange, Petrarchan, social-climbing love affair he established with the Duchesst corpse. Claiming that Antonio's murder is Ifsuch a mistake as I have often seen in a play," Bosola performs a different version of the shape-shifting trick by which he arrived masked to kill the Duchess. He negates his agency in the death by representing himself as a helpless actor manipulated by an absent stage-manager, complaining that "[w]e are merely the stars' tennis-balls, struck and bandied 102 / Which way please than (V-iv.54-55). At the same time, he explicitly writes himself into a play in which his sordid (and possibly quite intentional) act of execution is mystified as part of some cosmic cycle of revenge and retribution. Who is Bosola -- passive puppet, active
player, or playwright of his own destiny? Can it be that his ttmistakettin killing Antonio is reminiscent of "a play" partially because it asks this very question? Antonio's dying words suggest that the steward's murder, like so many deaths in Webster's theatre, explores the relationship between identity and performance. To
Bosola ' s question, What art thou? lf, the Duchess ' husband
responds ambiguously: "A most wretched thing, / That only have thy benefit in death, / To appear myselfrr(V.iv.48-50). On one level, Antonio's words imply that death is the agent which, peeling away the layers of counterfeit by which he has sought to "avoid shametr(II.iii.52), finally reveals his true self. Yet Antonio does not Say that he will at last %et' himself, but that he will "appeart' himself: we are still in the realm of performance, where, as Elyot writes, 'l[w]e know nothing but by outward significationsn (163). Do Antonio's words suggest that the very thing we cal1 a "self" is constituted by performance? And what does he mean by saying that the "benefittlin his death is Bosola's, not his own? By examining Bosola's own death and the death(s) of
Flamineo (who, like q cat, a god, or an actor, expires more than once), 1 hope to offer some provisional answers to these questions, for the malcontent's final performances suggest complex and ambivalent conclusions about the relationship between theatricality, social struggle, and identity. According to one strand of early modem response to death, the encounter with the grim reaper should be a sort
of pyrrhic victory for the malcontent. We have seen repeatedly how Bosola and Flamineo attempt to erase the supposedly essential difference between aristocrat and servant, arguing that although [sJome would think the souls of princes were brought forth by some more weighty cause than those of meaner persons -- they are deceived: there's the same hand to th-: the like passions sway themC.1 (Duchess II.i.101-104) According to Sir Walter Raleigh, death is the true proof of this assertion, the ultimate social leveller: It is ...Death alone that can suddenly make man to know himself. He tells the proud and insolent that they are but abjects, and humbles them at the instant.... He takes the account of the rich, and proves him a beggar -- a naked beggar, which hath interest in nothing but in the grave1 that fills his mouth. ...O eloquent, just and mighty Death! ...Thou hast drawn together al1 the far-stretched greatness, al1 the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it al1 over with these two narrow words -- Hic Jacet. (203-204) Death dissolves the prince's court in one fell swoop, as Flamineo observes: 'What solitariness is about dying princes .... O justice! where are their flatterers now?" (V.iii.43, 45-46). The poisoned Brachiano's trembling 104 cornand, "On pain of death, let no man name death to me, / It is a word infinitely terrible" (White Devil V.iii.40-41), attests pathetically to the limits of hhis ariçtocratic power, Similarly, the final moments of both Ferdinand and the Cardinal in The Duchess of Malfi are characterized by the dissolution of their proud ariçtocratic identities, with the Cardinal pleading to be "laid by and never thought ofw (V.v.90) and Ferdinand recognizing that "[llike diamonds we are cut with our own dust" (V.v.73).
The levelling accomplished by Raleigh's "mighty Death," however, is not really to the malcontent's purpose; it simply lands his "ambitionr'in the same pit of beggary and nothingness to which it consigns his princes' "pride [and] cruelty ." Moreover, death as repsesented by Raleigh seems to nullify the very strategies of performance by which the malcontent has attempted to rise. Death snatches off social masks; death alone can reveal the painfully naked truth,
''suddenly mak[ingJ man to know hirn~elf.~' If death destroys the social barriers that have hindered the malcontent's rise, it simultaneously precludes any possibility of rising; it suggests that both rank and the performances by which rank might be obtained are ultimately nul1 and void.
Faced with their own deaths, both Flamineo and Bosola seem to some extent to reject their struggles for social advancement and the often inefficacious performative means of those struggles. In the aftermath of his patron's and his brotherls deaths, Flamineo is forced to ask, "[ilf [Brachiano] could not be safe in his own court / Being a great Duke, what hope then for us?" (V.vi.39-40). At this point, the malcontent describes his life in te- which suggest to Bliss the stirring of a new and painful self- knowledge (126-127): 1 have lived Riotously ill, like some that live in court; And sometimes, when my face was full of smiles Have felt the maze of conscience in my breast. Oft gay and honoured robes these tortures try: 'We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.' (V. iv. 115-120)
As we have seen from his encounter with Ludovico, Flarnineofs disgust with his own social climbing and the society that necessitates it is very strong- His wit and his manipulation of Vittoria -- his riotous ill-living -- have been at best only partially successful as social tools, and death is (quite literally, as he is about to meet Brachiano's ghost) staring him in the face. We may well be tempted to decide that theatrical self-fashioning is a source of more tears than songs and to applaud Flamineo's apparent ability to "transcend self-delusion" (Bliss 135) as he abandons performance, that "desperate tactic by which [the actor] tries to foist a certain sense of himself on himself,It (Whigham 1984:22). But this is not Flamineo's final position; indeed, he soon turns from inwardness to the flamboyant perfo-tive mode of his encounter with Vittoria, resolving thataQIll these [horrors] / Shall with Vittoria's bounty turn to good, / Or 1 will drown this weapon in her blood" (V.iv.144-146). Something rather different from Raleigh's great unmasking is about to take place.
