A study of John Webster [Reprint 2015 ed.] 9783111681658, 9783111295091

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STUDIES

IN ENGLISH Volume L

LITERATURE

A STUDY OF JOHN WEBSTER by

PETER B. M U R R A Y Macalester

College

1969

MOUTON THE HAGUE · PARIS

© Copyright 1969 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 68-22064

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.

For my Mother and to the memory of my Father

PREFACE

In this century many scholars have studied the work of John Webster, providing the materials needed for critical interpretations of his plays. In 1904 Charles Crawford published the first of his studies of Webster's borrowing, and in 1905 Elmer Edgar Stoll showed the relation of the plays to the development of Elizabethan dramatic genres in John Webster: The Periods of His Work as Determined by His Relations to the Drama of His Day. Modern Webster scholarship received its greatest impetus with the appearance in 1928 of F. L. Lucas's edition of The Complete Works of John Webster. Lucas attempts to solve every problem connected with the study of Webster, dating the plays, discussing their sources, trying to determine his share in collaborations, and so on. He interprets the plays mainly in the context of classical and Shakespearian tragedy, and does not stress their dependence on the Christian and medieval tradition. This reading of the plays has had great influence on nearly every writer who has since approached Webster. In recent years there have been a number of further advances in our knowledge of Webster. In 1951 Clifford Leech's John Webster: A Critical Study offered a new outlook on the plays as works of dramatic art. Gabriele Baldini contributed a study of John Webster e il linguaggio della tragedia in 1953, with a valuable appendix on the history of the dramatist's reputation. Travis Bogard's study of The Tragic Satire of John Webster appeared in 1955. More recently there have been Robert W. Dent's study of John Webster's Borrowing (1960), Gunnar Boklund's two books on the relation of the tragedies to their sources: The

8

PREFACE

Sources of the White Devil (1957), and The Duchess of Malfi: Sources, Themes, Characters (1962), John Russell Brown's editions of The White Devil (1960) and The Duchess of Malfi (1964), and Don D. Moore's John Webster and His Critics, 1617-1964 (1966). My book does not undertake to supersede what has already been written about Webster. Instead I have tried to build upon what has already been achieved, directing my efforts especially toward two questions: What did Webster actually write? What is the artistic value and the significance of his work? Several scholars have tried to determine the authorship of the plays Webster is known or thought to have written in collaboration with others, and I have tried to advance scholarship in this area. My main concern, however, has been to arrive at an understanding of Webster's art and meaning. By following the lead of his titles, imagery, plots, and characters, I have tried to define the theme and structure of his plays and to relate them to the ideas and patterns of his cultural tradition. In doing this, I have discussed his relation to medieval literature and Christian thought more than other critics have done, attempting to fill in the gap left by Lucas and so provide what I hope will be a broader basis for criticism than we have hitherto had. I do not mean to suggest, however, that Webster wrote to expound Christian doctrine or morality. The vision that informs the plays is more tragic than moral, and nearly as much Stoic as Christian. Webster consistently affirms the Christian-Stoic ideal of "integrity of life." Whether one wishes his end to be crowned by the pagan "fame" or the Christian heaven, one must not swerve from the paths of truth. As a tragic writer, however, Webster is concerned most of all with the inner experience of his characters when they do stray from the paths of integrity. His sympathetic and imaginative treatment of their tragedies is much more deeply human than would be possible for a writer whose interest is primarily moralistic. In quoting early authors I have exactly reproduced the texts cited, except that I have used modern s, u and v, and i and j, and have expanded the tilde.

9

PREFACE

I owe a great debt to those who have studied Webster and his times before me, and especially to the scholars with whom I have been privileged to study, particularly Professors Allan G. Chester, Matthias A. Shaaber, Matthew W. Black, Arthur H. Scouten, and Maurice Johnson of the University of Pennsylvania. I also want to thank Mrs. Delphine Ο. Richardson of the University of Pennsylvania Library and Dr. William E. Miller of the Furness Memorial Library of the University of Pennsylvania. I am indebted to the University of Pennsylvania for a research fellowship that enabled me to complete a great part of the work. And, finally, I want to express my gratitude to my wife Frances and our children, Jean, Stephen, Susan, and Christopher, for their loving and usually constructive interest in my great stacks of paper. PETER B .

MURRAY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

7

I. Life and Works

13

II. Early Collaboration

23

III. The White Devil

31

IV. Vittoria as a White Devil

64

V. Banishment and Despair in The White Devil VI. Conclusions on The White Devil VII. The Duchess of Malfi VIII. She Lights the Time to Come IX. Job and Tantalus X. Bosola and the Duchess

.

.

100 113 118 143 154 168

XI. The Devil's Law Case

185

XII. A Cure for a Cuckold

215

XIII. Appius and Virginia

237

12

TABLE OF CONTENTS

XIV. Conclusion

253

Appendix I: The Authorship of Anything for a Quiet Life and The Fair Maid of The Inn

261

Appendix II: The Authorship of Westward Ho and Northward Ho

264

Appendix III: The Authorship of A Cure for a Cuckold

265

Appendix IV: The Authorship of Appius and Virginia

.

269

I

LIFE AND WORKS

Almost everything that we know about John Webster we have learned from his writings. So far no one has discovered a single document connecting the author of the plays and poems with a John Webster about whose private life we know anything. We guess he must have been born between 1570 and 1580, since he was writing plays in 1602. In the dedicatory letter to Monuments of Honour (London, 1624), he tells us that he was born free of the Merchant Taylors' Company, which presumably means that his father was a Merchant Taylor, but really tells us only that the dramatist lived in London. Beyond this we know virtually nothing except that he seems to have died before 1634, for in that year Thomas Heywood wrote of him in the past tense in his Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels. All else is darkness and conjecture.1 1 For a review of some conjectures see F. L. Lucas, The Complete Works of John Webster (London, 1928), I, 49-56. Also see F. C. Morgan, "A Deed of Gift (1624) and John Webster", NQ, 192 (1947), 496. From a contemporary gibe at Webster as "The Play-wright, Cart-wright: whether? either!" and a line in the comic elegy on Thomas Randolph's finger, "Webster's brother would not lend a coach", there is also the real possibility that Webster's brother, if not the playwright himself, was a cartwright. No record has yet been published, however, to show whether such a brother really existed or whether the first allusion was perhaps intended only to compare Webster's playmaking with the crudeness of cart-making, and was the inspiration of the second allusion. See F. L. Lucas, Works, I, 55; John J. Parry, "A Seventeenth Century Gallery of Poets", JEGP, XIX (1920), 270-277, who reprints the elegy on Randolph's finger; and R. G. Howarth, "John Webster", TLS, Nov. 2, 1933, p. 751, who draws the two allusions together and makes the inference that Webster's brother might have been a member of the Coach and Harness Makers' Company.

14

LIFE AND WORKS

Among the conjectures, the only one that is at all plausible or attractive is that the dramatist might be the John Webster who was admitted to the study of law at the Middle Temple on the first of August, 1598.2 This identification is plausible with respect to date and attractive as it explains Webster's knowledge of the law and his liking for courtroom scenes. But if Webster's life is obscure, we have a fairly clear picture of his literary career, and from this picture I think we can make some valuable inferences about how we should approach his works. The first record of his work as a writer is in the diary of Philip Henslowe, the theatrical manager at London's Rose Theater. Two entries in May of 1602 list Webster with Thomas Dekker, Anthony Munday, Thomas Middleton, and Michael Drayton as the authors of Caesar's Fall, a lost play.3 In October of the same year Henslowe made three entries in his diary for payments to Henry Chettle, Dekker, Heywood, Wentworth Smith, and Webster for two parts of Lady Jane, which is probably an early, perhaps longer version of the play that was printed in 1607 as Sir Thomas Wyatt, by Dekker and Webster. In early November of 1602 there is an entry for payment to Heywood and Webster "in earneste of" Christmas Comes but Once a Year, another lost play. 1607 saw the publication not only of Sir Thomas Wyatt, but also of two other collaborations of Webster with Dekker - the comedies of London life, Westward Ho and Northward Ho, which were written in 1604 and 1605, respectively. At this time Webster was working with other writers, too. In 1604 he wrote the amusing but negligible induction for John Marston's Malcontent, and he was well enough known to be asked to contribute commendatory verses for the publication of Munday's translation of Palmerin of England (the third part, 1602), S. Harrison's Arches of Triumph (1604), and Heywood's Apology for Actors 2

Lucas, Works, I, 50. Except where noted to the contrary, the facts about dates and authorship given here are from Lucas, Works; Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1941-1956); Henslowe's Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge, 1961); and Ε. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1923). 3

LIFE AND WORKS

15

(1612). And in 1612 he joined with Heywood and Cyril Tourneur in composing a volume of elegies on the death of Prince Henry. Webster's contribution, A Monumental Column, was also published separately in 1613. Through the year 1608, all of Webster's dramatic writing was done in collaboration with others. For the ten or so years that follow, however, we have record only of his working alone, and it is from this period of his career that the works come which have placed his name near Shakespeare's among England's tragic dramatists. His entire reputation rests on two of the four plays he wrote during these years, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. The White Devil was published in 1612. From allusions to contemporary events and from Webster's habit of borrowing phrases from contemporary books we can be sure that it was written after 1609. 4 The Duchess of Malfi was not published until 1623, but we know that it was written before 16 December 1614, because William Ostler, one of the actors in the play, died on that day. Since the play has many phrases and lines that are similar to passages in the 1612 Monumental Column, and since it borrows freely from sources not printed before 1612, we can be certain that it was written in 1612 or 1613. 5 4

Compare Lucas, Works, I, 67-69; Robert W. Dent, John Webster's Borrowing (Berkeley, 1960), p. 57; and John Russell Brown, "On the Dating of Webster's The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi", PQ, XXXI (1952), 353-362. 5 It has been suggested, however, that Webster added the lines at the start of the play in 1617 as an allusion to the upheavals of the French court in that year. F. L. Lucas believes that the play must have been revived in 1617, and that Webster added these speeches to make it timely: Works, II, 4. John Russell Brown has argued that there is nothing specifically historical about the passage, and that therefore there is no reason to suppose that the lines were written after the rest of the play, especially since these lines help define the theme of the action to follow, so that something like them must have been in the original version: "On the Dating"; Dent agrees with Brown, p. 58. In his 1959 re-issue of The Duchess of Malfi, Lucas revised his introduction to reply to Brown. He contends that since the play deals with actual history, the audience of 1614 would have asked, "this speech must be topical. But how? For to-day the French King is a mere boy . . . ": The Duchess of Malfi (New York, 1959), p. 15n. But I think that the audience would naturally assume that the lines were topical in relation to the actual history of the Duchess of Amalfi if they were not related to conditions of 1614.

16

LIFE AND WORKS

In 1615 the sixth edition of "Overbury's" Characters appeared. Included was a section of thirty-two new characters having a separate title page. F. L. Lucas reprints these in his edition of Webster's works along with a list of passages that have parallels in the dramatist's known writings or that borrow from his favorite sources.6 Robert Dent has found more parallels, and I think we can safely assert that Webster had some part in the composition of these brief prose sketches.7 The dedication of The Devil's Law Case, Webster's third and last unaided play that survives, lists his earlier works, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, and adds to them the title of a third play, Guise, which has most unfortunately not come down to us. From the fact that The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi are listed in what we believe to be the order of their composition, we infer that Guise, listed third, was also written third. The Devil's Law Case, which was published in 1623 and probably written between 1617 and 1621, was presumably written fourth, but we cannot be sure.8 In The Devil's Law Case Webster is on the decline, and in his later collaborations there are only rare flashes of the fire that burns so intensely in his two great plays. He may have had a hand in Anything for a Quiet Life, written about 1621 and published in 1661 with Thomas Middleton's name on the title page,9 but here the Websterian fire burns not at all. Indeed, the •

Works, IV, 6-59. P. 59. 8 Bentley has argued from dates given in the play's trial scene that Webster imagined the action of The Devil's Law Case to be taking place in 1610, and infers from this that the play must have been first performed in that year: V, 1250-1251. But as Brown has contended in reply, the date of 1610 in itself is never mentioned, nor is any topical point made in connection with that year: "The Date of John Webster's 'The Devil's Law Case'", NQ, 203 (1958), 100-101. Moreover, as Lucas and Dent have shown, the play borrows phrases and lines from works first published or performed in 1612, 1614, 1616, and even 1617: Lucas, Works, II, 213-216; Dent, pp. 58-59. * Lucas establishes the date of composition of Anything for a Quiet Life by citing allusions to events of 1621 and a little earlier; Works, IV, 65. Lucas's date is used by R. C. Bald in "The Chronology of Middleton's Plays", MLR, XXXII (1937), 42; and Bentley, IV, 860. 7

LIFE AND WORKS

17

evidence of his participation is so slight, as I show in Appendix I, that the play cannot be considered seriously in a study of his works. In September 1624 A Late Murder of the Son Upon the Mother was licensed with Webster and John Ford listed as the authors, but this play has been lost. From 1623-4 Webster's only surviving works are a short poem commending Henry Cockeram's Dictionary to the reader (1623), a few emblematical verses on a memorial plate showing the progeny of James I (1624-5),10 and a Lord Mayor's Pageant entitled Monuments of Honour (1624). He may have contributed a little to The Fair Maid of the Inn, written about 1625 11 and licensed as John Fletcher's on 22 January 1625/6, but the signs of his participation are even slighter here than in the case of Anything for a Quiet Life (see Appendix I). In the later period of collaboration there are two plays that have some importance for the study of Webster. He wrote A Cure for a Cuckold with Heywood and William Rowley, probably in 1625.12 The play was published in 1661 with the names of Webster and Rowley on the title page. Appius and Virginia was published in 1654 with Webster's name alone on the title page, but today we believe it was a collaboration with Heywood. There has been a great deal of controversy over the date of composition of this play. All the evidence indicates that it must have been written either very early or very late in Webster's career, either before 1609 or after 1625, but no solid proof has been advanced for either alternative.13 I am myself neutral on the question, and 10

Bernard M. Wagner, "New Verses by John Webster", MLN, XLVI (1931), 403-405. 11 Lucas fixes the date of The Fair Maid of the Inn by its topical allusions: Works, IV, 147. 12 Lucas again uses topical allusions to fix the date: Works, III, 3-4. Rowley died in Feb. 1625/6. 13 Rupert Brooke and Henry D. Gray assign it to about 1608-1609 and 1603-1604, respectively: John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1916), pp. 165-210; and "Appius and Virginia: By Webster and Heywood", SP, XXIV (1927), 275-289. Lucas, on the other hand, believes it was written between 1625 and 1630, or possibly later: Works, III, 121-130. Metrical analysis of Webster's part of the play indicates that it must have been written either early or late in his career. Through his three unaided plays, Webster's blank verse becomes progressively freer

18

LIFE AND WORKS

have decided to discuss the play after the other plays because I believe they shed more light on it than it could possibly shed on them. with the passage of the years. Then, in A Cure for a Cuckold, there is a return to somewhat greater regularity. T h e Webster of Appius and Virginia is the most regular of all, and it is a moot point whether one should place it just before The White Devil, to which it is statistically the closest, o r after A Cure. Other evidence is similarly indecisive. Gray's theory is that Heywood and Webster wrote the play in 1603-1604, and that it was revised in 1609 to follow Coriolanus in one or t w o scenes. Favoring this theory of collaboration and date are the echoes of Julius Caesar, the fact that Heywood and Webster are listed by Henslowe as working together in 1602, the closeness of the play's subject and its clown to Heywood's Rape of Lucrece (printed in 1608), and, above all, the general conformity of the play's subject and treatment to the style and manner of the earlier period of the drama. Countering this, Lucas points out that Heywood collaborated on A Cure for a Cuckold in 1625, and that there are clowns like Corbulo in plays of 1626-1630. Lucas claims that the starvation of the R o m a n troops, not found in the play's sources, could be an allusion to the starvation of English forces in 1624-1625. A n d he accounts for the general similarity of the play to earlier plays on R o m a n themes by suggesting that Appius and Virginia is a nostalgic "return to the older themes of the greater Elizabethan d r a m a with stories and characters not ashamed to be heroic". Now the argument f r o m nostalgia might work f o r Heywood, but it is not relevant to Webster. W h e n had he written of heroic figures? Whatever m a y be the value of the rest of Lucas's argument, this line of thinking weakens rather than strengthens his case for a late date, reminding us again of the play's closeness to the works of the early seventeenth century. There is one other small piece of evidence favoring an early date. In the plays written before The Devil's Law Case, Webster consistently favors the old-fashioned forms, hath and doth, over the more m o d e r n has and does. Starting with The Devil's Law Case and continuing through A Cure for a Cuckold, he favors has and does. I n the longer scenes of Appius and Virginia that Gray and Lucas assign to Webster (Li, IILii, IV.i, and V.i), there are 10 hath and 8 doth, no has or does. (Heywood tended to use hath and doth throughout his career - see the Appendix.) O n the face of it this is strong evidence for an early date, but it must not be allowed to carry much weight. It is simply too easy to explain away, not so much on the theory that a scribe, reviser, or printer has altered the forms, but on the theory that Webster may have felt that decorum demanded that a classical tragedy should have the greater formality of hath and doth. This very distinction m a y be seen in the works of Ben Jonson. I think it is impossible t o decide between early and late on the basis of the evidence we now have, and I follow Bentley in leaving the matter as a n open question: V, 1247.

