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The Framing of Webster's the Duchess of Malfi “I am Duchess of Malfi still”: the Framing of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi . Submitted by Jeremy Charles Bloomfield, to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, June 2011. This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has been previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. Signed: 1 Abstract This thesis investigates the ways in which Webster’s Duchess of Malfi has been framed and interpreted, selecting various case studies from the four hundred years of the play’s history. It analyses the way in which a number of discourses have been brought to bear upon the play to delimit and shape its meanings, in the absence of a powerful determining author-figure such as Shakespeare. The investigation is organised around three “strands”, or elements which reappear in the commentary on the play. These are “pastness”, the sense that the play is framed as belonging to an earlier era and resistant to being completely interpreted by the later theatrical context being used to reproduce it; “not-Shakespeare”, the way in which Malfi has been set up in opposition to a “Shakespearean” model of dramatic value, or folded into that model; and “the dominance of the Duchess”, the tendency for the central character to act as a focus for the play’s perceived meanings. It identifies and analyses the co-opting of these elements in the service of wildly varying cultural politics throughout the play’s history. Sited within the assumptions and practices of Early Modern performance studies, this thesis constitutes an intervention in the field, demonstrating the possibility of a radically decentred approach. Such an approach is freed from either a reliance on Shakespeare as a prototypical model from which other works are imagined as diverging, or from the progressive narrative of theatre history in which twentieth century scholars “discovered” the true inherent meaning of early modern drama which had been “obscured” by the intervening centuries of theatre practice. It reveals blindspots and weaknesses in the existing Shakespeare-centred conception of the field, and opens up new possibilities for understanding Early Modern drama in historical and contemporary performance. 2 Contents: Introduction: 4 Chapter One – 1623: 41 Chapter Two – 1708 and 1735: 72 Chapter Three – 1850 and 1892: 114 Chapter Four – Early C20th and 1960: 163 Conclusion: 202 Appendices: 209 Bibliography: 215 3 Introduction In a recent essay Genevieve Love suggests with conscious extravagance that “perhaps each early modern playwright would need, as Shakespeare has, a mode of performance criticism specially attuned to his particular history, style, dramaturgy” (‘Without Performance’, 133). In this thesis I am going to take Love’s suggestion seriously, and take it one step further, arguing for a mode of criticism tailored not only to Webster’s history and cultural situation, but specifically refined for The Duchess of Malfi itself. A survey of the current situation in Shakespearean, and non-Shakespearean, performance studies will demonstrate the need for such an approach and elucidate the theoretical sources upon which it will draw. The Two Subcultures Two broad tendencies co-exist in the scholarship of Shakespearean performance, which can be generally classed as “performance criticism” and “performance studies”, two labels with which their practitioners frequently, though not always, identify their work. In 2006, Jeremy Lopez reviewed the collections Acts of Criticism: Performance Matters in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries and the Companion to Shakespeare and Performance , finding in them “the bizarrely parallel but unconnected trajectories of two different kinds of performance criticism” which demonstrated “positions...[which] seem entrenched rather than in flux” and amongst which “it is difficult to find much hope for dialogue” (366). Part of the problem may well be that one form of criticism, “performance studies”, regards the other, “performance criticism”, as a superseded part of its own historical development, and thus hardly worth considering as a rival or alternative to its own approach. This is made clear by the introductory essay to the collection Lopez reviewed, Barbara Hodgdon and William B. Worthen’s Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (2005), which describes the work of scholars such as John Russell Brown and J.L. Styan as part of a “first wave” of work on performance, defined by a term which makes the field’s instability clear: “Even at the time, and certainly at a distance, ‘performance criticism’ sounds uncomfortably oxymoronic; a label in which ‘criticism’ gives legitimacy to the messy, contradictory, slightly suspect materiality of theatrical culture” (3). According to this view of the field, works such as Worthen’s Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (1997) developed the necessary theoretical tools for