Bosola's dying moments also initially seem to involve an association between performance and misery, an outright rejection of theatricality as a means for social advancement. The terms of this apparent rejection are explicitly metatheatrical, the assassin describing himself as "an actor in the main of all, / Much 'gainst [his] own good nature, yet i' th' end / Neglectedn (V.v.85-87). Even more so than Flamineo, who openly and gleefully boasts of the association between his histrionic skills and his social climbing, Bosola has been an anti-theatricalist's case-study in the hazards of acting, a masked hit man using performance to deceive even himself as he tries to negate his involvement in his own destructive actions. Now he invokes some sort of "good naturen which has been disguised and corrupted by his feigning. Can we afford to accept this "good nature" as the essential truth of Bosola's being? Or is the ex-galley slave in fact still the master actor in some form of social performance, still complaining of being unfairly "neglected," still asserting his agency in the action of the play? 1s he not, by re-inventing himself as the "RevengeCrJ, for the Duchess of Malfi, mrdered / By thtArragonian brethren" (V.v.81-83), fashioning a new 107 persona through which he may perform his "good naturew as well as his talent for murder? 1 do not wish to suggest that Bosola's repentance and disgust with his "neglect" are false, any more than Flamineo's self-abhorrence and unhappiness are false at the moment when he finds himself facing Brachianots ghost. Rather, I would argue that these characters finally challenge the anti-theatricalists' dichotomous opposition between reality and feigning, performance and self-knowledge, and ask us to revise our ideas about theatricality as a social tool. Death on stage, as Webster suggests in The White Devil, is something more than the curtain which ends our performances for good. When he appoints Vittoria and Zanche to kill him, Flamineo describes death in appropriately Raleighan terms as a leveller which reveals man's true nothingness before stealing him from himself for good: Whither shall I go now? O Lucian thy ridiculous purgatory! To find Alexander the Great cobbling shoes, Pompey tagging points, and Julius Caesar making hair buttons,., Whether 1 resolve to fire, earth, water, air, Or al1 the elements by scruples, 1 know not Nor greatly care.... (V.vi.105-108, 111-113) His apparent death at hiç sister's and his mistress' hands has al1 the trappings of a melodramatic villain's final reckoning. The appalling destructiveness of the malcontent's self-interested ambition becomes his torment as Vittoria I1tread[s] the fire out / That would have been [her] ruin" (V.vi.122-123). Flamineo responds appropriately with moans about the loneliness of his approaching damnation: "0, the way's dark and horrid! 1 cannot see -- / Shall 1 have no company?" (V.vi.136-137). "Caught in [his] own enginel' (V.vi.122), Flamineo even becomes the apparent victim of the histrionic ski11 he lived by, deceived by Vittoria's "perjured" vows (V-vi.124). But al1 this suitably operatic dissolution, Flamineo's
dying contem~tusmundi and his terrified visions of hellfire, are suddenly revealed as parodies of the real thing. What bas seemed to be the malcontent's final loss of control turns out to be his most darkly witty act of self- assertion as he rises from the (near) dead:
1 am not wounded: The pistols held no bullets: 'twas a plot To prove your kindness to me and 1 live To punish your ingratitude. I knew One time or other you would find a way To give me a strong potion. (V.vi.147-152) Flamineo's mock death suggests the extraordinary complexity
of Webster's use of metatheatricality. It is, as Luckyj
remarks, "[a] metatheatrical joke ...[where] Webster makes his audience (which has shared the women's illusions) conscious of the reality of the theatre, in which death is always feigned" (White Devi1 145, 11.148). As usual with Flamineo's jokes, this one has a pronounced social dimension. If the audience has really "shared the women's illusions, then it has presumably shared to some extent Vittoria's temporary illusion of power over her brother. Many audience members will likely have assumed that they know more than Flamineo, predicting Vittoria's and Zanche's betrayal and recognizing in Flamineo's grand guignol agonies
the proper retribution of a villain. As Nashe remarks in
his defense of the theatre, "no Play ...encourageth any man to tumult or rebellion, but layes before such the halter and the gallowes" (in Chambers 239).
Flamineo, rising, negates his own just punishrnent and re-writes it as a test of Vittoria and Zanche; it has been a demonstration of his power over them rather than vice versa. It has also been a demonstration of the actor's power over his audience. The player Flamineo winks at his spectators:
Didn't 1 tell you not to be too quick to find my shape- shifting ridiculous? On stage, where death is always feigned, performance is far from being vanquished by the great leveller, and the unpredictable, tumultuous power of this our chameleon is not so easily contained as Nashe might suggest . On the other hand, Vittoria's and Zanche's error is unquestionably such a mistake as could hardly happen except in the playhouse, and even on this stage, as Bliss mites, "Flamineo's farcical playlet, where nothing is real and the defeated spring back, proves to be only a rehearsal" (129). "My soul, like to a ship in a black Storm, / 1s driven 1 know not whither" cries Vittoria, faced with her real assassins and a death from which she will not spring back (V.vi.246-247). 1s there any way of avoiding a total loss of self at the end of lives lived outside the playhouse, in a world where the reality of death is unequivocal and ever- present? In fact, some early modern representations of the deaths of marginalized social figures such as women and religious dissidents suggest that the unquestionable
finality of death could enable the dying subject to make a iast bid for social power through a brilliant last performance. The great anti-theatricalist Philip Stubbes represents his wife Katharinetsdying moments as an edifying spectacle stage-managed by herself and complete with an audience of neighbours and friends. To these she remarks: Right worshipfu11 and my good neighbours and friends ...for that 1 knowe that my hower-glasse is runne out, and my time of departure hence is at hande, 1 am perswaded ...to make a confession of my fayth, before you all. (203) Philip Stubbes tells us that the reasons for his wife's confession are "1. to confirm others; 2. to testify that she died a Christian; 3. that her friends might be witnesses of her beliefn (203). In other words, Katharine Stubbes' last performance is not only designed to ensure the immortality of her soul, but also to assert the social power over others of her example and to guarantee the earthly survival of her reputation as (in her own words) "a perfect Christian, and a lively member of the mysticall bodie of Jesus Christ" (203). If Katharine Stubbes is unlikely to rise from the dead
Flamineo-style (except in the next world) , her persona as "a Christall Glasse for Christian women" (Stubbes 195) will remain socially influential. Actually facing "the halter and the gallows" in 1595 in retribution for his supposed inclination to "tumult and
tebellion," the Jesuit poet Robert Southwell reportedly responded to his approaching death in even more explicitly performative terms than Katharine Stubbes. In his biographer's account, Southwell addresses the crowd come to witness his execution through a theatrical metaphor: 1 am come hither to play out the last act of this poor life. . ..This is my death, my last farewell to this unfortunate life, and yet to me most happy and most fortunate. 1 pray it be for the full satisfaction of my sins, for the good of my Country, and for the comfort of many others. Which death, albeit that it seem here disgraceful, yet 1 hope that in time to come it will be to my eternal glory. (cited in Devlin 321-322) Southwell~sexecution is a drama staged by the state authorities in which the Jesuit's dismembered body is to stand as an 'kmblem of the manifest efficacy of the reigning social structurew (Mullaney 23). However, just as Flamineo
reminds his audience not to be too quick to judge his performances "ridiculousl' (IV.ii.239), Southwell tells the witnesses of his execution that his death may only seem "disgraceful.' Southwell's speech re-writes the spectacle of his noble suffering as one trmosthappy and most
fortunate" tu him, not only because it may guarantee his lteternal gloryw or spiritual immortality, but because he hopes it will have lasting social power "for the good of 112 [his] country, and for the comfort of many others.I1 And
just as Katharine Stubbes' death was a source of edification to many readers as well as to her neighbours, Southwell's reportedly so impressed the spectators at his execution that
one Protestant nobleman remarked, "1 cannot answer for his religion, but 1 wish to God that my sou1 may be with his" (cited in Devlin 324). These accounts make clear the reason why the death of the Duchess of Malfi is such a theatrical struggle between the Duchess and Bosola: an effective dying performance helps to ensure the survival of the cultural work performed, We
are left with the paradox described by Wendy Wall, in which dying speech becomes "a strangely performative and self- constituting gesture dependent on the erasure of the subject at the very moment of powerful self-assertionn (286). The power achieved by individuals like Katharine Stubbes and Robert Southwell is ambiguous: they can attempt to ensure the survival of their ideas, but they must lose their lives, and thus their worldly control over those ideas, in order to do so. This conundrum is underlined by the fact that the apparent social power of the dying Stubbes and Southwell may not be their own at all, but their biographers'. 1s Katharine Stubbes' last performance really hers, or is it staged by the (ironically anti-theatrical) husband who writes her biography complete with his own marginal notations? Can the most assured deathbed performance guarantee the survival of a vestige of the self, or is death always the loss of self as the power of interpretation and
representation passes into the hands of the survivors? Can performance ever tmly be a tool of social power? 1s the actor contained, containable, by the appropriating gaze of the audience? The death of Webster's Duchess of Malfi answers these questions equivocally; the Duchessl wonderful performance of the "dignity, courage, and stubborn wilfulness natural to her royal position" (Bliss 145) is not fully contained by Bosola's attempt to rewrite her as the suffering stoical heroine of his Petrarchan romantic tragedy, but it does not wholly escape such containment either. Bosola's own death is characterized by similar ambiguities; the malcontent switches positions in his final speech as rapidly as he switched roles earlier in the play: O, 1 am gone!-- We are only like dead walls, or vaulted graves, That ruin'd, yislds no echo: -- Fare you well -- It may be pain, but no harm to me to die In so good a quarrel. 0, this gloomy world! In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness, Doth womanish and fearful mankind live! Let worthy minds neter stagger in distrust To suffer death or shame for what is just -- Mine is another voyage. (V.v.96-105) This is much more complex than simply a last expression of wBosolalsflip pessimism[,],..discredited by our memory of what bas gone before" (Pearson 94). For one thing, Bosola repeatedly suggests the complex interactions between the Duchess' identity and his own. The malcontent's tone is indeed pessimistic when he forecasts the erasure of his worldly self, but if "ruinedm he leaves ''no echo, is the same true of the Duchess? She survives her own death in the ambiguous form of the echo which twists Antonio's words into a warning and reminds him of his "wife's voicetl(V.iii.26), Does the Duchess retain some power to influence events after her death, or does she simply become, like Katharine Stubbes, a supporting voice in her husband's play? Bosolats reference to a world without echoes, in which nothing survives death, could either be a tribute to the Duchess as an exception to this rule or a last attempt at erasing the performance by which she struggled to retain her social agency .