LIFE AND WORKS

19

Few dramatists who have written so little enjoy so great a reputation as Webster. He has only three complete plays, yet he was writing for the stage over a period of more than twenty years. I think that the explanation for this rather strange situation is that the qualities of The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi that make them so distinctive and so great are qualities that prevent quantity of output. These plays are very closely written, having an amazing density and complexity of structure and style. Every element of language and action is brought into relation with every other element in coherent patterns, but at the same time the individual elements of the patterns remain somehow discrete. Thus the plot is generally coherent, but the intense moments are what really stand out; and, while the dialogue generally holds together, its language is compressed and abrupt, almost disjointedly epigrammatic, and highly figurative.14 The effect is that of a dense pattern of brilliant points of fire, like a mosaic surface studded with gorgeously resplendent gems. Webster's style is the natural product of his method of composition. To Elizabethans, a part of mimesis in art was the borrowing of images, phrases, epigrams, and even whole passages from the works of other writers. These the borrower would adapt to make them fit the tone of his own work. Webster, particularly, seems always to have written with his commonplace book open at his elbow. He made such free use of borrowed materials that in a few passages he contributes nothing more than the cement for a mosaic of other men's words,15 though more usually he 14 There are efforts to define the peculiar qualities of Webster's style in Elmer Edgar Stoll, John Webster: The Periods of His Work as Determined by His Relations to the Drama of His Day (Boston, 1905), p. 124; Lucas, Works, I, 28-30; W. A. Edwards, "John Webster", in Determinations, ed. F. R. Leavis (London, 1934), pp. 165-166; Moody E. Prior, The Language of Tragedy (New York, 1947), pp. 123-135; Frank W. Wadsworth, The White Devil. An Historical and Critical Study, a 1951 Princeton University dissertation, pp. 349-371; Gabriele Baldini, John Webster e il linguaggio delta tragedia (Rome, 1953); Anna B. Dunkle, A Concordance to Three Plays of John Webster, a 1954 University of Wisconsin dissertation; Dent, pp. 13-14; and John Russell Brown, ed., The White Devil (London, 1960), and The Duchess of Malfi (Cambridge, Mass., 1964). 15 Dent, pp. 13-14.

20

LIFE AND WORKS

writes only an occasional phrase that sounds reminiscent of others' work. In adapting borrowed passages Webster most often improves on the phrasing that he finds. Generally he is attracted by arresting conceits, pithy sententiae, and striking epigrams. These are marked by their economy of expression to start with, and Websters's tendency is to make them still more economical. The result is a breathtakingly concise effect that in itself accounts for much of the brilliant intensity of his style. Sometimes there is a labored quality about the intensity of Webster's work. Usually such a quality is a detriment to style, but for the most part Webster's style is enhanced by it, for the very laboriousness adds a degree more of intensity in his case. It must be admitted that the habit of borrowing frequently injures Webster's plays as plays. He finds it difficult to resist the beauties he has quarried, and on a few occasions works them into passages where their relevance is not entirely clear or where they impede the action of the play. But we must judge the technique by measuring its overall success or failure, and when we do this I think there can be no doubt that we should be grateful to Webster's commonplace book and should accept the occasional faulty passages as the necessary defects of a most excellent virtue. Another defect of the peculiar virtue of Webster's method is that such laborious shaping of individual expressions is very time-consuming. Webster acknowledges and refuses to apologize for his slow writing habits in the preface "To the Reader" of The White

Devil·.18

To those who report I was a long time in finishing this Tragedy, I confesse I do not write with a goose-quill, winged with two feathers, and if they will needes make it my fault, I must answere them with that of Eurypides to Alcestides, a Tragicke Writer: Alcestides objecting that Eurypides had onely in three daies composed three verses, whereas himselfe had written three hundreth: Thou telst truth, (quoth he) but heres the difference, thine shall onely bee read for three daies, whereas mine shall continue three ages. 16

I follow the text of Lucas's edition of the Works in all quotations from Webster.

LIFE AND WORKS

21

Webster's extreme care and slowness in composition imply two important consequences. First and most obviously they explain why he wrote so few complete works in his long career, why so much of his output is in collaborations with others. Second, and even more significantly, they suggest something of the way in which we should approach his plays. His care in composition indicates that he intended his plays to be read as well as staged, an intention that is also implied by the high literary pretensions of the prefaces to his works, as in the passage just quoted. In fact, Webster explicitly and angrily suggests the value of a careful reading of The White Devil when he says in the preface that the play failed on the stage because it lacked "a full and understanding Auditory" which he hopes it will find among readers. And the title page of The Duchess of Malfi tells us that the text printed is not the same as the one that was acted, but rather the work as it came straight from the writer's desk, being "The perfect and exact Coppy, with diverse things Printed, that the length of the Play would not beare in the Presentment". It is a byword of an older style of criticism that what was written for the stage should not be closely analyzed in the study. But plays, like other works of literature, are created in some sort of study, and this is especially true of Webster's plays, on which we must imagine him working with several books open at his side. These include not only his commonplace book, but also two or three accounts of the events in Italian history from which he derives his stories.17 The reader who will have the patience to study Webster's plays very carefully will be richly rewarded, as I shall try to show in the discussion that follows. In all that I write my intention will be to illuminate his plays as works of dramatic art, and in order to do this I shall not hesitate to con17

For Webster's sources for The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi see especially Lucas, Works, I, 70-90, II, 6-17; and Gunnar Boklund, The Sources of The White Devil (Uppsala, 1957), and The Duchess of Malfi: Sources, Themes, Characters (Cambridge, Mass., 1962). See also John Russell Brown, "The Papal Election in John Webster's 'The White Devil' (1612)", NQ, 202 (1957), 490-494, and Brown's editions of The White Devil, pp. 194-197, and The Duchess of Malfi, pp. xxvii-xli, 175-208.

22

LIFE AND WORKS

cern myself with the details of his composition, with nuances of thought and with individual images, considering both their immediate relevance in the passages in which they occur and also their larger relevance as elements in the complex, ordered whole that is a Webster play.

π EARLY COLLABORATION

The plays Webster wrote with Thomas Dekker and others between 1602 and 1605 cannot command great interest in their own right, for, like most Elizabethan collaborations, they are work of inferior conception and achievement.1 The authors of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Westward Ho, and Northward Ho made some effort to create dramas that would not have too many seams showing, but for the most part the unity of these plays is mechanical. All three plays are of interest to students of Webster in at least one respect, however, for we can see in them some of the themes and the ways of dealing with reality that, transformed by the imagination of a great artist working alone, reappear so gloriously in The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. The version of Sir Thomas Wyatt that found its way into print was unfortunately an effort on someone's part to reconstruct the text from memory, and as a result the dialogue and the characterization are poor.2 Two stories are woven together to make up the plot of the play. One is the tragedy of Lady Jane Grey and her husband Guildford Dudley, whom the Protestant nobles try to put on the throne in place of the Roman Catholic Queen 1

These plays are discussed at some length from other points of view in Stoll, pp. 45-82; Frederick E. Pierce, The Collaboration of Webster and Dekker ( = Yale Studies in English, Vol. 37) (New York, 1909); Mary Leland Hunt, Thomas Dekker: A Study (New York, 1911), pp. 75-78, 101-108; and Baldini, pp. 13-26, 29-52. 2 See The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, 1953-1961), I, 399; and W. L. Halstead's "Note on the Text of The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt", MLN, LIV (1939), 585589. The state of the text makes it impossible to distinguish Webster's share in the play.

24

EARLY COLLABORATION

Mary. The other is the related story of Sir Thomas, who defeats the supporters of Lady Jane only to rebel against Mary when she declares her love for Prince Philip of Spain. There is a great conflict of tone between the quiet pathos of the scenes in which Jane and Guildford are brought to death and the loud exuberance of the scenes of warfare. This conflict gives Wyatt whatever power it possesses by developing the thematic conflict between the desire of Jane and Guildford to lead a private life and the mad insistence of their world that they should become political puppets. The madness of their world is stressed throughout the play in the headless noise of the battle scenes and the clowning that attends them, in the folly of Wyatt, and in the insistence of the political world at the end that Jane and Guildford must die, while most of the lords whose puppets they were go free! If anything in Wyatt appealed deeply to Webster's imagination, it must have been the character and fate of Jane. Her prosecution by a malicious churchman foreshadows The White Devil, and her Christian-Stoic strength in the face of death foreshadows the heroism of the Duchess of Malfi. Despite the degraded state of the text, a few of the lines in which Jane and Guildford lament their sad destiny show the intense and highly figurative style that is the mark of Webster's later work. These two young martyrs say the same sort of thing in much the same sort of way as Webster's later figures: Lo we ascend into our chaires of State, Like funerall Coffins, in some funerall pompe Descending to their graves.... (I.ii. 64-66) Great men like great Flies, through lawes Cobwebs breake, But the thin'st frame, the prison of the weake. (V.i. 99-100) The world like to a sickell, bends it selfe, Men runne their course of lives as in a maze, Our office is to die, yours but to gaze. (V.ii. 63-65)3 3

The text I have used for plays in which Dekker had a hand or which are his unassisted work is that established by Bowers, ed. cit.

EARLY COLLABORATION

25

Most students of Webster have believed that he wrote very little of either Westward Ho or Norhward Ho. Frederick E. Pierce and F. L. Lucas assigned only parts of three or four scenes in each play to Webster.4 From metrical and linguistic analyses, comparisons of parallel passages, and the occurrence of incidents or characters they believed to be typical of one author or another, they could do little more than say that a scene appears to be "mostly" by Dekker, or "partly" by Webster. They could make no clear statement of how the two writers divided their job of composition. As a new approach to the problem, I have studied the use of colloquial contractions and other distinctive features of the language of the two plays. The results show that Webster wrote more of these plays than we have thought, and they give us a clearer picture of the method of his collaboration with Dekker than we have had before. In both of the Ho plays there is alternation between groups of scenes in which has and does are used consistently and I'm, 'em, and ha' occur frequently, and groups of scenes in which hath and doth are used consistently and I am, them, and have are rarely contracted (see Appendix II, Table II). There is very little mixing of the two sets of forms. With one exception, at V.i. 263-359 in Northward Ho, the points of separation are sharply defined and obviously coincide with scene or act terminations. At each of the scene divisions where a change of forms occurs, there is an average of only nine lines (in Bowers' edition) on one side of the scene division to the first I'm, 'em, ha', has, or does, and an average of only seventeen lines on the other side to the first hath or doth. The few ha', has, does, 'em, or I'm that do occur in the hath, doth portions of the plays are scattered, not clustered or consistently near any of the borderlines. The same is true of the few occurrences of hath and doth in the has, does portions. These changes in forms could happen for any one of four 4

Pierce, pp. 129-132; Lucas, Works, IV, 241-244. See also Stoll, pp. 6479; and Brooke, pp. 90, 222-233. The argument that follows is adapted from my essay, "The Collaboration of Dekker and Webster in Northward Ho and Westward Ho", PBSA, LVI (1962), 482-486.

26

EARLY COLLABORATION

reasons: there could be a change of the level of style from scene to scene, or of compositors setting type for the book, or of scribe copying the play for the printer, or of author. The first possibility is the most easily eliminated: the same characters involved in the same sorts of situations will use has and does in one part of a play, hath and doth in another. The possibility that the change from one set of forms to the other signals a change in compositors seems equally slight. First of all, the two plays were printed by different printers, Westward Ho by William Jaggard and Northward Ho by George Eld. How explain two pairs of compositors working in different shops having the same contrasting characteristics? Besides, though Bowers notes no changes of compositors in Northward Ho, he notes several possible changes in Westward Ho, especially that a new compositor begins work at signature Hi, at the end of V.i, as marked by a change in the spelling of 'em to 'hem and the use of a narrower measure.5 But while the spelling of the contraction of them changes, them is still contracted, and we continue to find I'm and ha' and has and does. There is no really significant change in the contractions used. Nor are there changes from one set of forms to the other at other places where Bowers suggests there may have been a change of compositors. Since there seems to be little doubt that Westward Ho was printed from authors' foul papers and not from a scribal copy,® the only remaining possibility is that the changes in forms are caused by changes in authors, a conclusion supported by the occurrence of the changes at the beginning of acts and scenes of natural units of composition. To determine which writer is responsible for which groups of scenes, we must determine which of them used hath and doth in works written near the date of the Ho plays and which used has, does, I'm, 'em, and ha'. In the careers of both men we can trace a development from the use of the conservative and uncontracted forms to a more modern and colloquial style. In The Shoemaker's Holiday and Old Fortunatas, both printed in 1600, 5

•

See Bowers, Dekker, Ibid., II, 314-315.

II, 315.