a next wave, and the Companion was intended to both reveal and create a decisive break with the outmoded approaches of the past: “The essays collected here mark a 4 move from the essentializing orthodoxy of performance criticism to the theoretical heterodoxy of Shakespearean performance studies, a more encompassing, expansive, expressive and relational arena for rethinking performance” (7). Five years after this essay, it is easy to find work in Shakespearean performance studies which adopts this narrative of disciplinary development and takes it for granted, such as Christopher Cobb’s ‘Acts of Seizure’ (2010), which refers casually in its opening pages to “the decade since the theoretical ferment of the 1990s laid to rest the text versus performance debates that long preoccupied Shakespeare performance criticism”, footnoting Worthen’s Authority of Performance as the key text (51). The field thus defined as “Shakespearean performance studies” covers the work of scholars such as William B. Worthen, Barbara Hodgdon, James C. Bulman, Pascale Aebischer, Roberta Barker, Robert Shaughnessy, Carol Chillington Rutter and Kim Solga: such a diverse group possesses no common theoretical basis, but rather an attitude and set of assumptions about the identity of the field. Despite the confidence with which critics like Cobb build performance (or “stage- centred”) criticism into their genealogy as a period of confusion long superseded, the practice is still being carried out with undiminished confidence by some scholars. J. L. Styan provides a good example, both because of the clarity with which he lays out his ideas in Perspectives on Shakespeare in Performance (2000) and the iconic status which his Shakespeare Revolution (1977) has achieved as a touchstone which later scholars either ally themselves with or define themselves against. The rhetoric of Styan’s ‘The Basis for Performance Criticism’ (in the former book) alerts the reader to the difference in his approach from Worthen, Cobb at al, with references to how “Shakespeare’s props are few, but they speak for his play” and “the rhyming of the strongly metrical four-beat lines point to the first theatrical signals” (5, 2.) This is a critical mode which understands the stage as the most appropriate site for the release of meaning, but which insists on the playtext as the source of that meaning. “Signals” within the text, such as the presence of Macbeth’s dagger or a suggestion that Cordelia should be kneeling, guide the stage practitioner towards a theatrical event which is framed by Styan as interpretation: the unlocking of meaning rather than its production. Moreover, this meaning’s availability to us is the result of a linear descent of authority which can be more or less securely aligned: “Shakespeare”, “his play”, stage production. This phraseology, and the principles which underlie it, also run through his account of the history of Shakespeare studies in ‘Understanding Shakespeare in Performance’, with its comment that “Guthrie found a style which made [ Love’s Labour’s Lost ] work” (again the emphasis on discovering meaning, rather than creating it) and the “shift of understanding” which took place for All’s Well which is “now 5 a regular success, but previously always considered a commercial disaster and rarely played” (14, 15). Styan’s position rests here on two assumptions which critics avowedly working in performance studies might find difficult to assent to. Firstly, that the play is, somehow, a stable entity across time and space: “Putting on a production or going to see a play is not, as we are sometimes told, to snatch a moment of evanescence, quickly lost and gone forever, but to feel a touch of the play’s immortality directly and personally” ( Perspectives , 19). Secondly, that Shakespearean performance history can be viewed as a progressive narrative of emergence, as different plays are discovered in their true colours and made available to the theatrical community, salvaged from the obfuscations of history. This historiographic model underpins his references to Love’s Labour’s Lost and All’s Well which I cited above, and is more developed in a remark about the “problem plays” as a group: All’s Well and Troilus and Cressida , together with Measure for Measure , have been known traditionally – that is, since the formulation of the Edwardian concept of the social problem play – as Shakespeare’s problem plays. I prefer to think that the problem in question arises not so much because it seems to reflect an Elizabethan social issue, but rather because these plays embody strange conventions of performance that we are still trying to understand. (Perspectives , 17) Despite his recognition in the aside that the categories he is dealing with may have historical and historically contingent origins, Styan reasserts a progressive view of development in this passage and sites himself and his readers near the end of that process, though not able to grasp its completion yet.
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