One way or the other, Bosola is not negating his own identity but creating a new role for himself in relation to the Duchess. The malcontent's contention that ''we are only like dead walls or vaulted graves" is undercut by his next assertion, "CiJt may be pain, but no harm, to me to die / In so good a quarrel." Here we find Bosola writing himself the Duchess' avenger rather than her murderer; "[t]he last part of [his] life / Hath done [him] best servicew (V.v.64-65), as he remarks, for on the verge of his own dissolution he has not only finally destroyed his aristocratie patrons but identified himself with the cause of the Duchess, It's not a bad place td be; as Frank Whigham writes, "[the Duchess'] project fails, but its work of imagining gets done, in detail and extremely memorably" (1996:211)- The Duchess has both given the play's most nearly successful performance of nobility ("1 am Duchess of Malfi still"), and committed its most nearly successful act of social transgression by marrying Antonio. In identifying his cause with hers, the dying Bosola continues to attempt to construct an identity which will raise him from the level of suborned hitman to a position at once higher and more socially subversive, Yet it is impossible for Bosola to distance himself completely from the acts committed in the name of his massive desire for preferment, and the conclusion of his dying speech shifts back away from his self-fashioning as the glorious avenger. "Let worthy minds ne1er stagger in distrust / To suffer death or shame for what is just: / Mine is another voyage." Sublimely equivocal, these last words are vintage Bosola. He differentiates himself not only from the evil of Ferdinand and the Cardinal, the "main causeCs] of [his] undoing," but also from those confidently "worthy minds" incapable of such evil. Bosola himself is something, someone else; "crawling between heaven and eartht' (Hamlet IIL,i.128-129), his is "another voyage," Whigham describes Bosola's departure as "seaward, to the galleys, to the pathless wilderness from which he entered the play, a castaway looking for solid ground to cal1 his ownw (1996:223). Perhaps this very persona of unfixed, unfixable 116 castaway is one which Bosola performs at the last in a play for a form of social power. After all, he does not sum up his ruined, fearful life by remarking, "Mine was another voyagett;he journeys into death in the present tense, projecting himself past the ending of the play and past
Delio's glib assertion that "Integrity of life is £amers best friend / Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end" (V.v.120-121)- Bosolars own depiction of himself as a dead wall or a vaulted grave does indeed suggest the failure of his social and performative project. Concretely speaking, he has accomplished precisely nothing; he has neither gentled his position nor achieved any lasting place in the community. Indeed, he has destroyed al1 of the people (Ferdinand, the Duchess, and Antonio) with whom it seemed possible he might form some kind of lasting relationship. Delio, the spectator figure at Bosolats death, goes some way toward re- absorbing him into conventional moral discourse when he remarks that such men '' Cl] eave no more fame behind ' em than should one / Fa11 in a frost, and leave his print in snown (Vv.14-115) But still some vision of a future life appears in the spaces between the multiple personae of the malcontent's last speech. What if Bosola, consummate actor and "shifting cornpanion," could voyage right past Delio's attempt to contain him? At first sight, the speeches associated with the second and "realW death of Flamineo in The White Devil seem even more pessimistic than Bosolals last words. They are riddled with sententiae that resemble Deliols -- and Raleigh's -- remarks on the emptiness of rank and the instability of earthly glory: "'Prosperity doth bewitch men seeming clear, says the dying Flamineo, quoting from Alexander's
Croesus, "But seas do laugh, show white, when rocks are near" (V.vi.248-249). The citation points toward the failure of Flamineo's social project and his realization that the success he congratulated himself on at Vittoria's wedding (V.i.i-3) was an illusion; he has performed his way not into high rank but into death. Flamineo seems to acknowledge the futility of any social ambition in a world where "[tlhis busy trade of life appears most vain, / Since rest breeds rest where al1 seek pain by pain" (V.vi.271- 272). As Dollimore remarks, these words "surely allude to Bacon's essay Of Great Place." Bacon writes: It is a strange desire, to seek power and lose liberty; or to seek power over others and lose power over a man's self. The rising unto place is laborious, and by pains men come to greater pains; and it is sometimes base, and by indignities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery; and the regress is either a downfall, or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing. Cum non sis ai fueris, non esse cur velis vivere [When you are no longer who you have been, there is no reason why you should wish to live]. (Bacon 31, cited in Dollimore 1992:193) Dollimore reads this reference as pointing to Webster's sense in The White Devil of "how individuals can actually be constituted by the destructive social forces wotking upon 118 th-" (193). But it seems to me that the tragic force of Flamineo's quotations is somewhat undercut by the fact that he has already reeled off such pessimistic social wisdom in the midst of his staged death earlier in the scene. These are cultural tags befitting a frustxated villaints passing, and if they point to the determination of Flamineo's identity by the social forces which, as it were, put these words in his mouth, they also point to Flamineo's continual se-possession of his identity through his conscious theatricality. Has the malcontent really lost power over himself by seeking power over others? His use of sententiae suggests that the answer to this question is yes, to an extent, But Flamineo's last words, like Bosola's, are essentially shifting and contradictory, and up against his despairing social generalizations we must set his defiant declaration of his own autonomy and self-possession: "1 do not look / Who went before, nor who shall follow me; / No, at myself 1 will begin and endw (V.vi.254-256). Perhaps even more than Bosola, the dying Flamineo is still a master actor, still struggling to stage his own version of his own identity, and very far from renouncing performance as a means of social power. Bosola's death, on a stage littered by the bodies of men he has killed, is almost unequivocally tragic; surrounded by a "deep pit of darkness" (V.v.lOl), he voyages into an undiscovered country which may well turn out to be no less gloomy than Malfi. 119 Flamineo's death, despite his admission that his life has been "a black charnel" (V.vi.268), is characterized by an ambiguous form of lfgoodnessn(V.vi.267), a surprising levity. His last words are not, as Dollimore pretends, his despairing citation from Bacon; rather, they involve a grand theatrical gesture that recalls the malcontent's earlier, gleeful shape-shifting. "Let no harsh flattering bells resound my knellf1'Flamineo bids some transcendent stage manager: "Strike thunder and strike loud to my farewellN (V.vi.273-274). This last act of self-assertion seems to contradict the expression of social futility that precedes it, for if it refuses the flattery of the church bells that would muffle the malcontent's sins, it also claims for Flamineo the power to demand in honoux of his own death "a prodigious sign associated with the fa11 of great menm (Luckyj in The White Devil 151, n.274). It is possible to read this with Dollimore as a pathetic howl of protest undercut by the social truths that go before it, or with Bliss as a tragic affirmation that "in a world which refuses to offer it, meaning might yet be createdl' (135). Or perhaps Flamineo's position in death is more equivocal than either critic would allow, By describing Flamineo's "stubborn defiance" before his murderers as "born of a willed insensibility" sustained by Flamineo "only by isolating himself in the moment -- removed from the past, the future, almost from consciousness itself" (192-193), Dollimore ignores the implications of the Websterian metatheatricality of Flamineo's death. The malcontent's demand for thunder at his death is a social gesture which situates him firmly in the playhouse; the line
between the dying character asserting his identity in the face of the void and the living actor cuing the sound
effects crew is not at al1 clear. "1 have caught / An everlasting cold. 1 have lost my voice / Most irrevocablyw (V.vi.268-269): Flamineo's dying quip at once distinguishes his "reall'death from his faked one (where no jokes were allowed to spoil the Heroic Style) and reminds the audience once again that this is not a "realm death at all, that they are in the theatre where death is always an illusion and where Richard Perkins might well be a little hoarse after an afternoon of belting all those lines into the crowd at the Red Bull. The actor's loss of voice, the end of the performance, is the tragic character's loss of body, the end of his life. Pearson remarks that "the identity which the actor normally sheds as the curtain finally goes dom
Flamineo begins to shed rather earlier" (78), effectively accepting Keir Elam's definition of metatheatrical moments as "licensed means of confirminq the [theatrical] frame by pointing out the pure facticity of the representation" (90). But does Flamineo's metatheatrical death really point to the actorls shedding of a fictional identity? Or could the metatheatrical joke which blurs the line between character 121 and actor actually suggest that Flamineols loss of voice, like the actor's, is not wirrevocablew at all, that the character's cultural work of performance is carried on by the actor even while the latter lies panting on the stage attempting convincingly to play dead?