EARLY COLLABORATION

27

Dekker uses hath and doth almost exclusively, and never uses the colloquial I'm, 'em, or ha'. But by the time of Satiromastix, printed in 1602, has and does have become dominant, and ha' occurs 37 times. Also, does, I'm, and ha' are used in the Dekker autograph page of Sir Thomas More, which was written at the end of the sixteenth century. In The Second Part of the Honest Whore, printed in 1630 but written between 1604 and 1608, has and does are dominant, ha' is quite common, I'm is used 16 times and 'em 9 times. This trend continues in If This be Not a Good Play, The Devil is in It, printed in 1612, which has 24 ha', 33 has, 1 hath, 25 does, 1 doth, 44 'em, and 12 I'mJ Westward Ho (1604) and Northward Ho (1605) thus fall in a period when Dekker was consistently using has and does more than hath and doth, and was using the colloquial I'm, 'em, and ha'. Webster moved from the conservative hath and doth to has and does at a later date. In The White Devil (1609-12) and in The Duchess of Malfi (1612-13) he uses hath and doth almost exclusively and rarely contracts / am, them, or have. In The White Devil there are no ha', has, 'em, or I'm, and only one does. The Duchess of Malfi has no I'm, or ha', only 3 'em. Later on, in The Devil's Law Case, (1617-21), has and does are dominant, but there is only one ha', no I'm or 'em.8 From this evidence we may conclude that the has, does portions of the Ho plays belong to Dekker and the hath, doth portions to Webster. This division of the plays gains force because it is basically consistent with the assignments made by earlier investigators. All the scenes they assigned to Webster are 7

What evidence there is indicates that most and possibly all of these Dekker plays were printed from author's papers or fair copies of them preserving most of their author's characteristics. See Bowers' introductions to the plays, ed. cit. 8 John Russell Brown has analyzed the texts of Webster's plays and shown that The White Devil was printed from the author's papers, that The Duchess of Malfi was probably printed from a scribe's copy of the author's papers or from prompt copy, and that it is slightly more probable that The Devil's Law Case was printed from author's papers than from prompt copy: "The Printing of John Webster's Plays (I)", SB, VI (1954), 117-140. I have used the text of Lucas's very accurate edition of Webster for m y count of these forms.

28

EARLY COLLABORATION

in the hath, doth portions, while all the scenes they were positive belonged to Dekker because of the use of dialect are in the has, does portions. The pattern of composition turns out to be the same for both plays: Webster wrote the first and third of a total of four parts of Westward Ho and the first, third, and fifth parts of a total of six for Northward Ho. The portions written by Dekker are always longer than the portions by Webster that precede them. This pattern implies something of the way Dekker and Webster worked. After the whole of the play had been planned, they seem to have assigned the first unit of action to Webster and what followed to Dekker. Webster, the slower of the two writers, was thus given a definite goal to write towards. Dekker, on the other hand, had the freedom to write ahead as far as he could while Webster was toiling over his share. When Webster finished his assignment, they met again, compared what they had done, and divided the next section of the play in the same way. Alternatively, they may have divided the whole play up at the start, making sure to give Dekker the longer sections to work on. Despite his slower pace, Webster wrote about forty per cent of each play: all of Acts I and III and the first scene of Act IV of Westward Ho, and in Northward Ho all of the first scene of Act I, the second scene of Act II, all of Act III, and Act V to somewhere between lines 263 and 359. This still leaves the question whether Webster had a significant share or interest in the creation of character, plot, and theme. Most critics have thought not, and Lucas did not even include the plays in his edition of Webster's works.9 In any event there is not much room in these plays for anything that is distinctively Webster's, since they conform very closely to a conventional dramatic type of the day. They are typical and thoroughly undistinguished citizen comedies, a genre in which the subject matter is the natural conflict between young gallants or appren9

More recently, however, Baldini, pp. 29-52, has argued that these plays are important for the study of Webster's development, finding even in Dekker's scenes the spirit, if not the words of Webster. But most of the characters and sentiments Baldini cites as evidence of Webster's spirit seem to me to be quite conventional.

EARLY COLLABORATION

29

tices and married citizen tradesmen. In Westward Ho the gallants try to seduce the flirtatious and pretty young wives of the tradesmen. As not uncommonly in the genre, the wives mostly prove to be true to their husbands, but the husbands are caught visiting whores. At the end, the gallants are made absurd in revenge for trying to seduce the wives. Westward Ho must have been a successful stage play, since it was imitated and praised in Eastward Ho, written by George Chapman, John Marston, and Ben Jonson. Chapman, as the chief author of Eastward Ho, came in for some friendly mockery as Bellamont, the poet, in Northward Ho, a rather feeble attempt to follow up on the popularity of the earlier play.10 Again a younger man tries to seduce a citizen's wife, but this time things are more complicated. The would-be seducer is himself married, and his best friend and constant companion is his wife's lover. The citizen's wife proves true to her husband, and in the end they get a sweet revenge - the would-be seducer is tricked into disguising himself and bringing a woman for the citizen to enjoy, and this woman, who is also disguised, turns out to be the seducer's own wife! At the same time, his faithless friend is tricked into marrying a whore. In the early years of the seventeenth century realistic satire was the most important new development on the London stage. Chapman, Marston, and especially Jonson and Middleton were lighting the way, and under their influence even men like Dekker were turning their attention to the sordid and foolish side of English life, presenting it with an unsparing wealth of detail and lashing it in a spirit of bitter zest previously unknown. Webster's work with Dekker coincides with the period in which Dekker came the most strongly under the influence of the writers of satire, in such works as Satiromastix (1602) and his collaboration with Middleton, The Honest Whore (1603-04). Webster also knew the work of Chapman and Jonson directly, of course, and not only through his contact with Dekker, Heywood and Marston. He pays tribute to them ahead of the other major writers of his time in the preface to The White Devil·. 10

Stoll, pp. 65-70, discusses the relation of the three plays to each other.

30

EARLY COLLABORATION

For mine owne part I have ever truly cherisht my good opinion of other mens worthy Labours, especially of that full and haightned stile of Maister Chapman: The labofd and understanding workes of Maister Johnson: The no lesse worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Maister Beamont, & Maister Fletcher: And lastly (without wrong last to be named) the right happy and copious industry of M. Shake-speare, M. Decker, & M. Heywood, wishing what I write may be read by their light.

In The White Devil Webster transposed the satire of the cuckold's comedy into the more profound satire of the cuckold's tragedy.11 The spirit of the second scene, in which Flamineo leads Brachiano on in his lust for Vittoria and gulls the foolish Camillo, her husband, is not entirely alien to the spirit of IV.i in Westward Ho, in which Mistress Birdlime, the bawd, gulls the citizens as they come to visit Luce, a prostitute. Flamineo and Birdlime take much the same kind of cynical delight in leading their victims by the nose, playing upon their lust to get one man to go to bed with the girl, another to shut himself away where he cannot interfere. A further link between Westward Ho and The White Devil is in the name of the prostitute, Luce, meaning "light" as well as "loose", and the "white" of The White Devil. The name of Luce is part of the emphasis on false appearances in the Ho plays, an emphasis that is particularly strong in the scene in Westward Ho in which Justiniano disguises himself as his wife in order to expose the lustful Earl. These are elements of the Ho plays that are important in Dekker's work generally and that, together with similar concern for false appearances throughout the medieval and Elizabethan tradition, had a great influence on Webster, as I shall show in my discussion of The White Devil.

11

Travis Bogard discusses Webster's fusion of tragedy and satire and relates it to Marston and Chapman - too narrowly so, I think: The Tragic Satire of John Webster (Berkeley, 1955), especially pp. 18-39 and 87-98. See also the discussions of the influence of other writers on Webster in Stoll, especially pp. 79-82, 132 ff; and Marcia Lee Anderson, John Webster's The White Devil and the Duchess of Malfi: A Critical Study, a 1940 Duke University dissertation, pp. 91-100.

Ill THE WHITE

DEVIL

Glories, like glow-wormes, afarre off shine bright But lookt to neare, have neither heat nor light. (V.i.38-39) 1

The White Devil is a brilliant burst of flame illuminating the dark face of Satan, a magnificent exploration of the hell men create for themselves on earth when they act without any moral, social, or natural restraint and become completely independent, selfish, and finally isolated individuals. The title describes Judas and other malicious deceivers who lie in the ultimate depth of Dante's hell, and its first word, "Banisht!" is the despairing cry of the damned, cut off forever from hope and love as a result of their self-willed exclusion from the human community. The catastrophe, and especially the death of Flamineo, conveys with great tragic power the despairing sense of the emptiness and futility of all of life that comes to such an individualist in death. Flamineo has looked only to himself, and so has blinded himself to the true hope of life. Webster plays his white against the traditional devil's black to create an anatomy of evil worthy of comparison with Dante's Divine Comedy and Shakespeare's Othello. The structure of the play is boldly clear yet it is intricate, too, as Webster shows in scene after scene how one evil parallels another, then shifts his perspective glass to create a different parallel, a new pattern. Evil creates evil and destroys evil, but for all the evil that is destroyed more rises up to take its place. 1

Cf. DM IV.ii.141-142; DLC IV.ii.l 19-121.

32

'the white devil'

Not all of the evils of the play appear to be evil, however. Since the devil is traditionally black, "the white devil" signifies a devil disguised by a fair outside, a vice pretending to be a virtue, a beauty that tempts men to sin. Almost every character in the play is a white devil, from the resplendent Cardinal Monticelso to the gorgeous Vittoria Corombona. Nearly every word and action in the play is hypocritical or dissembling,2 and when the people are not deceiving each other they tragically deceive themselves. The people, the events, and even the objects in the world of The White Devil appear to be glories, but looked to near they have neither heat nor light. And indeed the glories must be looked to very near, for Webster never relaxes his artistic control to tell the audience how they are to react. 3 The audience is drawn into the dramatic illusion: Webster uses his art to deceive and tempt us just as it deceives and tempts the characters in the play. We, like them, may be led to make false moral judgments, and though we may recognize these as false when all is said and done, we come away from our experience of the play with a profound awareness of the terrible power of evil, of the magnificence of Satan, and we can never again feel in our hearts that it is easy to cleave to good and shun evil. It is important to understand that this play was written by an Elizabethan Englishman about true events that took place in Italy in the early sixteenth century.4 The evils depicted are those Englishmen thought of as peculiarly "Italianate", a term that had become almost synonymous with decadent and cruel perversions of all sorts. Yet the play is not merely an expose of conditions in Italy, for the English recognized that the evils of decadence were part of their own experience. The Italian setting gives Webster enough distance from his material to make his * See the very important essay by Hereward T. Price, "The Function of Imagery in Webster", PMLA, LXX (1955), 717-739. 3 Virtually every bit of dissimulation in the play has fooled one critic or another: Vittoria's pretense of piety, Francisco's disavowals of evil intent, and Monticelso's sermons have all been regarded as sincere by some readers. 4 See Lucas, Works, I, 70-90; Boklund, Sources of The White Devil.

'the white devil'

33

play universal instead of merely local. The White Devil is truly the timeless devil: its evil recurs whenever men embrace false values. The concept of the white devil has its origin in Jesus' warnings against hypocrites and in St. Paul's attacks on the false apostle: 5 Wo be to you, Scribes and Pharises, hypocrites: for ye are like unto whited tombes, which appeare beautifull outward, but are within full of dead mens bones, and all filthines. For suche false apostles, are deceiptful workers, transfourmed into ye Apostles of Christ. And no marveyle: for Satan hym selfe is transfourmed into an angel of lyght.

Both of these passages are echoed by later authors writing about white devils,6 and both of them are necessary for an understanding of the term. Paul emphasizes the radiance of the glories Satan is able to assume; Jesus stresses the charnel and the worms that those glories really are, looked to near. After Paul, the idea of the false apostle became very important in Christian writings, as people dreaded the coming of the Antichrist, who seems to be Christ but is really the son of the devil. The devil is the "father of lies", so he is never more dangerous than in the form of this son whose radiance is a lie. The Antichrist is begotten upon a whore in Babylon, the city of pride and idolatry, and is in all things the parallel and opposite of Christ. The medieval Cursor Mundi includes a full account of his coming and his activities.7 He casts out devils by the power of the devil, and beguiles the people so that they cannot tell whether he is Christ or not. He overcomes many men, deceiving some, bribing others with riches, and intimidating still others. He persecutes those who will not submit to his rule. 5

The Geneva Bible, The Bible and Holy Scriptures ... (London, 1581), Matthew xxiii: 27; and the Bishops' Bible, The Holy Bible (London, 1572), 11 Corinthians xi: 13-14. β See, for example, the Morals on The Book of Job by S. Gregory the Great: "The devil is appropriately understood by whitening, who though dark through his deserts, transforms himself into an angel of light", quoted from the Parker Society translation (Oxford, 1850), III, 413. 7 Part IV, lines 21,975-22,426; ed. Richard Morris, EETS, o.s., LXVI (1877), 1258-1282.

34

'THE WHITE DEVIL'

With the Reformation the Antichrist really came into his own. Luther repeatedly named the Italian Pope an Antichrist, and it is in Luther that we find the first Protestant use of the phrase "white devil". In his Latin Commentary on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Galatians (1535), Luther uses the term to refer to spiritual sins, sins that recommend themselves to us as virtues. These are the sins of a false religion, here particularly Roman Catholicism. Luther is commenting on verse 4 of the first chapter of Galatians, in which Paul asserts man's need to be rescued by Christ from "this present evil world": "[The] white Devill which forceth men to commit spirituall sinnes, that they may sell them for righteousnes, is farre more daungerous then the blacke devill, which onely enforceth them to commit fleshly sinnes which the world acknowledgeth to be sinnes." 8 A few pages later Luther comments on Paul's assertion in Galatians 1 : 6 that the false apostle leads his victims "unto an other Gospell": Here we may learne to espie the craftie sleights and subtilties of the Devill. No heretike commeth under the title of errours and of the Devill, neither doth the Devill himselfe come as a Devill in his owne likenes, especially that white Devill which we spake of before. Yea even the blacke devill, which forceth men to manifest wickednes, maketh a cloke for them to cover that sinne which they committe or purpose to committe. The murtherer in his rage seeth not that murther is so greate and horrible a sinne as it is in deede, for that he hath a cloke to cover the same. Whoremasters, theeves, covetous persons, drunkards and such others, have wherwith to flatter them selves and cover their sinnes. So the blacke devill also commeth out disguised and counterfet in all his works and devises. But in spirituall matters, where Sathan commeth forth, not blacke, but white in the likenes of an Angell or of God him selfe, there he passeth himselfe with most craftie dissimulation and wonderfull sleights, and is wont to set forth to sale his most deadly poison for the doctrine of grace, for the word of God, for the Gospell of Christ.9 Luther's word for the devil's "white" is "Candidus", a Latin word that has no exact English equivalent, that manages to fuse 8

A Commentary of M. Doctor Martin Luther Upon the Epistle of S. Paul to the Galatians (London, 1575), F 21r. TTiis translation was headed by a note of commendation written by Edwin Sandys, Bishop of London. The book was reprinted in 1577, 1580, 1588, and 1603. » Ibid., F 25v.

'the white devil'

35

the whited sepulcher and the angel of light. It refers to both the whiteness of snow and the light of stars, or even of diamonds, crystal, or glow-worms. It is this fusion of whiteness and shining light that Webster gives us in his play. Luther's distinction of white and black devils is the acknowledged source of the other Protestant writers who have been observed to use it, but whereas in Luther the white devil means the devil who is a consummate master of deceit in tempting men to spiritual sin, and the devil is otherwise black, even when using dissimulation, to the later writers the devil is white whenever he uses false appearances. Yet even in their writings the white devil is chiefly the religious hypocrite or deceived zealot. Thus Pierre Viret distinguishes at length between white or "familiar" devils and the black variety in The World Possessed with Devils, summing it all up in The Second Part of the Demoniac World: The devil is "the father of lyes"; if the black devil's means, violence, does not get him what he wants, he uses white means, deceit, first trying false doctrine, superstition, and idolatry, but if that does not work he becomes a hypocrite, seeming to favor Christianity: And, although this enemy is alwayes greatly to be feared, yet is he never so much to be feared, as when he useth thus to faigne and glose. For hee never hurteth so sore, as when he transfigureth himselfe into an Angell of light, which he can right well doe. 10

The belief is proverbial: "The white Devil is worse than the black" " 10

Translated by Thomas Stocker (London, 1583), pp. B[V-B2r. " Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, 1950), p. 155, item D 310. The greatest effect of whiteness in something horrible is to add an increment of horror, as Herman Melville writes of "The Whiteness of the Whale" in Moby-Dick, chapter XLII. Melville admired Webster and echoed The White Devil in two of his poems, but he may only have seen the passages included in Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (London, 1808). For the borrowing see Hennig Cohen, "Melville and Webster's The White Devil", ESQ, No. 33 (1963), p. 33. For Melville's acquaintance with Webster's work see Merton M. Sealts, Jr., "Melville's Reading: A Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed ΙΠ (Continued)", Harvard Library Bulletin, ΠΙ (1949), 268-277. Sealts lists Lamb's Specimens, but he has no entry at all for Webster.

36

'THE WHITE DEVIL'

The idea that the Pope is the devil's offspring, the Antichrist, was very much alive in early seventeenth century England, and was treated in such quite different works as Barnabe Barnes' play

The

Devil's

Charter

(1607)

and John Donne's

prose

satire, Ignatius his Conclave (1611). One such work which is of more than passing interest in connection with The White

Devil

is Thomas Dekker's The Whore of Babylon (printed in 1607). Through his work with Dekker, Webster had the opportunity to know this play well, and he borrowed phrases and images from it in writing his play.12 Moreover, he found in it a prototype for what he wanted to attempt. In The Whore of Babylon, as in The White Devil, evil parades itself as truth. Whereas Catholic prelates and aristocrats are obvious monsters of crime in The

Devil's

Charter, an audience without any prejudices against Babylon and Roman Catholicism could be taken in from the beginning by the fair appearance and words of the Empress of Babylon. In the first scene she laments the way her enemy, the "Faerie Queene", has been led astray by false doctrine: That strumpet, that inchantresse, (who, in robes White as is innocence, and with an eye Able to tempt stearne murther to her bed) Calles her selfe Truth, has stolne faire Truths attire. (I.i. 56-59) In this scene there are few hints that the Empress is more wicked than her foe. Only as her efforts against the Faerie Queene are frustrated does her demonic nature become evident, gradually appearing more and more obviously until at the end of the play she is an insane monster. A s the action develops we are able to be sure the Empress's "Truth" is falsehood because we are allowed to see the Faerie Queene's true "Truth". A s "Plaine Dealing" says to this proper "Truth", of the false one after she has been exposed: Is this speckled toade shee? Shee was then in mine eye, the goodliest woman that ever wore fore part of Sattin.... TRUTH. Shee look'd so

1!

See Dent, pp. 76, 79-80, 104, 158.

'THE WHITE DEVIL'

37

then; fairenes it selfe doth cloth her/In mens eyes, till they see me, and then they loath her. (IV.i. 62-68)

In The White Devil Webster similarly allows falsehood to pretend to be truth, with the vast difference that truth herself is barred from the field, and only error is left to expose error, as it does most feverishly and poisonously in every scene. The context of the first of Luther's references to the white devil is very helpful for an understanding of Webster's world, surrendered as it is to evil, so much so that only the devil is left to preach. Luther is writing about man's need for Christ to deliver him from the present evil world, and he begins with the traditional Christian belief that the world is the kingdom of the devil, but adds the Protestant emphasis on the result that if the world is the devil's, no man has the power to save himself by his own works. Indeed, all human abilities become the devil's instruments: Whatsoever is in this world, is subject to the malice of the Devil raigning over the whole world. For this cause the world is said to be the kingdome of the Devill. For there is nothing els in this world, but ignoraunce, contenpt, blasphemy, and hatred of G o d . . . . As many therfore, as are in the world, are the bond slaves of the devill, constrained to serve him, and to doe all things at his pleasure. . . . Therfore all giftes either of the body or of the minde which thou possessest, as wisedom, righteousnes, holines, eloquence, power, beautie, riches, are but the slavish instruments of the hellish tyrannie, and with all these thou art compelled to serve the devill, and to promote and enlarge his kingdom. 13

This is the predicament of humanity in The White Devil. Devotion to false values has perverted all of Italy to the service of evil. Perhaps central among these perversions is the corrupt state of the Papacy. Through the middle of the play the old Pope is dying, and we feel the corruption of his illness infecting the whole world. And then the hypocritical and devilish Cardinal Monti13 Commentary, F 20r-20v. Compare the discussions of the religious background of Webster's work by Vincent F. Hopper and Gerald B. Lahey, eds., The Duchess of Malfi (New York, 1960), pp. 56-67; and David Cecil, Poets and Story-Tellers (New York, 1949), pp. 27-43.

38

'THE WHITE DEVIL' 14

celso is elected Pope. Webster has made Monticelso at once the perfect victim of the white devil that Luther describes and the perfect white devil himself. He is the victim of the white devil in succumbing to false spiritual values. Webster makes him deny one Christian teaching after another. In the breathtakingly brief span of four lines he supplants virtue with honor, mercy with revenge, and brotherly love with hate (II.i.386-389). As a white devil, however, Monticelso almost always keeps his devotion to malice hidden. He first appears in Il.i, and until the brief dialogue with Francisco de Medicis at the end of the scene, he is a pious sermonizer, the master hypocrite, lecturing Brachiano on his moral duty, restraining Brachiano and Francisco in their quarrel, and mildly rebuking Isabella for divorcing herself from Brachiano. Then in the arraignment of Vittoria in Ill.ii we see Monticelso pervert justice to get his revenge, proving the adage Vittoria hurls at him that "poore charity" is "seldome found in scarlet" (73-74). It is not until IV.i, when we have penetrated to the inmost part of the action, the very center of the play in stage time, that Monticelso reveals the inmost truth of his character and of his relation to the evils of his world. For a moment in this scene he drops the white mask and lets us see the black Satanic horror beneath. He urges Francisco to seek treacherous revenge against Brachiano and Vittoria for the murder of Isabella, and gets for him his "blacke booke", in whose pages "lurke / The names of many devils" (IV.i.35-38).15 As Monticelso runs through his inventory of devils, we recognize the sinners we have met in the play, the intelligencers, the panders, the pirates, the politic bankrupts, the corrupt lawyers, the evil divines, the courtesans, and the FRAN.

MON. 14

Murderers. Fould downe the leafe I pray, G o o d m y Lord let me borrow this strange doctrine. Pray use't my Lord. (IV.i. 67-70)

See Lucas, Works, I, 74. Elizabethans thought that the devil keeps a black book to record our sins, through which he can torment us: see Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night (London, 1594), in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow (London, 1904), I, 345. 15

'THE WHITE DEVIL'

39

Francisco comments a little later: . . . That [in] so little paper Should [lie] th'undoing of so many men! 'Tis not so big as twenty declarations. See the corrupted use some make of bookes: Divinity, wrested by some factious bloud, Draws swords, swels battels, & orethrowes all good. (IV.i. 96-101)

Here all is very clear: Monticelso is a devil, an Antichrist whose religion is an inversion of Christianity, his bible a black book and his divinity the devout religion of hell. And this is the man who is about to be elected pope and will then pretend to Lodovico that the revenge against Brachiano is damnable! As the representative of the white devil in his role as cardinal and then pope, Monticelso is in one way or another the source from which all the evils of the play flow. Insofar as he urges Francisco to seek blood revenge, he is morally responsible for the murders of Brachiano, Vittoria, and Flamineo. And, astonishingly, he is even indirectly responsible for the evil that brought on that revenge, the rise of Vittoria into the courtly world and the consequent murder of Isabella and Camillo. He suggests the connection himself in the scene of Vittoria's arraignment, saying to her that Camillo bought her from her father, that he received no dowry with her (III.ii.243-253). Put this together with his earlier admission that Camillo was in debt to him (III.ii.162163), and it is possible to link Monticelso with the crimes inspired by Vittoria. Camillo raised Vittoria from obscure poverty to a place where Brachiano might see her more easily, if with less propriety. Whether directly or indirectly, Monticelso's money has helped to bring Vittoria within Brachiano's orbit. The Italian word for the evil sorcery that is the devil's business is venefico, which also means poison. The imagery and action of the play make us feel that the white devil is like a poison, working unseen to convulse the world, and there are repeated allusions to the need for more poisons to fight the first ones, to physic the state even if only by bringing it close to death. Thus Isabella dies when she kisses a poisoned picture of Brachiano,

40

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and this is repaid when the poisoned Brachiano forbids Vittoria to kiss him for fear his lips may be poisonous.16 We feel the force of the poison of the white devil's false values most strongly when we see what it has done to qualities that ought naturally to be good: to the deep passion of Brachiano for Vittoria, which is made murderous; to the brilliant wit and perception of Flamineo, which are perverted to clever, self-deceiving rationalizations; and above all to the living spirit and the magnificent beauty of Vittoria Corombona, which are reduced to the whitewash on a sepulcher. It must heighten our sense of the play's tragic force to consider what human richness and beauty have been lost eternally because of this poison, what radiant, dazzling whiteness has been conquered by the darkness of hell. Even the virtues of the ostensibly good people are perverted or at least tainted.17 The virtue of Cornelia and Marcello is mostly a matter of pride and self-righteousness, and Isabella is a hypocrite in accepting the responsibility for Brachiano's divorce from her. She tries to be his redeemer, taking his sin upon herself and comparing the strength of her arms to the power of the unicorn's horn, a traditional symbol of the saving power of Christ (II.i.12-18, 212-227). Her reward is the Judas-kiss of death. Giovanni is the only other character who might be regarded as "good", and every time we see him we are ominously reminded of his close similarities to his father, Brachiano, and his uncle, Francisco. At the end of the play he sincerely intends to purge the state of evil, but he is beset by enemies of truth, and, his world being poisoned as it is, there are implications that he will be unable to escape his evil heritage.18 He captures Lodovico just after the murder of Vittoria and Flamineo: GIO. You bloudy villaines, By what authority have you committed 16 For this ironic reversal see Muriel C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, 1935), p. 191; and Mario Praz, 11 Dramma Elisabettiano: Webster-Ford (Rome, 1947), p. 78. 17 See Irving Ribner, Jacobean Tragedy: The Quest for Moral Order (London, 1962), pp. 103-104; and Muriel West, The Devil and John Webster, a 1957 University of Arkansas dissertation, pp. 62-63, 100-101. 18 See Il.i.101-109, III.ii.320-324, V.iv.1-8.

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41

This Massakre? LOD. By thine, GIO. Mine? LOD. Yes, thy unckle, Which is a part of thee, enjoyn'd us to't. (V.vi. 284-287)

The lines he addresses to Flamineo when he banishes him from the court apply also to himself as the inheritor of Brachiano: 'Twere fit you'd thinke on what hath former bin — I have heard griefe nam'd the eldest child of sinne. (V.iv. 18-19)

The ritual forms of piety have been perverted by the white devil so that they have become black masses to go with the black book that is Monticelso's bible.19 Cornelia kneels to curse her daughter, not to pray (I.ii.287-290). Brachiano divorces Isabella with a ceremonial kiss and ring-vow (Il.i. 193-201). He scoffs at the religious quality of her "devotion" to him (Il.i. 151-154). His hired assassins, Julio, who kills for gold Julios, and Christophero, bearer of the Antichrist, take advantage of her idolatrous worship of his picture to kill her with the fumes from the poisonous incense of their black mass: Enter suspiciously, Julio and Christophero, they draw a curtaine wher Brachian[o]'s picture is, they put on spectacles of glasse, which cover their eyes and noses, and then burne perfumnes afore the picture, and wash the lips of the picture, that done, quenching the fire, and putting off their spectacles they depart laughing. Enter Isabella in her night-gowne as to bed-ward, with lights after her, Count Lodovico, Giovanni, Guid-antonio and others waighting on her, shee kneeles downe as to prayers, then drawes the curtaine of the picture, doe's three reverences to it, and kisses it thrice, she faints and will not suffer them to come nere it, dies, sorrow exprest in Giovanni and in Count Lodovico, shees conveid out solemnly. (Il.ii. 23 s.d.)

Where the white devil cannot turn love to idolatry, he converts it to lust. Brachiano is "saved", i.e., "quite lost" in his own false religion of love. There are echoes of theological talk about whether a man is saved by his own merit in the way he speaks of Vittoria's effect on his spirit. She makes him: " West, pp. 203-205; James R. Hurt, "Inverted Rituals in Webster's The White Devil", JEGP, LXI (1962), 42-47.

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happie above thought, because 'bove merrit. FLA. 'bove merrit! wee may now talke freely: 'bove merrit! what ist you doubt? her coynesse? (I.ii. 16-18) In IV.iii we learn that Lodovico has "tane the sacrament to prosecute/ Th'intended murder" of Brachiano, an abuse of ritual pointedly mentioned again later (IV.iii.75-76, V.i.62-63). After taking this vow, Lodovico enacts a parody of confession with the connivance of Monticelso, now pope, who treats the confession as the desperate thing it is by replying with a penance that abandons the sinner to despair, leaving him to save himself without further assistance (IV.iii. 107-130). There immediately follows Lodovico's "confirmation" in evil when Francisco sends him money in Monticelso's name, making him believe that the pope really favors the murder after all (IV.iii.135-153). In this incident is a superb example of the great subtlety of the white devil's control of false appearances in damning men: first Lodovico is deceived into believing that Monticelso is opposed to the murder, then he is deceived into believing what is really true, that Monticelso favors blood revenge for Isabella's murder. The ritual of extreme unction is perverted in the murder of Brachiano. The murderers are disguised as Capuchin monks Franciscans - to suggest that they are really agents of Francisco, not of God. First they go through the motions and the Latin words of the last rites, then they drop their disguises when they are alone with Brachiano and reveal to him the malicious reality beneath. In the same way as devils were traditionally thought to do,20 they taunt him in an effort to make him die in despair (V.iii.130-169). And at the end of the same scene Zanche pretends to feel contrition for being an accessory to the murders of Camillo and Isabella, and proposes as penance that she rob Vittoria, meet with Francisco in the chapel at midnight, and run away with him (V.iii.250-275). Lodovico's comment reveals him in his role as the Flamineo of Francisco's party: "Excellent 20

Theodore Spencer, Death and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), pp. 10-11.