1 would argue that one subtext of metatheatrical stage deaths like those of Webster's malcontents is the shifting power relation between the early modern player and his audience. It is striking that the elegies on Richard
Burbage's passing usually describe stage moments in which the actor's effective depiction of a character's suffering or death attests to his extraordinary histrionic power.
Thus, Burbage is praised on the grounds that Yor false / And acted passion he has drame true teares / From the spectators" (May cited in Gurr 1980:lll). Another elegist describes the effect of his performance of Hamlet's death: "ThCe] spectators, and the rest / Of his sad Crew, whilst hee but seem'd to bleed, / Amazed, thought even then he died in deedn (cited in Gurr 1980:lll). The spectators simultaneously know that Burbage's performance is Yalse and actedn and are utterly convinced of its truth; Hamlet dies and does not die (because it's only art, not reality),
Burbage does not die and seems to die (because the impression of reality is so strong). As Laura Levine notes, much early modern antitheatrical writing suggests that the illusion of reality produced by actors had a 'koercive, 122 almost hypnotic, power ...over the audience" (13), a power strong enough to change their social behaviour, In this context, the convincing performance of the death of an accomplished fictional actor like Hamlet -- or Bosola, or Flamineo -- validates theatricality as a powerful social tool even while depicting the failure of social projects which use performance as a means to an end, As Flamineo gains power over Vittoria and Zanche by giving a convincing
rendition of his own death, the actor gains power over his audience by giving a convincing rendition of a consummate playerts final lapse into apparent powerlessness.
Then again, perhaps the true power remains in the hands of the spectators. At the end of countless early modern plays the players must turn to the audience and ask for applause to ratify whatever social power they have; perhaps
Burbage does not so much convince his spectators that he "dieCs] in deed" as they choose to invest his obviously Valse and acted" death with reality, In this case the wtor, like the dying subject, might turn out to be the most dependent of the dependent, his identity effectively erased at the very moment of powerful self-assertion by the interpretive power of the spectator. Katharine Stubbes' dying identity is determined by her husband and absorbed ipto his; Bosola's ambiguous dying statements are conven$sntlr-~uumedup by Delio's consemative moral s performance fectiyely dies the vision; wk' ef -. as audience withdraws its imaginative cornmitment and gushes out the theatre doors at the end of the play. Still we are left with the implicitly subversive content of Katharine Stubbesf apparently conservative
gesture when she identifies her own body with Christ's on her deathbed (Stubbes 206); with the shifting, elusive power of the final pronouncements of Webster's malcontents; with the antitheatrical terror that "the play is dangerous precisely because the spectator becomes a replica of the actor" (Levine 13). The power of performances of death, and of performances & death, is partially in the implication that there is no such thing as a fixed, permanent, lasting human identity, but that al1 identity is constituted dramaticallv through the social dialectic between actor and spectator. Death iç a leveller in the sense that it demonstrates the finitude of any constnicted human identity, so that Bosola can glory that the Cardinal, who llstood...like a huge pyramid / Begun upon a large and ample base, / [Shall] end in a little point, a kind of nothing" (Duchess V.v.77-79). Flamineo responds to Ludovico's frustrated demand that he reveal the truth of himself by revealing what he is thinking: Nothing, of nothing: leave thy idle questions; I am itthlwayto study a long silence. To prate were idle -- 1 remember nothing. Therefs nothing of so infinite vexation As man's own thoughts. (White Devil V.vi.200-204) No essential, fixed human trait or position can survive the hand of "cloquent, just, and mighty death." Still, Bosola responds to Antonio's murder by resolving at last to I1appear [him]selfw: "1 will not imitate things glorious,/ No more than base; 1'11 be mine own example" (V.iv-81-82). Similarly, Flamineo declares, "1 do not look / Who went before, nor who shall follow me; / No, at myself 1 will begin and endw (V.vi.254-256). Yet even these final declarations of absolute autonomy are performances of identity which depend for their power on audience ratification, on the dismay of onstage rivals faced with the malcontent's courage or on the playhouse spectator's appreciation of his bravura theatricality. In this sense, Flamineo's and Bosolats last acts of self-assertion are like their earlier expressions of disdain for the preferment they desire: in the very act of distancing himself from the community, the malcontent attempts to become part of it. Perhaps the only social power that can survive death is the power of one performer over another in this social dialectic -- Katharine Stubbes' effect on her husband, her husbandfs on her, the power of both over his readers.