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penitence!/ Usurers dreame on't while they sleepe out Sermons" (V.iii.261-262). Flamineo is the most fully developed of the play's people in whom goodness is perverted by the white devil. His character and his role in the play are illuminated in a sermon preached by the Anglican divine, Thomas Adams, at Paul's Cross in 1612, the year The White Devil was printed. Adams had as his subject "The White Devil or the Hypocrite Uncased".21 Though Adams mentions only Luther as source for the idea of white devils, his sermon may actually have been inspired by Webster's play, since it provides such excellent commentary on it.22 The direct influence of Luther is slight; there are more echoes of the reformer's "Candidus diabolus" in other sermons than in this one.23 The model for Adams' white devil is Judas, not Lucifer, the whited sepulcher rather than the false angel of light. His subject is the story in John xii. Christ was dining with his friends and disciples, and Mary bathed his feet with a precious ointment. Judas censured her for wasting what might have been given to the poor. Adams' text is verse 6: "This hee sayd, not that he cared for the poore; but because he was a theefe, and had the bagge, and bare what was put therein." Judas, says Adams, 21

The Works of Thomas Adams (London, 1629), pp. 32-60. " The sermon seems to echo both what Flamineo says of the redness of his face at I.ii.323-325, and the aphorism about the glow-worm: "he hath a flushing in his face, as if he had eaten fire: zeale burnes in his tongue, but come neere this gloeworme, and he is cold, dark, squallid", ed. cit., p. 47. Adams certainly knew The Duchess of Malfi, for he borrows from it in his "Meditations Upon Some Part of the Creed", first published in 1629. In one paragraph he writes that "Securitie is the very suburbes of hell; there is nothing but a dead wall betweene", and only a paragraph later he has "Glories, like Glowormes, a farre off shine bright: come neere, they have neither heate nor light. All that the worlds glory leaves behind it, is but like a man that falles in the snow, and there makes his print: when the Sunne shines foorth, it melts both forme and matter", ed. cit., p. 1180. Cf. DM IV.ii, 141-142, V.ii.372-373, V.v.139-142. This borrowing is peculiar, for Webster had earlier borrowed the "security" aphorism from Adams! "The Gallants Burden" (London, 1612), ed. cit., p. 5. 23 See especially "The Black Saint. Or, the Apostate" (London, 1615), ed. cit., pp. 368-369; "The Way Home" (London, 1618), ed. cit., pp. 847848.

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could swallow a gudgeon, though he keckes at a flie: he could observe, obey, flatter the compounding Pharisee,... but here because his mouth waters at the money, his teeth rankle the womans credit: for so I find malignant reprovers stiled: . . . they doe not mend but make worse; they bite, they gnaw: thus was Diogenes sirnamed Cynicke for his snarling; . . . the dog of reproches.24

After reading this passage it does not seem so strange that John Genest, the important early nineteenth century stage historian, could refer to Flamineo as the white devil as though there were no question about it: "The White Devil is Flamineo - he assists Brachiano in debauching his sister Vittoria - he kills Camillo and pretends that he died by accident." 25 Flamineo parallels and complements Monticelso as a "malignant reprover" and source of infection in the world and as a man who will pretend anything to achieve his will. "Hypocrisie is but another sinnes pander", writes Adams, and the figure of speech points directly to Flamineo.26 He is so much an active source of evil that Vittoria can pretend to feel wronged by him in her quarrel with Brachiano in the house of convertites: VIT. Hence you Pandar. FLA. Pandar! Am I the author of your sinne? VIT. Yes: Hee's a base theif that a theif lets in. (IV.ii. 138-140)

When Cornelia catches Vittoria, Brachiano, and Flamineo at their midnight rendezvous, she rebukes them in language defining the situation as being like the temptation and fall of man in Eden - an analogy casting Flamineo in the role of Satan, the most guilty of all (I.ii.259-268). Adams says of cynics like Judas or like Satan tempting Adam and Eve: Observe his devillish disposition, bent and intended to stifle goodnesse in others, that had utterly choakt it in himselfe... . [To such creatures it is] some ease . . . to have fellowes in their miserie. . . . For the author sins more, than the actor.27 24 25 26

"

"The Some "The Ibid..

White Devil", ed. cit., p. 35. Account of the English Stage (Bath, 1832), I, 346. White Devil", ed. cit., p. 45. p. 36.

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The historical Vittoria's wicked brother was Marcello, the innocent one Flamineo, but it is no wonder Webster exchanges the names. Flamineo is an agent of the devil's destructive false light to himself and others, as he attests in his first lines of the play, lines urging Brachiano to the affair with Vittoria that is to be their ruin: Pursew your noble wishes, I am prompt As lightning to your service, 6 my Lord. (I.ii. 4-5) As a pander he is "like an old/ Proverbe, Hold the Candle before the divell",28 Flame imagery occurs in connection with Flamineo at three crucial points in the action. When he is banished from the presence by Giovanni, there is a sudden change in his course: Doth hee make a Court ejectment of mee? A flaming firebrand casts more smoke without a chimney, then within't. lie smoore some of them. (V.iv. 41-43) When Vittoria thinks she has shot him, she cries in triumph, I tread the fire out That would have bene my ruine. (V.vi. 125-126) And as he dies, Flamineo, having already reduced himself from lightning to a firebrand, finally sees himself as a mere candle-end: I recover like a spent taper, for a flash And instantly go out. (V.vi. 263-264) But the name of Flamineo signifies more than flame. "Flaminio" or "flämine" in Italian means "a high-priest among the Gentiles"^29 i.e., a high priest of a false religion, in Flamineo's case the worship of his own good: "An hypocrite is a kinde of honest Atheist", writes Adams, "for his owne Good is his God".™ Like Monticelso, Flamineo is the victim of the white devil as well as 28

This expression is applied to panders in Dekker and Middleton's The Honest Whore (London, 1604), II.i.35-36. 29 John Florio, Queen Anna's New World of Words (London, 1611), p. 190. Webster had met the term in Dekker's Whore of Babylon, IV.i.21. so "The White Devil", ed. cit., p. 46.

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a white devil himself. He is a rationalizing thinker, lost in a confusion of values. He has much greater complexity than Monticelso, for he cannot quite get rid of the notion that the traditional virtues have value. He is a spoiled priest who thinks he loves the good but also thinks he must betray it to live in his corrupted world. As a consequence, he must make light of good and of his own evil in order to bear his guilty conscience: . . . this face of mine I'le arme and fortefie with lusty wine, 'Gainst shame and blushing. (I.ii. 323-325)

By masking his face in the druken red exuberance of his railing wit, he prevents the natural blushes of his conscience from betraying him. It is chiefly himself he needs to deceive. When he resolves to dissemble at the arraignment of his sister, saying "I do put on this feigned Garbe of mirth,/ To gull suspition", we feel that the suspicion he most sorely wants to gull is his own (Ill.i.30-31). He points out the wickedness of others to justify himself. Somehow he feels that to call Vittoria whore makes him less a pander, a name to which he is very sensitive. In all his railing bitterness Flamineo speaks for himself and not for Webster. Because he holds the stage so much of the time, it is easy to make the mistake of regarding him as a chorus and attributing his cynicism to Webster. But matters are not so simple as this. Every voice in the play exposes the falsity of the others, and none speaks clearly for truth itself, for every voice is tainted in motive or is self-deceived in devotion to false values. Yet from the play as a whole emerges a clear moral voice, the result of all the voices working against each other.31 Flamineo mistakes temptingly radiant worldly goods for the good that he should seek, an error of spiritual perception in which he joins many of the other people of his world. As he says, "O Gold, what a God art thou! and ö man, what a devill art thou to be tempted by that cursed Minerall! . . . theres nothing 31

See James Smith, "The Tragedy of Blood", Scrutiny, V m (1939), 270; Bogard, on the other hand, feels that the opposed voices simply nullify each other: pp. 130-131.

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so holie but mony will corrupt and putrifie it" (Ill.iii. 19-21, 24). In his war against mankind, the devil is ubiquitous and Protean, assuming whatever shape the occasion demands, now tempting with dazzling riches, now with beautiful women, now with glorious false doctrines.82 Traditionally the forms in which he tempts man are three - the World, the Flesh, and the Devil - and we must understand the tradition surrounding these in order to see the structure and meaning of Webster's play.83 The murderous Lodovico, himself a white devil who has "to[o] good a face to be a hang-man" (V.vi.212), opens the action of the play with a dramatic outburst against his suffering in the world: "Banisht!" He follows this by cursing the traditional personification of the power that governs wordly rewards and punishments, the goddess Fortune: H a , H a , ö Democritus thy G o d s That governe the w h o l e world! Courtly reward A n d punishment. Fortun's a right whore. If she give ought, she deales it in smal percels, That she m a y take away all at o n e swope. This tis to h a v e great enemies, G o d quite them: Y o u r w o o l f e no longer seemes to be a w o o l f e T h e n w h e n shees hungry. (I.i. 2-9)

The terms of this tirade are extremely significant, particularly in their Roman setting. The Latin for she-wolf, lupa, also means whore and devil. In a single stroke Webster brings together his wolvish great men and his whores as devils, white devils drawing men to evil.34 By introducing the World as a whore destroying 32

See Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night, ed. cit., I, 349; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621), ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York, 1929), p. 968; and cf. C. Grant Loomis, White Magic: An Introduction to the Folklore of Christian Legend (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), pp. 74-75. 33 G. Wilson Knight thinks Webster is also tied to the "medieval and Christian" tradition in his use of charnel imagery: The Burning Oracle (New York, 1939), p. 22. 34 Compare IV.Ü.92-93: "Woman to man/ Is either a God or a wolfe"; and the "character" called "A Jesuite", probably written by Webster: a Jesuit "Is a larger Spoone for a Traytor to feede with the Divell, then any other Order: unclaspe him, and hee's a gray Woolfe, with a golden Starre in the fore-head: so superstitiously he followes the Pope, that he forsakes

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Lodovico, Webster parallels it with the grand whores introduced in scenes two and three, the Flesh in Vittoria Corombona, "the famous Venetian Curtizan", and the Devil in the Whore of Babylon, represented by Monticelso and the idolatrous Isabella. There are many parallels between these first three scenes of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, and the fact that Webster was concerned to establish the pattern shows that it was important to him. The opening "Banisht!" of scene one is ironically paralleled in the differently intended "Quite lost" with which Brachiano begins the real action of scene two. And the underlying action of the three scenes is the same: the characters are all becoming lost from their wonted place in the world. Lodovico is banished, Camillo is separated from Vittoria, and Isabella is separated from Brachiano. Moreover, the separations are like banishment: Camillo locks himself in a room away from his wife, and Isabella retires from Rome to Padua. The parallel between Camillo and Isabella is especially striking since they are both led to take upon themselves the separation desired by their spouses. Also, the lecture delivered to Lodovico by Antonelli and Gasparo in the first scene is paralleled and even echoed in the tandem assault on Brachiano by Monticelso and Francisco in the third scene (c/. I.i. 12-30 and II.i.27-52). This triad of World, Flesh, and Devil is a product of the traditional Christian enmity to worldly life, which has its roots in the Bible and its pallid flowers in the medieval ars moriendi and dance macabre. The theme is ever the same, whether in medieval religious art, drama, or preaching: the allurements of worldly and fleshly pleasures are false appearances, white devils; if a man takes those appearances for realities, neglecting the meaning of death and the life of the spirit, he falls prey to Satan and his kingdom. In the Castle of Perseverance, one of the earliest morality plays, the World, the Flesh, and the Devil appear in all their power. The prologue tells us of the human condition, besieged by these three enemies as the sum of the Christ . . . ", Works, IV, 42. Price, p. 721, notes that Fortune is introduced in an image of false-seeming; and Baldini discusses the images of whore and wolf, but along lines different from my discussion: pp. 63-67.

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35

Seven Deadly Sins, and a little later Mundus opens the play proper, speaking from the eminence of a high throne: Worthy wytis, in al J?is werd wyde, Be wylde wode wonys, & every weye-went, Precyous in prise, prekyd in pride, J)orwe j?is propyr pleyn place, in pes be pe bent! Buske J?ou, bolde bacheler«, under my baner to a-byde, Where bryth basnet is be bateryd, & backys ar schent, pe, syrys semly, all same syttyth on syde, For, bothe be see & be londe, my sondi'j I have sent; al pe werld my« nam[e] is ment, al a-bowtyn my bane is blowe, In every cost I am knowe, I do men rawyn o n ryche rowe tyl pei be dyth to dethys dent. (11. 157-169)

(wytis - wights; werd - world; wode - wild; wonys - dwellings; weye-went - crossroad or road-turn; bent - knitted, tied; buske - prepare; basnetis - helmets; schent - injured; rawyn - ravin; dent - blow.)36 In the morality tradition of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil there is never an effort to minimize the magnificence, the radiance of man's Adversary. Satan and his henchmen, the Vices, are always the most exciting characters in morality plays, as they are in The White Devil and in Paradise Lost. The Vices have brilliantly ironic wit, furious life, and insight into human frailty and folly, and the devils have at least a touch of tragic grandeur in their nature as fallen angels. As with Mundus in the passage just quoted, they regularly are given the most resounding verse the poet can muster. But all this must not confuse our moral perspective: the author gives the devil his due, nevertheless knowing him all the while for the devil: "this enemy is alwayes greatly to be feared, yet is he never so much to be feared. . . . as when he transfigureth himselfe into an Angell of light".37 The » Ed. F. J. Furnivall and Alfred W. Pollard, EETS, extra series, XCI (London, 1904), lines 28-39. " Ibid., gathered from the glossary. S7 Viret, p. B2r.

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exaltation of World, Flesh, and Devil is necessary for the artistic and moral purpose of de contemptu mundi literature: the grandeur of the world, the radiance of beauty, and the excitement of evil must be shown in all their power to explain man's yielding to their blandishments and to add glory to the achievement of overcoming them. Who would care whether a man had the good sense to reject an evil ugly woman, or had the meager strength needed to defeat a feeble enemy? If we are to turn away from the world, let it be something to turn away from, as any man's experience shows it to be; the world is false, not with respect to us, but with respect to eternity and the grave. Ubi sunt? where are the glories of the world after the passage of time and the coming of death? This is the great refrain. It is in something of this spirit that Webster maintains his paradox of white and devil, glory and glow-worm, radiance and sepulcher. Vittoria, Brachiano, and the rest are exciting and seemingly vital people, but there is no moral value, no value for life, in any of the glorious light that may seem to come from them; all they do and are is really incompatible with life, is but a dark doorway to despair and death. The role of the Vice in morality plays particularly illuminates the character of Flamineo: T h e Vice, f o r the purpose of corrupting M a n c o m e s between M a n and the G o o d . H e slanders the G o o d , ingratiates himself with M a n and entices h i m into a life of pleasure and sin, in which he also takes an active part. 38

The Vice was above all a white devil proffering his evil as a Virtue in order to trick men, and Flamineo says that his own "varying of shapes" includes the ability to "Come in with a dried sentence, stuft with sage" (IV.ii.244-245). 39 This morality pattern had great potential for tragedy, and its peculiar use of farce to 18

Lysander W. Cushman, The Devil and the Vice in the English Dramatic Literature Before Shakespeare (Halle, 1900), p. 72. Especially see Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York, 1958), pp. 96-205. 39 Compare Viret on "Libertine Courtiers": they will be "the first that shall make court to the Gospell, and will bee come fayre whyte, and familiar Divels, amongst the very angels", p. D 7 v.

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deepen significance was to have a shaping influence on Elizabethan drama. Willard Farnham writes of the function of comedy and physical horror in Elizabethan tragedy that both may serve certain profound purposes which have their inception in the very beginnings of Gothic tragedy. The one no less than the other may give a shock to the easy pretentiousness of man, raise his serious aspiration into high light through contrast, and bring him to the truly tragic q u a l m . . . . The quickly popular theme of the corruption of Mankind by the minor and less heroic forces of evil — by the Vices . . . - provides low comedy that has truly tragic overtones. The Vices are largely human in character and they tend more and more to represent a kind of gross humanity rather than a spiritual force warring against good. In them man can often see his own flesh uninformed by soul, amoral rather than immoral, amiably mischievous rather than fearsomely vicious, without reason yet somehow comically shrewd, the clownish part of him that gets in his way and takes him down when he tries to be his nobler self. 40

In the Elizabethan period some of the greatest plays grew out of the author's giving a touch of the Vice to tragic human figures. In major plays written before The White Devil this can be seen especially well in Shakespeare's Richard III, Hamlet, 41 and lago, 42 and in Vindici of the anonymous Revenger's Tragedy.*3 Indeed, Othello might aptly be titled The White Devil: Othello is black, and so is imputed to be devilish by his enemies though he is not - appearances deceive. White lago uses false appearances to make Othello think the fair, white, innocent-seeming Desdemona is really black at heart. He dupes Othello into mistaking her moral nature for that of the real white devil, "Bianca" the whore, and Othello finally calls Desdemona a "fair devil" (III.iii.478). In describing his actions that seem friendly to Othello and Cassio, lago refers to the traditional role of the Vice in lines that might well serve as an epigraph for The White Devil: 40

Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage oj Elizabethan Tragedy (Berkeley, 1936), pp. 432-434. 41 Sidney Thomas, The Antic Hamlet and Richard III (New York, 1943). 42 Spivack, especially pp. 3-27, 415-453. 45 L. G. Salingar, " 'The Revenger's Tragedy' and the Morality Tradition", Scrutiny, VI (1938), 402-424. See also my A Study of Cyril Tourneur (Philadelphia, 1964), pp. 231 ff.

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. . . Divinity of hell! When devils will the blackest sins put on, They do suggest at first with heavenly shows, As I do now.... (Il.iii. 356-359)44 Othello, The Revenger's Tragedy, and The White Devil are close to the morality tradition in essential ways, but they mightily transcend it in one crucial respect. In the moralities the line between good and evil is always very clear. Mankind may be suspended between them, but the good angel is always entirely "good" and the bad one "bad". Flamineo as a Vice could tempt men and he could join in their sins with them, but he could never in his turn be tempted by them, and his experience could never affect his character. In The White Devil, as in Othello, all men are capable of being devils and of being the victims of devils - others or themselves. Flamineo may be like Satan in the Garden of Eden, tempting Brachiano and Vittoria to sin, but Brachiano is equally tempting him with promises of Wordly advancement. Likewise Brachiano's World tempts Vittoria as much as her Flesh tempts him. And the moral situation is enriched further by the characters' self-deception, their perversion of good into evil. Moral simplicity gives way to moral complexity, and the audience, instead of being allowed to watch an entertaining sermon, is forced to sharpen its awareness of the moral and emotional complexity of life. Although the World, the Flesh, and the Devil are three in appearance, they are one in reality, united in the figure of the whore. Thus Monticelso's character of a whore, aimed at Vittoria, strikes at least as hard at the "right whore" Fortune and the bells and the penances for sin of his own Whore of Babylon.45 The whore is the grand embodiment of the white devil because 44

All quotations of Shakespeare are from the edition of George Lyman Kittredge, The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Boston, 1936). 45 On this last point see H. Bruce Franklin, "The Trial Scene of Webster's The White Devil Examined in Terms of Renaissance Rhetoric", SEL, Vol. I, No. 2 (1961), p. 42. Compare Wadsworth, White Devil, pp. 379380, who argues that Monticelso's concern about her falseness suggests a personal obsession and is therefore self-revealing.

'THE WHITE DEVIL'

53

hers is the "dissembling trade" notorious for face-painting (IV.ii.96). The Latin "meretricius" means "of a prostitute", and has come to mean "using false allurements to attract".46 The phrase "white devil" itself has been found in two passages in Elizabethan writings where it literally refers to whores using false allurements.47 The moral satirist Richard Brathwaite, in his A Strappado for the Devil (London, 1615), gives whores a fine tongue-lashing in language pointing ever and again to the white devil in its imagery of false holiness, and especially its angels of false light and whited sepulchers. His term for whore is analogous to "white devil"; he titles one poem "An Epigram called the Civil Devil": T h e i r p a i n t e d V i z a r d s c o v e r n a k e d sinne, W h i c h s e e m i n g f a i r e , a r e ever f o u l e w i t h i n . A w h i t e n wall, a r o t t e n o d i o u s t o m b e , T h a t p r o s t i t u t e s h e r selfe to all t h a t c o m e . 4 8

A whore is a "Saint-like Devill",49 like "painted Sodom-apples faire to th'eye,/ But being tutcht they perish instantly".50 The whore is a saintly-seeming white devil even when the title of a poem does not insist on this particular aspect of her nature, as in Brathwaite's "A Satire called the Coniborrowe": N o w in t h e n a m e of f a t e w h a t Saint is she, T h a t k e e p e s a s h o p of p u b l i c k e B r o t h e l r i e ?

46

See Dekker, The Second Part of The Honest Whore, IV.i.262-271, for a link between charm, harlots, and "Meretrix". In The Honest Whore, Dekker and Middleton had written of the whore as the epitome of white devilishness: "a mingled harlot,/ Is true in nothing but in being false" (II.i.314-315). 47 See the commentary on the title of the play in Lucas, Works, I; and Dent, pp. 69-70. Especially significant is Robert Burton's use of the term in the Anatomy, ed. cit., p. 717: "These white Devils have their Panders, Bawds, and Factors, in every place, to seek about and bring in customers, to tempt and way-lay novices, and silly travellers. . . . These are the . . . glew or lime with which the wings of the mind once taken cannot fly away; the Devil's ministers to allure." 4e Ed. Rev. J. W. Ebsworth (Boston, Lincolnshire, 1878), p. 42. 49 Ibid. 50 In "The Author's Moral to his Civil Devif', ed. cit., p. 48.

54

'THE W H I T E D E V I L '

This Saint was sent from th' fiery Regiment. A Sodome-apple,. .. Pritty-fac'd divell of a ginger pace, Grace-lesse in all save that her name is Grace,51 A rotten Tombe, a Basaliske, a Punke. For tell me whore? what bewty's in thee showne, Or moving part that thou canst say's thine owne? The blush that's on thy cheeke I know is made By'th Painters hand, and not by nature laid. 52 The three images that continually recur are Sodom-apples, angels of false light, and whited sepulchers. Webster's Monticelso uses the first of these images against Vittoria in the arraignment scene: Oh your trade instructs your language! You see my Lords what goodly fruict she seemes, Yet like those apples travellers report To grow where Sodom and Gomora stood, I will but touch her and you straight shall see Sheele fall to soote and ashes. (IILii. 65-70) Her trade instructs her language - she dissembles, he means: it is obvious that whore is proverbial for dissembler. Whore as angel of false light is not uncommon in Elizabethan literature. Witness, for example, the language in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors when the courtesan enters to Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse: s. ANT. s. DRO. s. ANT. s. DRO.

Sathan, avoid! I charge thee tempt me not. Master, is this Mistress Sathan? It is the devil. Nay, she is worse, she is the devil's dam! And here she comes in the habit of a light wench; and thereof comes that the wenches say 'God damn me!' That's as much as to say, 'God make me a light wench!' It is written, 'They appear to men like angels of light'. Light is an effect of fire, and fire will burn; ergo, light wenches will burn. (IV.iii. 48-58)

si Ed. cit., p. 150. 52 Ibid., p. 153.

' t h e w h i t e devil'

55

The most common and most meaningful image used to characterize whores as white devils is the whited sepulcher. It is evidence of the survival of the charnel-house asceticism of the Middle Ages into the Renaissance that it was still proverbial in Elizabethan times that women, let alone whores, are whited sepulchers.53 In most of the passages Tilley cites in his dictionary of proverbs, the point is that physical beauty may disguise evil, as it does for a whore: Hermyns have faire skinnes, but fowle livers; Sepulchres fresh colours, but rotten bones; women faire faces, but false heartes.54 The fading apples of Tantalus, have a gallant shew, but if they be toucht, they turne to Ashes: so a faire face may have a foule minde: sweete words, a sower heart: yea rotten bones out of a paynted Sepulchre: for al is not gold that glysters.55 A faire woman with foule conditions, is like a sumptuous sepulcher full of rotten bones.56 Shee is as harlots, faire, like guilded tombs Goodly without; within all rottennes: shee's like a painted fire upon a hill, set to allure the frost-nipt passengers, And starve them after hope: she is indeede As all such strumpets are, Angell in shew, Divell in heart.57 A few passages will illustrate how easily this imagery of painting, of Sodom-apple, and of whited sepulcher can slide over from whores to preachments against the worldly and fleshly life in general. Burton speaks against ladies' face-painting and artifice in clothes and ornaments: Why do they glory in their jewels... or exult and triumph in the 53

Tilley, item S 225. John Lyly, Campaspe (London, 1584), in The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond (Oxford, 1902), II. These lines are II.ii.55-57. 55 Robert Greene, Mamillia (London, 1583), in The Life and Works of Robert Greene, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London, 1881-1886), II, 26. 58 John Bodenham, Politeuphuia, 2nd ed. (London, 1598), p. 26v. 57 Henry Chettle, The Tragedy of Hoffman (London, 1631), in Malone Society Reprints, ed. Harold Jenkins and Charles Sisson (Oxford, 1950), lines 823-829. 54

56

'the white devil'

beauty of clothes? why is all this cost? to incite men the sooner to burning lust. They pretend decency and ornament; but let them take heed, lest, while they set out their bodies, they do not damn their souls; 'tis Bernard's counsel: shine in jewels, stink in conditions; have purple robes, and a torn conscience.... And let Maids beware, as Cyprian adviseth, lest, while they wander too loosely abroad, they lose not their virginities: and, like Egyptian Temples, seem fair without, but prove rotten carkasses within.58 To the Elizabethan contemplating life by the medieval light of death - whether he be dramatist, poet, or preacher - all flesh, however beautiful, is only a mask hiding the reality of the skull beneath: .. . whats beautie but a coarse? What but faire sand-dust are earths purest formes: Queenes bodies are but trunckes to put in wormes.59 The graphic style of John Donne, who knew "ill spirits walk in white",60 can rival the medieval sermonizer's charnel. The life of the flesh is false: The state of a body, in the dissolution of the grave, no pencil can present to us. Between that excrementall jelly that thy body is made of at first, and that jelly which thy body dissolves to at last; there is not so noysome, so putrid a thing in nature. This skinne, (this outward beauty) this body, (this whole constitution) must be destroy'd, says Job, in the next place.61 The parallel of World as whore, Flesh as whore, and Devil of 58

A natomy, ed. cit., p. 692. Dekker and Middleton, The Honest Whore, I.i.55-57. 60 Elegy XIX, "Going to Bed", line 22, in The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson (London, 1912), I, 120. S1 From a sermon preached at Lincoln's Inn, probably during Easter Term, 1620, in The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley, 1953-1962), III, 105. The basic metaphor of Donne's "Anatomy of the World - The first Anniversary" (1611) is that since the death of Elizabeth Drury the world is a rotting corpse, and he follows this up in "Of the Progress of the Soul - The second Anniversary" (1612) with the exhortation to "Forget this rotten world" (1. 49, ed. cit., I). The spiritual progress of the soul still requires as its first two steps the medieval pattern of a proper contempt for the world and a contemplation of death. Earth is "our prisons prison" in this poem (1. 249, ed. cit., I). This is also the theme of Donne's last sermon, "Death's Duel", in which death is a deliverance from the evil world (ed. cit., X, 229-248). 59

'the white devil'

57

Romanism as whore that Webster introduces in the first three scene of The White Devil should have been recognized by his audience, for they were used to thinking of all three in this way. And they knew them all for whores because they thought of them as meretricious, as white devils using whitewash to beautify rotten sepulchers. The true church is of course the bride of Christ, and so a false church must be a whore. Thomas Adams states the Protestant view in his sermon "Majesty in Misery. Or, the Power of Christ Even Dying": Christ his Spouse must not flaunt it like an harlot, but be soberly attired like a grave matron.. . . This condemnes the Church of Rome for a glorious Harlot, because shee loades her selfe with such a heape of gawdie Ceremonies.62 One source for much of the treatment of Rome as a whore is Spenser's Faerie Queene. In Book I, Archimago, hypocritical Catholic magician and master of false shapes, fashions a devil as a succuba in the image of Una, the true religion, in order to deceive the Red Cross Knight. Archimago, Who all this while with charmes and hidden artes, Had made a Lady of that other Spright, And fram'd of liquid ayre her tender partes So lively, and so like in all mens sight, That weaker sence it could have ravisht quight: The maker selfe for all his wondrous witt, Was nigh beguiled with so goodly sight: Her all in white he clad, and over it Cast a blacke stole, most like to seeme for Una fit.«3 Throughout the Elizabethan era the theme of the falseness of worldly life touched a responsive chord, moving writers to use their most richly figurative language. The court of Elizabeth, and much more the court of James I, seemed to be gilded evils, and the moral voices of satirist and preacher attacked their falseness and corruption. In these attacks on the World the 62

(London, 1618), ed. cit., p. 762. (London, 1590), The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles G. Osgood, and Frederick M. Padelford (Bait., 1932), Vol. I; I.l.xlv. Una is wearing black in mourning for her parents' loss of their kingdom. 63

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figures of speech shift back and forth from whore to facepainting and to whited sepulcher: the World is a great white devil. In "The Ruins of Time" Spenser writes: Ο trustlesse state of miserable men, That builde your blis on hope of earthly thing, And vainly thinke your selves hälfe happie then, When painted faces with smooth flattering Doo fawne on you, and your wide praises sing, And when the courting masker louteth lowe, Him true in heart and trustie to you trow. All is but fained, and with oaker dide, And everie shower will wash and wipe away, All things doo change that under heaven abide, And after death all friendship doth decaie. Therefore what ever man bearst worldlie sway, Living, on God, and on thy selfe relie; For when thou diest, all shall with thee die.64 The satirist Thomas Nashe hopes that Aretine will repaire his whip, and use it against our English Peacockes, that painting themselves with church spoils, like mightie mens sepulchers, have nothing but Atheisme, schisme, hypocrisie, & vainglory, like rotten bones lie lurking within them. Ο how my soule abhors these buckram giants, that having an outwarde face of honor set uppon them by flatterers and parasites, have their inward thoughtes stuft with strawe and feathers, if they were narrowelie sifted.65 Adams preaches in "The Cosmopolite: or, World's Favourite", that the "cares of the world" are the devils three-wing'd arrow, (wealth, pride, voluptuousnesse) whereby hee nailes the very heart fast to the earth. It is his talent of lead, which he hangs on the feete of the soule, the affections; that keepes her from mounting up into heaven: with the painted beauty of this filthy Harlot he bewitcheth their mindes, steales their desires from Christ, and sends them a whoring to the hote Stewes of hell.66 64

(London, 1591), ed. cit., The Minor Poems, II, 42. See also the episode of Mammon in the Faerie Queene, II, 7, ed. cit., II. 65 In Pierce Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (London, 1592), ed. cit., I, 242. 66 (London, 1618), ed. cit., p. 674.