Flamineo's metatheatrical jokes defy death because they underline the ongoing link between the actor and the spectators who at once believe in his "deathW and laugh at his mockery of stage illusions; his identity, his social dream of performance, is already slipping off the stage and into the audience. Plays like Webster's, as Francis Barker remarks, %hare[d] an unbroken continuity -- across the proscenium which is not there -- with the world in which they were performed, and which they perform" (15). This is a world in which identity is never autonomous; power over the self is always shifting from one subject to another. Although the player is "the servaunt of the people1' (Cocke
in Chambers 256), White still admonishes the theatregoer, "and thou be what thou canst be, thou losest thy selfe that hauntest those scoles of vicet1 (in Chambers 197). Performance annihilates death in one sense, for the diffusion of one identity into another is an endless
process; but it also annihilates any fixed self or any final end to social struggle. "It importes euerie negotiatour, discouerer, intelligencer, practitioner, and euerie wittie
man continually to cast abowt, b scowre the coast- Still & still more 9 more" (Gabriel Harvey cited in Whigham 1984: 1). If we look back at Bosola's and Flamineo's original social ambitions, those projects in which performance was to be a means to an end, we find that both malcontents began
their respective plays with a determination to reach a fixed (that is, higher) social position. Thus Bosola, al1 the
while denouncing the aristocrats he seeks as patrons,
declares, Tould 1 be one of their flattering panders, 1 would hang on their ears fike a horseleech until 1 were full and then drop offw (Duchess I.i.52-54), and Flamineo is willing to do anything in order to Ifbear [his] beard out of the level / Of [his] lord's stirrupn (White Devi1 311-312). For al1 their social transgression, these are largely conservative ambitions, effectively endorsing the old social hierarchies and only desiring to move a few rungs up the ladder. That accomplished, al1 the performing could end, and, "confirm[edJ.,,happyw (White Devil V,i.3), the malcontent could relax in the place he had gained for
But, as we have seen repeatedly, there is really no escape from the continuing dialectical relationship between actor and audience in which each is continually taking on the other's role. In the famous words of one playgoer who might have seen the premieres of Webster's tragedies, "No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine" (DOM~ 101). The Iives and deaths of Webster's malcontents suggest that, as Montrose writes, social systems are produced and reproduced in the interactive social practices of individuals and groups; that collective structures may enable as well as constrain individual agency; that the possibilities and patterns for action are always socially and historically situated.,-; and that there is no necessary relationship between the intentions of actors and the outcornes of their actions. (1986:lO)
Antonio's death is "such a mistake as 1 have often seen in a play," says Bosola -- an action at once socially and individually determined in which Bosola's intention is disrupted by the presence of other wills and other agents, a murder which underlines the fluidity of identity on this stage and in this world. Performance does indeed fail as a means to the end Bosola and Flamineo originally seek, that of achieving a fixed and satisfying position in the social hierarchy, Flamineo is left unhappily aware of the maze of conscience in his breast, and Bosola is "if th' end / Neglected." Still, Bosola dies embarking on "another voyage," Flamineo calling for a stage-hand to endorse his defiant self- definition. These deaths are ambiguous and contradictory, as both characters attentpt at once to cling to doomed
autonomous identities and to hand their cultural projects over to the spectators in the playhouse, themselves social actors. The spectacle the malcontent makes of himself in death suggests that his identity, formed by cultural £orces and social interactions, is still struggling to leave a social imprint that will not end with the failure of his voice- Webster's intensely theatrical last acts suggest
that performance may succeed as an end in itself, as a constitutive force in the social construction of identity. Seeking to know themselves in death, the malcontents find "a kind of nothing" instead of fixed natures or subject positions (Duchess V.v.79). What remains is the ongoing social action of performance, the endless formative dialogue between shifting subject positions. Perhaps Bacon is wrong; perhaps it is only when you are no longer who you have been 128 that you can hope to continue to live. As Foucault writes, it is death which "hollows out in the present and in existence the void toward which and from which we speakw (cited in Dollimore 1996:369). Conclusion Whether-Either: John Webster Among the Actors crabbed Websterio, The playwright-cartwright (whether-either) Ho! No further. Look as youtd be looked into: Sit as you would be read. -- Henry Fitzgeoffrey
ltEvery worthy man / 1s his owne Marble; and his Merit cm / Cut him to any Figuret1:so Thomas Middleton, in his dedicatory poem to the published edition of The Duchess of Malfi, evoked man's power to shape his identity, praising the art by which John Webster wrote both his plays and himself (Duchess 4). The figures of Flamineo and Bosola, however, suggest that Webster's own views on the possibilities for self-fashioning in his culture may have been considerably more complex and ambivalent than Middleton suggests. Middleton writes that the self-fashioner's merit can "expresse / More Art, then Deaths Cathedrall Palaces, / Where Royal1 ashes keepe their Court" (Duchess 4), and this delicately subversive compliment finds some confirmation in The White Devi1 and The Duchess of Malfi, where the consetvative ideal of solid, unchanging social hierarchies is frequently exposed as a dying illusion. To various extents, aristocratic figures in Webster's courts -- Brachiano, Ferdinand, the Cardinal, the Duchess -- assume or pretend to assume that their power is stable and effortlessly maintained. In fact, The White Devi1 and The 130 Duchess of Malfi often suggest that even the highest social positions are achieved and maintained only through unremitting and sophisticated social performances, Inadequate performance of princely identity can effectively erase that identity, ending it "in a little point, a kind of nothing" (Duchess V.v.79). But Webster's malcontents also discover that even expert shape-shifting will not necessarily allow the aspiring self-fashioner to forge a completely autonomous and upwardly mobile self out of "his owne Marble-" This is largely sa because it is so nearly impossible either to keep sole possession of the sculptorts chisel or to avoid having to work in the recalcitrant medium of someone else1s identity as well as in one's own. On Webster's stage, the complicated dialectic between the malcontent and the characters on whom and through whom he attempts to write his own social preferment reflects the ambiguous power relation between the early modern professional actor and the playhouse audience. More broadly, it may be said to reflect the relationship between individual will and cultural constructions of identity. "Social systems are produced and reproduced in the interactive social practices of individuals and groups," writes Montrose, but at the same time "the possibilities and patterns for action are always socially and historically situatedw (1986:lO). Ambitious social performers like Flamineo and Bosola are always both cutting and being cut, fashioning and being fashioned by their audience. As the malcontentsf death scenes suggest, the most powerful performances of a social self are fraught with contradictions and, in Greenblattls words, "always involve ...some effacement or undermining, some loss of selft' (l98O:g)- In another dedicatory poem to The Duchess of Malfi, the dramatist John Ford describes the play as ..,a masterpiece.. . In which, whiles words and matter change, and men Act one another, he, from whose clear pen They al1 took life, to memory hath lent A lasting fame, to raise his monument. (Duchess 5) Ford recognizes the shifting quality of identity in Webster's play-world, where "words and matter change, and men / Act one another." Perhaps speaking £rom a playwright's perspective, he implies that the only self that remains fixed is Webster's own, to which The Duchess of Malfi stands as a But if Webster's characters
'al1 [take] life' from his pen, is it not at least partially true to Say that Webster's own social identity took some of its life fxom th-?
There is not much we can Say with great certainty about what, precisely, Webster's social identity was. His father was a prosperous citizen, a practitioner of the relatively new craft of coach-making and a member of the influential Mercbant Taylors Company, to which Webster himself was admitted in June 1615. The playwright does not, however, seem to have practiced his father's trade; rather, he may well have attended the Middle Temple (that breeding ground for aspiring lawyers and would-be gentlemen). In his address to the reader of The White Devil, the cartwright's son chooses to define himself as one of a group of playwrights, Webster writes, Detraction is the sworn friend to ignorance: for mine own part 1 have ever truly cherished my good opinion of othet men's worthy labours, especially of that full and heightened style of Master Chapman, the laboured and understanding works of Master Jonson: the no less worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Master Beaumont, and Master Fletcher: and lastly (without wrong last to be named) the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dekker, and Master Heywood, wishing what I write may be read by their light: protesting, that, in the strength of mine own judgement, 1 know them so worthy, that though 1 rest silent in my own work, yet to most of theirs 1 dare (without flatte-) fix that of Martial: non norunt, haec monumenta mori [these monuments do not know death]. (White Devi1 6) Webster's deferential compliments to his fellow playwrights are social actions worthy of Flamineo and Bosola, for they allow him to slam the "ignorance" of his detractors and to
suggest his own well-informed refinement and generosity by praising the authors of whom he cherishes a "good opinion." By classing himself with these men, Webster manages to imply that his works, like theirs, do not know death, al1 the while carefully avoiding the kind of unseemly boasting which
simply makes a man look like his own gross flatterer.
Despite his disclaimers, Webster also seems to establish a sort of pecking order among the playwrights he praises: Chapmants ''full and heightened stylet1and Jonson's "laboured and understanding works," with their multiple classical allusions, their "erudition and artistryN (Volpone viii), are lauded before the work of authors whose "right happy and copious industryttcontrasts with the "long time" Webster spent in finishing The White Devil (White Devil 6). Jonson, for one, was a sort of malcontent himself: "the posthumous son of an impoverished gentleman," a bricklayer's stepson, a soldier and an outspoken social critic. In allying himself with such men, Webster seems to be identifying with those who are distinguished not by inherited rank or class, but by intellectual distinction, labour and understanding. In his dedication of the published edition of The Duchess of Malfi to Baron Berkeley, Webster tells his patron,
I do not altogether look up at your title, the ancientest nobility being but a relic of time past, and the truest honour indeed being for a man to confer honour on himself, which your learning strives to propagate and shall make you arrive at the dignity of a great example. 1 am confident this work is not unworthy your Aonour's perusal; for by such poems as this, poets have kissed the hands of great princes[.] (Duchess 2-3) Webster protests that it is Berkeley's learning, the honour he has conferred upon himself, that he admires rather than the Baron's inherited rank. Like Bosola refusing to flatter Ferdinand he forestalls charges of sycophancy; but just as Bosola covertly pleads to be accepted as an advisor by differentiating himself from flattering courtiers, Webster remains in his own simile the poet who kisses a great prince's hand. His play & an action in a struggle to define himself, not only as an aspirant to Berkeley's learning, but as upwardly mobile- In this way, as Gurr remarks, the allusions and borrowings from other sources which proliferate in Webster's writing speak differently to auditors of different class and education and work to inscribe the author as a member of the well-informed elite (1987:98), a man who, like Jonson, can speak on an equal
intellectual level with his aristocratie patrons. However, as one of a band of entrepreneurial brothers writing themselves through their plays, Webster might remain as much a citizen craftsman like his father as a would-be gentleman; as a playwright and part of the playhouse world, he could be classed as one whose "wages and dependence prove him to be the servaunt of the peoplen (Cocke in Chambers
256). Thus Fitzgeoffrey could insult Webster with an allusion to the (probably ignominious) ambiguity of his profession: crabbed Websterio, The playwright-cartwright (whether-either) Ho! No further- Look as you'd be look'd into: Sit as you would be read. (cited Bradbrook 169) Bradbrook describes the "difficult position between the gentry and the citizens" held by "the playwright-cartwxight (whether-either)" (183). If Webster's plays were a social action in his own self-fashioning, they also suggest that social identity 5s a site of permanent contestation, constantly shifting, a state of "whether-either" rather than
of fixed being. Assertions of agency are simultaneously acts of submission. The writer and the actor are constructed not only by themselves but by the peers who surround them and by the spectators who interpret their self-fashioning gestures. As for "sit[ting] as you would be read," the ambiguity of Fitzgeoffrey's direction can hardly be better understood than through a reading of the Induction to a play that seems to have had a strong influence on Webster's characterizatioas of Flamineo and Bosola, John Marston's The Malcontent (c.1603). Marstont$ hero is the dispossessed
Duke Altofront who takes on the persona of the court malcontent Malevole in order to undermine his usurpers and to regain his lost social position. Malevole's own experiences have taught him to understand, as the leading figures of Webster's plays corne to do, that social institutions and hierarchies are unstable and impermanent: "Et nunc seses ubi Sion fuit," the disguised Duke remarks to his arch-enemy, Mendoza (II.v.126). The latter is a
Machiavellian villain who rises by his deceitful protestations of love for people he is plotting to usurp or murder, a man who believes that "who cannot feign friendship, cm ne' er produce the effects of hatredft (I.vii.82-83). Having lost his dukedom because he "wanted those old instruments of state, / Dissemblance and suspectft
(1.~9-0Altofront now understands the need for courtly performances, remarking that his disguise as Malevole
doth yet afford me that Which kings do seldom hear or great men use -- Free speech; and though my state's usurped, Yet this affected strain gives me a tongue As fetterless as is an emperor's. (I.iii.161-165) According to Marston's Malevole, then, the malcontent's persona is useful because it affords the opportunity for the disguised subject actually ta be himself, to speak his thoughts freely. Malevole may have lost his inherited rank, but his over-the-top performance as court-gall grants him a surprising power to critique and to influence the events around him. In this court, expert performance often equals
power , Episodes like Flamineo's feigned madness, or the encomium to Antonio by which Bosola wins the Duchesst trust,
suggest the extent to which Webster was influenced by Marston's depiction of the malcontent's persona as a potential tool for empowerment. Influence, in this case,
may have run both ways, for the title page of the 1604 published version of The Malcontent describes this edition
as including "the Additions played by the Kings Maiesties servants. Written Jhon (Malcontent ii) . Marston's play seems originally to have been written for the Children of the Chape1 Royal (later the Children of the Queen's Revels), the Company of boy actors resident at 137 Blackfriars. The Induction to The Malcontent makes it clear that the play was later Itfoundw -- taken up or stolen, as the case may be -- by the adult Company at the Globe, the King's Men (Malcontent Induction 75); the "additions" the title page describes, including the Induction in which "the King's Men play self-consciously on their membership of the cornpanyu (Malcontent xlvii), seem to have been created for the Globe performances. Hunter remarks that I1[i]t is generally agreed that the Induction should be regarded as an
'addition' by Webstertr (Malcontent xlvii); he goes on to argue that, in fact, although u[s]tylistically the Induction has few or none of the characteristic features of Marston...[, it] is no more (and no less) like Webstert1 (xi,1). In fact, the impossibility of telling
Marston's work from Webster's in the 1604 version of The Malcontent attests to the interdependent and sometimes amorphous quality of playwrightsr identities in this world of collaborations and borrowing; again, no man is an island. Still, the first page of the published Induction to The
Malcontent does seem to claim it for Webster (Malcontent 8), and certainly the Induction deals in a lighter way with the questions about theatricality and social identity later raised by his malcontents in The White Devi1 and The Duchess of Malfi. In the Induction to The Malcontent, some of the players of the King's Men appear as themselves, some as would-be gentlemen; and no one's identity can be easily read, especially not by where he is sitting. The Induction to The Malcontent begins as William Sly, a member of the King's Men from 1594 until 1608, flounces ont0 the stage, "a Tire-man following him with a stooltl (Malcontent Induction-1). Sly appears in the persona of a rather obstreperous would-be gentleman and, although the published stage directions refer to him by name, it is not entirely clear how recognizable as his player self he is to the playhouse audience, If he & recognizable, the joke is that Sly almost immediately denies that he is an actor: "1'11 hold my life thou tookest me for one of the players. ...By Godls slid, if you had, 1 would have given you but sixpence for your stool" (4-5, 7-81. The stool is in question because the bourcreois sentilhomme Sly represents wants to sit on the stage, a seat which Davis associated with the theatre's aristocratie male patrons (cited in Gurr 1987:68). "Sir," protests the Tire-Man, "the gentlemen will be angry if you sit here." "Why?", asks Sly in his now established persona as a graceless parvenu: We may sit upon the stage at the private house. Thou dost not take me for a country gentleman, dost? Dost think 1 fear hissing? ... Let them that have stale suits sit in the galleries, Hiss at me! He that will be laughed out of a tavern or an ordinary shall seldom feed well or be drunk in good Company -- Wherers Harry Condell, Dick Burbage, and Will Sly? Let me speak with some of them- (2-4, 8-13) The identification between the actor and the pseudo- gentleman is made in Cocke's "Character of a Common Player," 139 where the author claims that the player's "chiefe essence is, A daily Counterfeit: He hath beene familiar so long with out-sides, that he professes himselfe (being unknowne) to be an apparant Gentleman" (in Chambers 255). The "Gentleman" Sly is quick to differentiate between himself and the actors, reproving the Tire-Man for mistaking him for one, yet it is immediately apparent that his identity & a performance constructed by his suit, the seat he chooses at the theatre, and his familiarity with "the private house. t12 In a moment we find him asking for a number of the King's Men, himself among th-, in what seems an attempt to prove his status as a man-about-tom who not only knows actors but can airily command their presence. The "Gentleman" Sly distances himself from the Player Will Sly by asking for him, constructing a scenario in which the gentleman is the subject, the fixed term, and the actor his object, his "servaunt." At the same tirne, it is clear that Sly's performed gentlemanly identity will not hold without the evoked presence of the actor, who is not so much the