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59

And in "The Spiritual Navigator Bound for the Holy Land" the world's beauty is spoiled by a leprous whiteness: The world is a Sea, and in this Sea, is plaine-dealing drowned. There is foming luxury in this Sea: a corrupt and stinking froth, which the world casts up. The steame of lust in this mare mortuum fumes perpetually; poysons the ayre we breathe; and like a thicke fogge, riseth up to heaven, as if it would exhale vengeance from above the clouds. This spumy fome is on the surface of the world, and runs like a white leprosie over the body of it. Commend the world, ye affecters affected of it: there is a fome that spoyles the beauty. . .. The world you say, is spaciosus, speciosus; beautifull, bountifull; rich, delightful: But it is leprous.61 The covetous man confesses God his master but the world his Mistrisse. If you aske him, why hee doth not in charitable deeds obey his Master; he answers, his Mistrisse will not let him. Would the yong man repent? His harlot steps forth, and . . . stayes his course.68 Rub your eyes, and looke on this world better: it hath but a surphul'd cheeke, a colour'd beauty; which God shall one day scowre off with a floud of fire.89 Donne sums everything up in a few lines of one of his Satires: Know thy foes: the foule Devill (whom thou Strivest to please,) for hate, not love, would allow Thee faine, his whole Realme to be quit; and as The worlds all parts wither away and passe, So the worlds selfe, thy other lov'd foe, is In her decrepit wayne, and thou loving this, Dost love a withered and worne strumpet; last, Flesh (it selfes death) and joyes which flesh can taste, Thou lovest; and thy faire goodly soule, which doth Give this flesh power to taste joy, thou dost loath.70 Webster himself writes of false worldly pleasure as a whore, a white devil, in A Monumental Column, his funeral elegy on the death of Prince Henry. God sent true Pleasure from heaven into «

(London, 1615), ed. cit., p. 397. Ibid., p. 403. ·» Ibid., p. 407. 70 "Satire III", lines 33-42, in Poems, ed. cit., I, 155-156. 88

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the world for a time, then recalled her to His side. Worldly Sorrow returned from banishment, put on a robe Pleasure had left behind by mistake, and began to masquerade as Pleasure: . . . to adde a grace, To the deformity of her wrinkled face, An old Court Lady, out of meere compassion, N o w paints it o're or puts it into fashion — When straight from Country, Citty, and from Court, Both without wit or number there resort Many to this imposter — all adore Her haggish false-hood, Userers from their store Supply her and are cosened, Citizens buy Her forged titles, riot and ruine flye, Spreading their poison universally. Nor are the bosomes of great Statesmen free From her intelligence, who let's them see Themselves and fortunes in false perspectives; Some landed Heires consort her with the[ir] wives, Who being a baud corrupts their all-spent oathes — They have entertain'd the divill in Pleasures cloaths. And since this cursed maske, which to our cost Lasts day and night, we have entirely lost Pleasure, who from heaven wils us be advis'd, That our false Pleasure is but Care disguis'd. (11. 172-192)

Among the allegorical figures of the World who are whores, the goddess Fortuna is the most common. Every man in the audience recognized this first white devil the instant Lodovico cried out against her as a "right whore" in line four of scene one. Howard R. Patch tells us that from her beginnings in Roman times Fortuna was notoriously meretrix, as became her role as the fickle goddess of chance.71 Among the epithets applied to her were double, fallace, iniqua, perfida, perversa, and variable. At best she was belle, benigna, or bona — she was never regarded as stable, true, or certain.72 In pictures she sometimes has two faces, "one of which may be black, the other white".73 "She has an un71

The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), pp. 11-12, 56-57. 72 Ibid., p. 38. 73 Ibid., p. 43.

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61

pleasant reputation for being unclean, with a more or less constant reminiscence of the 'whited sepulchre'." 74 So in The Book of the Duchess Chaucer speaks of Fortune, That baggeth foule and loketh faire, The dispitouse debonaire, That skorneth many a creature! An ydole of fals portrayture Ys she, for she wol sone wrien; She is the monstres hed ywrien, As fylthe over-ystrawed with floures.75 (baggen - squint; wrien - betray; ywrien - hidden.) And in "Fortune: Balades de Visage sanz Peinture", in which it is made clear that Fortune is the World and the Flesh, Chaucer writes of . . . the deceit of hir colour, And that hir moste worshipe is to lye. I knowe hir eek a fals dissimulour; For fynally, Fortune, I thee defye!76 Later on, in Webster's time, the idea that Fortune is a whore was a commonplace, and it is easy to find the goddess described as a white devil. One treatment of the theme is particularly important for the study of Webster because it was written by his collaborator, Thomas Dekker. Old Fortunatas, like Dekker's Whore of Babylon, is a morality play full of dazzling white devils.77 In the first scene gorgeous Fortune uses chained ex-kings as stepstools to ascend her throne, Tamburlaine style. These kings complain of her as a harlot in language that defines her role in the play as in the life of man. They remember that they have been her favorites, And sometimes beene thy minions, when thy fingers Weav'd wanton love-nets in our curled hayre, And with sweete jugling kisses warm'd our cheekes. (I.i. 83-85) 74

Ibid., p. 46. 75 The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 273, lines 623-629. 78 Ibid., p. 535, lines 21-24. 77 (London, 1600), ed. cit.. Vol. I.

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One ex-king cries out: Thou painted strumpet, that with honied smiles, Openest the gates of heaven and criest, Come in, Whose glories being seene, thou with one frowne, (In pride) lower then hell tumblest us downe. (I.i. 134-137) After this prologue, Old Fortunatas is given the choice of long life, health, strength, beauty, riches, or wisdom. To exemplify how easily the man who rejects wisdom may be deceived by appearances, Dekker makes Fortunatas choose riches over beauty with an ingenious non-sequitur: The fairest cheeke hath oftentimes a soule Leaprous as sinne it selfe; then hell more foule. But A maske of Gold hides all deformities. (I.i. 277-278, 291) In scene 3 Dekker commences a morality conflict between Virtue and Vice, in the course of which we see Vice as a white devil and Fortune's preference for her: Enter Vice. . . . She and others wearing gilded visards, and attirde like devils. Fortune contrasts the radiant Vice with the poorly clothed Virtue: "this bright divell and that poore Saint" (1. 17). Fortune tells Virtue she is a fool not to make herself pretty in order to lure mankind (1. 46), and Virtue replies that she "abhorres to weare a borrowed face" (1. 74). A t this Fortune loses patience with Virtue and turns to Vice, who invites her to observe what will ensue: VICE.

Stay, Fortune, whilst within this Grove we dwel, If my Angelicall and Saint-like forme Can win some amorous foole to wanton here. (U. 89-91)

Later on, Andelocia, son of Fortunatas, has been hurt in Vice's game, tempted by the World, the Flesh, and the Devil:

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63

Ο fingers, were you upright Justices, You would teare out mine eyes: had not they gazde On the fraile colour of a painted cheeke, None had betraid me: henceforth ile defie All beautie.... Ο women, wherefore are you borne mens woe, Why are your faces fram'd Angelicall? Your hearts of spunges, soft and smooth in shew, But toucht, with poyson they doe over-flow. (IH.i. 467-471, 474-477)

Andelocia dies on the refrain of de contemptu mundi: "Who

builds his heaven on earth, is sure of hell" (V.ii.180). At the end of the play Virtue and "Shadow" point the traditional moral: [VERTUE.]

SHAD. VERTUE.

Looke but on Fortunatas and his sonnes: Of all the welth those gallants did possesse, Onely poore Shaddow is left comfortlesse, Their glorye's faded and their golden pride. Only poore Shadow tels how poore they died. All that they had, or mortall men can have, Sends onely but a Shaddow from the grave. Vertue alone lives still.. . (V.ii. 326-333)

This, then, is the tradition Webster evokes with his title, The White Devil, these the associations in image, action, and char-

acter that people brought with them to see or to read his play. And Webster is careful not to disappoint his audience's expectations. He portrays the devil in all his shapes and colors - a white devil or a black of one sort or another lurks in nearly every line of every scene. We have already looked at Monticelso and the religious white devils and at Flamineo as a white devil, and we have seen the first pattern of white devils that Webster creates, the triple parallel of World, Flesh, and Devil in the first three scenes. We are now ready to consider Vittoria as a white devil, and then to study the structure of the rest of the play and the significance of Vittoria's relation to that structure.

IV VITTORIA AS A WHITE DEVIL

When people talk about The White Devil today, they generally assume that the title refers chiefly to Vittoria Corombona, and they are right if they remember to see her as the epitome of all the other white devils of the play: as the others are figuratively whores, she is the devil of the Flesh in the flesh. She draws to herself all their glory and all their evil. To an extent, they may be judged by her and she by them. If you would know what it means to say that the World, Fortune, and the Roman Catholic Church are white devils, you may look to Vittoria for the answer. She is splendid. Beside her, the glories of the World and its religions are mere glow-worms; as Webster shadows them, they deceive few people outside the world of the play. But as they are dimmed, Vittoria shines the brighter, and she, who takes in only one man in the world of the play, is the grand trapdoor to hell for us outside the play, as many a critic she has dropped into the fire testifies. This is the master stroke in Webster's construction of the play: in reality Vittoria epitomizes the evil of all the other white devils, but Webster lets their black show through more obviously, making Vittoria by contrast seem whiter. As we look about desperately for someone good to fasten on, someone we can sympathize with and perhaps try to justify, we are repelled from all else into Vittoria's arms. That is precisely where Webster wants us, not that he values Vittoria's course of action, but that he may give us a direct experience of the terrible power of the white devil. Since F. L. Lucas wrote the introduction to his edition of

VITTORIA AS A WHITE DEVIL

65

1

Webster's works, most critics have echoed him, contending that Webster values the "egoistic strength and personal integrity" of evil people,2 that the question of good and evil was (in terms of his instinctive emotions) irrelevant beside his love of resolution,3 that his chief command is to be self-consistent, whether in evil or in good.4 The critics have said this convinced that Vittoria shows resolution, "nobility and . . . courage, even if it be Satanic",5 and a true lover's devotion to Brachiano.® And these critics have also been convinced for the most part that the phrase "white devil" is a true paradox, that among other things it implies that there is some goodness in the greatest evil.7 In this view Willard Farnham agrees with Lucas, speaking of Vittoria as presenting the "paradox of deeply flawed nobility" necessary for a tragic protagonist.8 But it is only from afar that "white devil" can imply "deeply flawed nobility". When a potential paradox is found to have proverbial meanings, as white devil means hypocrite and whore, 1

Works, I, 93-99. Richard A. Bodtke, Tragedy and the Jacobean Temper: A Critical Study of John Webster, a 1957 Columbia University dissertation, pp. 13, 436-439. 3 Una Ellis-Fermor, The Jacobean Drama, revised ed. (London, 1958), pp. 184-186. 4 Ian Jack, "The Case of John Webster", Scrutiny, XVI (1949), 41; Bogard, pp. 40-43, 145; cf. G. Wilson Knight, The Golden Labyrinth: A Study of British Drama (London, 1962), p. 105; Wadsworth, White Devil, p. 152; Robert Freeman Whitman, The Opinion of Wisdom: Montaigne and John Webster, a 1955 Harvard University dissertation, pp. 120, 157; George P. V. Akrigg, The Anatomy of Websterian Tragedy, a 1944 University of California dissertation, pp. 45-49; Anderson, pp. 237, 302-303; B. J. Layman, "The Equilibrium of Opposites in The White Devil·. A Reinterpretation", PMLA, LXXIV (1959), 336-347; Ian Scott-Kilvert, John Webster (London, 1964), pp. 15-16; and Moore, p. 162. Compare Clifford Leech, John Webster: A Critical Study (London, 1951), p. 89, who thinks this is the unconscious meaning of Webster's work. 5 Ellis-Fermor, p. 184. β Walter Wilson Greg, "Webster's 'White Devil' ", MLQ, III (1900), 119; Lucas, Works, I, 96; Bogard, p. 60; Willard Farnham, Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier (Berkeley, 1950), pp. 29-30. Compare the more complex view of Roma Gill in " 'Quaintly Done': a reading of 'The White Devil'", E&S, XIX (1966), 41-59. 7 Akrigg, p. 204; Layman, pp. 336-347. 8 Tragic Frontier, p. 27. 2

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the potential paradoxical tension is resolved. We must look at The White Devil near, by the light of the tradition of its own time, to see that it implies not "deeply flawed nobility" but evil made the more dangerous and terrible because so seemingly vital, so exciting, and so attractive. If Webster had wanted to reject the accepted meaning of the term and recreate it to show that there is something of value for life in the greatest evil, he might have done so, but he has not. Looked to near, as the play insists we must, the glories of Vittoria's seeming resolution, her seeming consistency and strength of character, her seeming nobility, and her seeming devotion to Brachiano are all seen to be glow-worms. Yet this is not to deny the validity of the critics' initial response to Vittoria; Webster makes her seem tnese things grandly and gloriously. He has divided feelings about her himself: he is as much attracted to her as we are, and although he does not value her course of action, his imagination is deeply fascinated by her. He uses every device at his command to create the illusion of radiance. He keeps her quiet or off the stage most of the time, so that she is excitingly mysterious.9 When she speaks, it is never in self-analysis: she is given no soliloquies. On the contrary, she is always creating an illusion to hold between herself and those around her. She is ever the consummate actress, and Webster manages things so that instead of condemning her as a liar and hypocrite, we admire her lies and hypocrisies as part of her great performance. We naturally forget that as a great actress creating illusions she is the white devil still. And what is the reality of her glories that shine so bright? In the second scene, where we first meet her, she is yielding to Brachiano. In his construction of the scene, Webster makes use of the tradition of the white devil. First he captivates us with her fair beauty. For a long time he lets us admire her without exposing her inner nature; then, when he does expose her near the end of the scene, it is through the imagery that we have seen defines the white devil, imagery of sepulcher and charnel. At the very beginning of the scene she enters with Camillo, • Gamaliel Bradford, "The Women of Middleton and Webster", X X I X (1921), 24.

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her husband, and greets Brachiano and Flamineo. For only a moment she stands there, lit by torches, then she is gone, and Flamineo sends the torches away, too, so that he and Brachiano are left standing in semi-darkness. She is brilliant, and without her all is dim and foul as Flamineo and Camillo show the audience what a devil her brother is and what an ass her husband is. By the time she re-enters, we are properly impatient for another glimpse of beauty. This time we are allowed to form a strong impression of her appearance, for she stands on the stage through nearly eighty lines of dialogue between Camillo and Flamineo with only four lines of her own, lines in which she tries to hold herself aloof at the same time that she shows her impatience to be rid of Camillo so she can begin her interview with Brachiano. Flamineo meanwhile is amusing himself at revolting length with the task of persuading the impotent but jealous Camillo to lock himself away from Vittoria for the night in order to frustrate herl We enjoy Flamineo's wit, but the length of time he takes leads us to sympathize with Vittoria's desire to get on with it. And we certainly sympathize with her loathing of Camillo and her desire to be rid of him. Moreover, we are almost certain to overlook the real meaning of Camillo's loathsomeness. What in the world made Vittoria marry him in the first place? Everything indicates she never loved him, but at this moment the question is not asked, so that we are not forced to form any adverse impression of Vittoria. The reason is not made explicit until her arraignment, when Monticelso tells us that Camillo bought her from her father, receiving no dowry with her (Ill.ii. 243-249). We know from Flamineo that their family is poor, and Vittoria does not deny Monticelso's account of her until he calls her a strumpet, so there is no cause to doubt that her reasons for marrying Camillo were entirely worldly (I.ii.304-312; Ill.ii. 250-253). And now her husband is in debt to Monticelso (Ill.ii. 162-163). How strange that she should fall in love with the rich Duke of Brachiano. Flamineo finally persuades Camillo to lock himself away for the night, and Vittoria yields herself to Brachiano. It is note-

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worthy that the closest she ever comes to saying "I love you" is her first line in this interview, her dissembling, deliberately coy response to his frank avowal of passion: "Sir in the way of pittie/ I wish you hart-hole" (I.ii.198-199). After a few lines comes Brachiano's revealing "What valew is this Jewell?" (I.ii.211). He knows his woman; his appeal to her is to offer a wordly incentive. Her reply confirms him in the belief that she will satisfy his desires if he will improve her fortune: bra.