2 The reference to the "private" house is apparently, like the later discussion of the boy actors at Blackfriars (Induction 74-90), intended as a blow in the contest between rival companies which is one of the Induction's subtexts. As Hunter remarks, it "implies that sitting on the stage was more acceptable in the 'private' theatre than in the public one" (Induction n.2). Considering that the implication here is that the "privatetlhouse is a more viable arena thmi the public for would-be gallants who wish to write themselves gentleman by, as it were, performing on stage, the slight would appear to be class-based. pretended gentleman's opposite as his mirror or doppelganger, Sly, however, goes on slighting players, complaining that "the play is bittert' even while boasting that "any man that hath wit may censure -- if he sit in the twelve penny room" (59-61). This last jab of social satire is illuminating, for Sly suggests that the acceptable exercise of "wit" and "censurew is limited by the censurer's socio- economic position. As Flamineo implies in The White Devil, great Dukes can Say and do what they want and poor secretaries are expected to shut up. But perhaps one can simply perform one's way into a position of power; perhaps anyone's a gentleman in the theatre if he cari afford to "sit in the twelve penny room." This, in fact, was the cornplaint made in a resolution in the accounts of the Merchant Taylors, Webster's father's Company, in 1574:
[A]t our common playes and suche lyke exercises whiche be comonly exposed to be seene for money, everye lewd persone thinketh himself (for his penny) worthye of the chiefe and most commodious place without respecte of any other either for age or estimacion in the comon weale. (cited in Montrose 1996:47) "Look as you'd be look'd into: / Sit as you would be read.I1 The Induction to The Malcontent, however, also raises the possibility that the performances of the social-climbing censurer might ultimately be inefficacious, brushed off as the griping of one of "a sort of discontented creatures that bear a stingless envy to great onesV1(Induction 53-54). The 141 %entleman" Sly stands in danger of being hissed at by the playhouse audience if he tries performatively to gentle his condition by sitting on the stage; every social actor risks
being given the thumbs dom sign by the spectators on whom his identity depends. Similarly, the experiences of Flamineo and Bosola on the courtly stage suggest that the use of performance as a means of social climbing almost inevitably leads to a stalemate. Even the act of distancing oneself from one's own social ambition can turn out to be another manifestation of that ambition, a means of climbing by "mak[ing] toies of the uttermost [one] can do1' (Greville 154). The performer must always Vear hissing" £rom his audience, whether he is acting in the court or in the playhouse. Sly's bravado and self-assertion at the opening of the Induction to The Malcontent, like Flamineo's bravura irony and Bosola's persona as "the only court-galln (Duchess i3)mask the social performer's painful dependence on his audience .
At the end of the Induction to The Malcontent, Sly consents to leave the stage in favour of a "private roomn (126), pausing before he goes to offer the players some advice on the prologue to their play. The offer is another ambiguous social action: it both situates the "Gentlemann Sly above the players as a patronizing advisor, and explicitly identifies him as one of them. For students of Webster's malcontents it is an additional ironic joke that he addresses John Lowin, the first Bosola:
SLY . ,.Have you never a prologue? LOWIN Not any, sir, SLY Let me see, 1 will make one extempore: Come to them, and fencing of a congey with arms and legs, be round with th-: 'Gentlemen, 1 could wish for the women's sakes you had all soft cushions; and, gentlewomen, 1 could wish that for the men's sakes you had al1 more easy standings.' What would they wish more but the play now? and that they shall have instantly- (127-137) Sly's "prologuet1suggests, just as many anti-theatrical pamphlets do, that men and women corne to the playhouse not only to sit as they would be read, but also to engage in sexual adventures. In a sense, Sly is re-asserting his power over the spectators that might "hiss" him, staging them as a sexual spectacle and making them as much the butt of his jokes as he is the butt of theirs. Slyls prologue tacitly recognizes that such joke-making is reciprocal, that the positions of actor and spectator are dialectical and interchangeable, and that both gentlemen and gentlewomen are the objects of the other gender's active desire. This lesson is one that Flamineo and Bosola are forced to learn over the course of The White Devi1 and The Duchess of Malfi. The malcontent attempts to manipulate misogynist cultural constructions of woments sexual rapacity and dissimulating nature in order to stage-manage the women around him and to gain his own social ends. He f inds, however, that these women cannot so easily be relegated to the realm of objectification, and that he is caught in the middle of 143 another performative ason with a worthy feminine opponent. The differentiating line between masculine and feminine on which the malcontent attempts to build a social persona dissolves into the bhr of identities of Flamineofs contention that "[iJf wornan do breed man / She ought to teach him manhood" (White Devi1 V.vi.240-241). Far from being "as differing as two adamants" (White Devi1 IV.ii.91), male and female social actors are inextricably tangled in the web of one another's performances, In the end, 1 would argue, Webster's explorations of social struggle through his malcontents suggest that al1 actors are tangled in one anotherfs performances, that the dividing line between the professional actor on stage and the social performers who make up the playhouse audience is difficult to draw across "the proscenium that is not theref' (Barker 15). In the Induction to The Malcontent, the "Gentlemanw Sly clairns that he is "one that hath seen this play often, and cm give [the players] intelligence for their action: 1 have most of the jests here in my table- bookn (15-17)- Who is the instructor, who the instructed here? Sly sets himself up as an expert on The Malcontent, and on "action" in general, because he "hath seen this play oftentt;he constructs himself as a mirror for those who hold the mirror up to nature and is licensed to do so by the playersf jests in his copy-book. Later, Sly suggests that The Malcontent has had a palpable effect on fashion, one of the most obvious forms of social performance. Malevole's remark, "no fool but has his feather" (The Malcontent V.iii.40), has put the parading gentry in the playhouse audience off ostentatious hat decoration:
BURBAGE Why do you conceal your feather, sir? SLY Why? Do you think 1'11 have jests broken upon me in the play, to be laughed at? This play has beaten al1 your gallants out of the feathers; Blackfriars has almost spoiled Blackfriars for feathers. (39-42) Perhaps Montrose is right to daim that early modern playgoers may have gone to the theatre "to learn, from experts, how to playw (1996:Zll). Webster praises the Queen's Men for presenting "the true imitation of life, without striving to make nature a monster" (White Devil
152); the Induction to The Malcontent suggests that there is also much to be said for the spectator who is able truly to imitate the good example set by the best players.
1s the Induction's "drye mocke" a spoof of the player's ridiculous social ambition? Or does the Induction actually function as a kind of Apology for Actors? It is interesting to note that when Richard Burbage, the player of Princes and Dukes, appears in the Induction as himseff his voice is
"grave, courteous, restrainedw -- almost, one would Say, aristocratic (Bradbrook 116). He bids Sly "very welcome" to the playhouse (30), daims for his troupe "the ancient freedom of poesy" (65), and excuses himself politely from
Sly's tiresorne demands: "1 must leave you, Sir" (84-85). It 145 is the Player-King in his own person who exudes a convincing aura of gentility while the "Gentleman" Sly blusters and undercuts his own supposed gentility by overstating it in a manner reminiscent of the rudely forced aristocracy of Brachiano and Ferdinand. In The White Devi1 and The Duchess of Malfi, the malcontent, unlike the aristocrat, shows himself a self-conscious actor who can -- at least up to a point -- control his performances and their effects. If his proficient acting does not necessarily allow him to best his aristocratie patron, it may help hirn to survive his stage death and the end of his play, to function as a kind of professor of playing to the social actors in his audience and thus to execute some successful cultural work.
Similarly, even while early modern anti-theatricalists decried the monstrous social-climbing of players, "Burbage and Alleyn were worshipped as models for gallant behaviourn (Gurr 1987:69). The differentiation in the Induction to The Malcontent between the ludicrous performances of the parvenu who refuses to admit that he is an actor and the elegant performances of the player who defines himself as such suggests that the anti-theatrical conflation of actor and social-climber may be too simplistic; the two may be in a similarly vulnerable position with regards to their culture, but the one who is more intelligent and self-conscious about his performing may stand a greater chance of proving socially powerful. In response to Cocke's "Character of a Common Playex," Webster included his own Tharacter of an Excellent Actorw in his 1614 additions to Sir Thomas ûverburyfs book of Characters. Here he writes that Al1 men have been of [the actor's] occupation: and indeed, what he doth fainedly that doe others essentially: this day one plaies a Monarch, the next a private person, Heere one Acts a Tyrant, on the morrow an Exile: a Parasite this man to-night, t[o]- morow a Precisian, and so of divers others, (43) It is not so much that the actor feigns the social roles that define other men, but that he feigns on stage the shifts between such roles, the shifts from monarch to private person, tyrant to exile, parasite to precisian which are the essence of social life and social interaction. While Cocke's Common Player, a daily counterfeit and a shifting cornpanion, is dangerously trying to impose falsity on reality, the performances of Webster's Excellent Actor reflect upon the condition of "realttlife in the social world, functioning less as a bad example than as valuable social commentary. Moreover, Webster's Excellent Actor is a self-aware craftsman who, "by a £1111 and significant action of body ...[,] charms our attention,. ,[;] he doth not make nature monstrous, she is often seen on the same stage with him, but neither on stilts nor crutchesft(42-43). More monstrous, perhaps, are those social actors -- tyrants and exiles, parasites and precisians -- who cling so vehemently to their ''essential" roles that they refuse to shift even if 147 such a shift might Save themselves or others from harm. In Marston's The Malcontent, Malevole plays on early modem constructions of the actor as a barn-stormer who "make[s] nature monstrous" when he responds to Pietro's vociferous grief with the plea, "O do not rand, do not turn player; there's more of them than can well live one by another already" (IV.iv.4-5). As in The White Devi1 and The Duchess of Malfi, there certainly seem to be too many competing actors in the courtly world of The Malcontent, each violently determined to upstage the next. Malevole himself first deplores the necessity for his own involvement in this performative struggle, which he like Flamineo sees as threatening to make him ridiculous. However, he cornes to accept this involvement as preferable to what Webster might have termed "essential" ridiculousness: "O God, how loathsome this toying is to me! That a duke should be forced to fool it! Weil. stultorum plena sunt omnia: better play the £001 lord than be the fool lord1' (V.iii.43-46). Having opened with an Induction which suggested that the proficient and self-aware actor will fare best in a world where everyone is a perfomer, The Malcontent closes with a metatheatrical moment which lfsuggest[s]that Altofront is in the end no more real than Malevole" (Malcontent lxxiii), as the restored Duke bids "[tlhe rest of idle actors idly part. / And as for me, 1 here assume my right, / To which 1 hope all's pleased. To all, good nightI1 (V.vi.165-167). The character who has performed his way back into a dukedom melts into the actor who has attempted to perform his way into a "pleas[ing]" position in relation to his audience. It may seem ignominious to have to 'Yool it," but the malcontent's subtle playing turns out ta be a social tool of considerable power . In this sense, Marston's Malcontent -- and Websterfs Excellent Actor -- are like Flamineo playing dead, constantly springing from an apparently vulnerable position back into social struggle, "as who would Say, '...[Llet th- saye what they will saye, we will playw1 (Stockwood cited Mullaney 18). Still, Webster's perspective on the malcontent at the end of The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi is considerably darker than Marston's at the end of his influential play, and we are left with the unhappiness of Flamineo and Bosola, "actor[s] in the main of all, / ...y et if th' end / Neglected" (Duchess V.v.87-89). Malevole's play ends happily because there was always a place for him at the top of the ladder if he could but regain it; Marston's is still, to some extent, the comfortingly hierarchical world where each man has his "duetie and ordre" and must learn to walk in his vocation. In Webster's plays, the power structures being performed are oppressive ones in which one identity is asserted at the expense of another and everybody finally suffers, not only loss of life, but some loss of self. Few living figures are 149 left to mop up the carnage at the end of either The White Devil or The Duchess of Malfi, and just as the power of the Jacobean actor was rigidly circumscribed by state control, so the power of the malcontent is circumçcribed by the social forces which lead to his death, forces which he himself has endorsed in his struggle to get to the top of a ruthless hierarchy. Yet the possibility remains that, if self-aware performance is less a false front than a constitutive force, we might try performing a different social order- Such a possibility does make tantalizing appearances on Webster's stage: in the Duchess' brief married idyll with Antonio, perhaps; in Ferdinand's fleeting acceptance of Bosolals advice; or in Flamineo's final pact of defiance with his "noble sister" (White Devi1 V-vi-239). "Shortly they will play me in what forms they list upon the stage,'' lamented the Earl of Essex after his fa11 £rom influence (cited in
Montrose 1996:82). The early modem playhouse was a theatre capable of appropriating the images of power and powerlessness from the society around it and revising them, if only by pointing out that their reality sprang from performance rather than from essential, unchanging, unchangeable truth. Perhaps it was a theatre which, by representing the ongoing struggle between individuals and between social groups, could suggest, as Walter Benjamin writes of Brecht's theatre, that "it can happen this way, but it can also happen quite another wayw (cited in
Cartwright 29)- Could the performances of actors like Lowin and Perkins really have wielded this sort of cultural power? John Webster, himself a social actor on so many levels, seems to have had an exceptional respect for players; recall his praise for "the well-approved industry of my friend Master Perkinsfl which helped to shape the actor's part and to "crown both the beginning and the endw of The White Devi1 (152). In Webster's case, the line between playwright and actor may itself have the fluidity of "whether-eitherm; both figures are involved in social performances, both struggle to shape the "realt1world by shaping a fictional world onstage. Contemporary criticism has much to Say about the agency (or lack thereof) of the playwright; in discussing the agency of the actor in Jacobean society, we are at something of a disadvantage. We have the text of The White Devil, but we have little idea what Richard Perkins' "full and significant action of bodyw was really like or what impression it made on his audience, and without this knowledge any judgements on the cultural power of his performance as Flarnineo, or Lowints as Bosola, can only be limited ones. The theatre offers a paradigmatic image of a world in which the quirk of an eyebrow or the charming deadpan delivery of a joke can influence social negotiations in ways that are never completely predictable, depending as 151 they do on the fluctuating desires, aims, and interpretive powers of a more or less "full and understanding auditoryw (White Devi1 5). Like Webster submitting his play "to the
general vieww even while attempting to construct a suitable audience for it through his words, the early modern actor emerges as a figure taught to play by his spectators even as he teaches them in return- Many questions remain as to how this process worked, and as to how successful or "neglected" specific actors may have been. Perhaps it is best lo close as Marston closes The Malcontent, protesting that "[shle that knows most knows most how much [sJhe wantethn (Epilogue
18). In doing so I join Flamineo and Bosola by attempting to make a toy of the most 1 can do, and thus acknowledge that 1 too am part of the tangle of social performances, the world of "whether-eithern in which Webster's shape-shifters are such enigmatic players. Works Cited
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