What valew is this Jewell? vit. Tis the ornament Of a weake fortune. bra. In sooth ile have it; nay I will but change My Jewell for your Jewell, f l a m . Excellent, His Jewell for her Jewell, well put in Duke. brac. Nay let me see you weare it. vit. [Here] sir? brac. Nay lower, you shall weare my Jewell lower. f l a m . That's better, she must weare his Jewell lower. (211-218)

In this passage the significance of the "jewel" shifts quaintly. As Flamineo's "put in" and "lower" make clear, the jewel Vittoria is to give Brachiano is sexual. 10 All through the play after this, imagery of diamonds and crystal is associated with Vittoria, and there is always the question whether she is a true jewel or a counterfeit. This imagery reminds us of the white devil of tradition, the " C a n d i d u s diabolus" whose "white" suggests both the whited sepulcher and the brilliance of starlight or jewels: Satan as an angel of light. In this respect the jewel imagery is related to the imagery of fire and of blazing stars that surround Vittoria enough to justify Muriel West's calling her a "fiery devil" in a study of the possible use of witchchraft symbolism in Webster's plays. 11 Looked to near in the immediate dramatic context, the "Jewell" Vittoria is to give Brachiano is clearly fraudulent. It is 10

The symbolic use of jewels or treasure for feminine honor or the maidenhead is common in Elizabethan literature: see, for instance, Nashe, The Terrors of the Night, ed. cit., I, 380; Dekker, The Honest Whore, ed. cit., V.ii.407-411. " The Devil and John Webster, pp. 30-46. Muriel West relates Webster strictly to witchcraft traditions, and hardly looks at the tradition of the white devil at all. Vittoria, she says, is primarily a black devil, because of such things as her raven black hair.

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not her own jewel that she gives to him, but a jewel that belongs to Camillo. Moreover, she is too eager to exchange her jewel for the paste and clay of the World's jewels to convince us that she is genuine. Under the guise of an illusion, "a foolish idle dreame", Vittoria next suggests to Brachiano that he murder her husband and his wife (I.ii.221-245). The dream is allegorical, so that it appears not to suggest murder but a kind of accidental death for the victims. She and they appear in the dream as themselves, only distorted by Vittoria's perspective, but Brachiano appears as a "Eu" tree rising out of a graveyard where Vittoria says she fears Camillo and Isabella want to bury her alive. All is illusion: the very idea of a dream, the pretense that this was really a dream, and the allegorical and distorted content of the story. In addition, the dream is a tempting illusion, suggesting to Brachiano that felicity with Vittoria will follow the murders (I.ii.249-258). The distortions and the allegory palliate the evil of murder, and so Brachiano can succumb to temptation without facing up to his crime.12 Her "dream" defines Vittoria as the white devil: temptingly painted on the outside, but a charnel within: . . . my husband straight With picax gan to dig, and your fell Dutchesse With shovell, like a fury, voyded out The earth & scattered bones — Lord how me thought I trembled, and yet for all this terror I could not pray. FLAM. N o the divell was in your dreame. VIT. When to my rescue there arose me thought A whirlewind, which let fall a massy arme From that strong plant, And both were strucke dead by that sacred Eu In that base shallow grave that was their due. (I.ii. 235-245)

Vittoria's dream reveals her attitude toward Brachiano: the yew is not entirely a flattering thing to represent him by. She is drawn to it because of its pun on "you", and she pointedly calls it "goodly", "harmelesse", "well-growne", "strong", and even 12

See Muriel C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions, p. 188.

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"sacred", but its traditional use in graveyards justifies Monticelso's later warning to Lodovico, a warning that illuminates the real meaning of Vittoria's dream: . . . like the blacke, and melancholicke Eugh-tree, Do'st thinke to roote thy selfe in dead mens graves, And yet to prosper? (IV.iii. 123-125) Also, the use of its wood for bows led naturally to the idea becoming semi-proverbial of "The Eugh obedient to the benders will", as Spenser writes in a brief catalogue of plants and their traditional attributes. 13 In making Brachiano a yew, Vittoria really proclaims her mastery of him, though she does not seem to do so until we look near. Before we leave the dream of the yew it is worth noting that the play's constantly recurring graveyard imagery quite frequently has the function of defining the reality of the white devil, whose very life is a "blacke charnell", as Flamineo admits at the end (V.vi.270). Thus even before telling about her dream, in the very act of accepting Brachiano as her lover, Vittoria speaks of funerals (I.ii.201). And when Brachiano comes to Francisco after the death of Isabella and pretends to be distracted by grief, this kind of imagery defines his appearance as the whitewash on a sepulcher: Now you and I are friends sir, wee'le shake hands, In a friends grave, together — a fit place, Being the embleme of soft peace, t'attone our hatred. (Ill.ii. 306-308) After the second scene of the play Vittoria does not appear again until her arraignment for adultery with Brachiano and for the murder of Camillo. Here once more Webster uses all his art to make us fall for an illusion, to make us sympathize with her despite the fact that we know she is guilty. First of all he makes us forget her guilt: the scene is a duel between two white devils, and our moral sense is therefore untouched, for justice is on neither side. Vittoria is at least beautiful, and we are drawn to her side by her being the persecuted underdog. There has 13

The Faerie Queene, ed. cit., Vol. I; I.l.ix.4.

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been a great deal of debate among critics about her bearing in this scene. Charles Lamb characterized it as "innocence-resembling boldness", 14 but his phrase has not been accepted by others. William Hazlitt spoke of "her scorn of her accusers and of herself. The sincerity of her sense of guilt triumphs over the hypocrisy of their affected and official contempt for it". 15 Alexander Dyce came nearer the mark than either Lamb or Hazlitt when he wrote that Webster has carefully "discriminated between that simple confidence in their own integrity which the innocent manifest . . ., and that forced and practised presence of mind which the hardened offender exhibits when brought to trial". 10 Dyce went on to contend that Vittoria never once says anything an innocent might have said, but she does contend that she is innocent, and Robert Dent has shown that here and in her scene with Brachiano in the House of Convertites she does say things innocent people said in Webster's sources.17 The important distinction that must be made is between what Vittoria says and the way she says it. She protests that she is innocent of adultery and murder, that "beauty and gay clothes, a merry heart,/ And a good stomacke to [a] feast, are all,/ All the poore crimes" that Monticelso can charge her with (Ill.ii.216-218). We hear her guilt speak in the "practised presence of mind" that gives her the wit to flaunt her beauty and the eloquence to make her lines themselves an expression of that beauty. The sincerity Hazlitt credits her with is the sincerity of a great actress using words artfully to play her scene as well as possible. We admire great acting or we should probably not have come to see the play in the first place, and so once again Webster leads us to sympathize with his white devil. H. Bruce Franklin has examined the arraignment scene in terms of Renaissance rhetoric, showing how Webster draws attention to rhetorical style and then gives Vittoria the victory 14

Speciments of English Dramatic Poets (London, 1813), p. 188. Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (New York, 1845), p. 77. le In the Introduction to The Works of John Webster, revised ed. in 1 vol. (London, 1877), p. xiv. 17 See Dent's commentary on these scenes, pp. 102-115, 122-130. 15

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in her duel with Monticelso chiefly by making her the better rhetorician and greater wit.18 The lawyer begins the prosecution in Latin, and her objection that she understands him but that the audience might not is designed to make the audience sympathize with her. He then attacks her in stilted, Latinate English which, as she says, is "welch to Lattin" (III.ii.42). The lawyer defends his style, accusing Vittoria of mere ignorance of rhetoric, and so drawing attention to its importance in the scene. He is then forced to retire, and Monticelso takes over the attack, but Vittoria has already won a signal victory, and she manages to maintain this advantage for most of the rest of the scene. In his onslaught on her as a whore, Monticelso scores heavily by drawing on the traditional imagery of the white devil, including the comparison of whores to the apples of Sodom and Gomorrah, but he errs in allowing his personal bitterness to be evident, in permitting his attack on whores to taint his own Church as well as Vittoria,19 and in accusing her of being a whore of the common variety, when in reality she is a more dreadful sort. Against his attack Vittoria has no real defense, so she concentrates on throwing accusations back at Monticelso in order to anger him and make him the more bitter. Instead of replying in a formal rhetorical style to match Monticelso's, she uses the plain style during this section of their duel, thus winning more audience sympathy, since, as Franklin notes, this is the style the people in the audience feel they might use. The first part of the duel ends after the character of a whore, for at that point Monticelso stops attacking Vittoria as a whore and begins to attack her as a murderess. Webster confirms our sympathy for Vittoria up to this point in the scene by interjecting remarks by part of the on-stage audience of ambassadors. The English Ambassador can be counted on to express what we are to feel: FR. EMB. Shee hath lived ill. ENG. EMB. Trew, but the Cardinals t o o bitter.

(IH.ii. 110-111) 18 "The Trial Scene of Webster's The White Devil Examined in Terms of Renaissance Rhetoric", SEL, Vol. I, N o . 2 (1961), pp. 35-51. 19 See above, p. 52.

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When the issue turns to murder, the duel is complicated for a time by the intervention first of Francisco and then of Brachiano. During this change of the dramatic pace some of the pressure is taken off Vittoria, and she has a chance to mount a real counterattack. Monticelso blunders by suggesting that she would have worn mourning for her husband if she had not been his murderess, and she wins the initiative from him with the telling reply that her failure to wear mourning is really evidence that she did not know of her husband's death before her arraignment. Having won the advantage, she overwhelms Monticelso with eloquent scorn directed at the injustice of the proceedings. This outburst wins another statement of admiration from the English Ambassador: "Shee hath a brave spirit" (III.ii.144). Monticelso only manages to escape when he thinks to ask a question that draws Brachiano into the debate: Who lodg'd beneath your roofe that fatall night Your husband brake his necke? (ffl.ii. 157-158) In the bitter quarrel between Monticelso and Brachiano that follows we see Monticelso's real objective in the arraignment: he and Francisco agreed in the preceding scene that they lack enough evidence of murder to make their case stick, but Monticelso still hopes to infuriate Vittoria and Brachiano so they will at least discredit and perhaps even destroy themselves by making angry statements. By this time in the scene we might be feeling that Vittoria is holding her own against Monticelso only because it is easy to do, so Webster makes Brachiano blow up to reveal her strength by contrast. Brachiano admits his murderous potential by threatening to kill Monticelso, then storms off, leaving Vittoria to defend herself alone. Francisco and Monticelso realize they have more chance of breaking Vittoria as they have broken Brachiano if they return to the charge of adultery, and the pattern of the scene now reverts to that of the first part, with Monticelso eloquently and bitterly crying "whore!" and Vittoria even more eloquently and indignantly crying back "unjust!" The only difference is that now the situation is more dangerous for Vittoria because Monticelso

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dramatically introduces actual evidence of Brachiano's passion for her, a letter asking her to meet him at a summer-house by the Tiber. But Vittoria is able to overcome this immediately and to turn it back on the Cardinal. The letter, she points out, proves only Brachiano's love, not her consent. And she hastens to add, "Casta est quam nemo rogavit" - she is chaste whom no man tempts (III.ii.208). Now, as Franklin says, this line comes from a passage in Ovid's eighth Elegy in which the bawd Dipsas is trying to persuade a young wife to commit adultery with a wealthy man. As Franklin interprets the line, it is a distinct blunder on Vittoria's part, first in being in Latin, and second in seeming to admit that, since Vittoria has been tempted, she must not be chaste.20 But I do not think this can be the right interpretation of the line, because Monticelso makes no effort to pounce upon it as an admission. In fact, he allows Vittoria to seize and hold the initiative with this speech. The most probable explanation, it seems to me, is that "Casta est quam nemo rogavit", Latin and all, is attributed by Vittoria to Monticelso she hurls it at him to say that such is his reasoning: to prove that a woman has been tempted is to prove her unchaste. Vittoria has won enough of an advantage with this thrust to go on and proclaim her complete innocence and assume the mantle of martyrdom. In this she reaches too far, for she has forgotten that her guilt as an adultress is known to virtually everyone. She has forgotten that she has won till now by refraining from talking about her innocence or guilt. Monticelso lets her put on the mask of innocence, then rips it off at a stroke: "If the devill/ Did ever take good shape behold his picture" (III.ii.224-225). With this the prosecution recaptures the initiative. To keep the advantage on his side, Francisco breaks in with a crucial question, in reply to which Vittoria gives only a very weak answer: FRA. Who brought this letter? VIT. I am not compel'd to tell you. CHI.ii. 227-228) From this moment on Monticelso controls the scene, reciting »

Pp. 48-49.

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Vittoria's history and rising to the powerful emotional climax in which he sentences her to confinement in the House of Convertites. Vittoria continues to cry "unjust!'' whenever there is a break in his attack, and the truth of her charge is evident as Monticelso allows his whiteness to give way to the black devils of wrath and persecution. His wrath may be deliberate, however, for it makes Vittoria finally lose her temper, as Brachiano had done, and expose the black devil hidden behind her artful composure: VIT.

VIT. VIT.

rape, a rape! MON. H O W ? VIT. Yes you have ravisht justice, Forc't her to do your pleasure, MON. fy shee's mad — Dye with th[o]se pils in your most cursed [mawe], Should bring you health, or while you sit a'th Bench, Let your owne spittle choake you. MON. She's turn'd fury. That the last day of judgement may so find you, And leave you the same devill you were before — (Ill.ii. 285-291) A

Vittoria recovers quickly, and Monticelso permits her to have the last eloquent words, contenting himself with having managed to send her off to confinement without any more adverse comments from the ambassadors. It is a mistake to regard the arraignment scene as wholly Vittoria's. True, for the most part she makes the better impression, but there is really a fine balance maintained. Whereas in other scenes of the play Flamineo uses his wit to expose the white devils, in this scene he has hardly a line: his voice is not needed, for here the wit and eloquence of Monticelso and Vittoria expose each other. Vittoria's is the greater achievement, of course. After all, what facts there are all support Monticelso's side, and in order to expose him as an unjust persecutor, she has had to rely entirely on her own wits. Yet her victory is conditional on her defeat - it is the sort of "moral" victory only a loser can afford, entirely a product of the manner of the battle, not of its actual content. In defending an evil cause with wit and eloquence, Vittoria is aligned with one of the traditional characteristics of the white devil as the Vice, Satan's agent in the morality plays who tempts

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man with false appearances. L. W. Cushman writes that the Vice's satiric attack on the Good, allegorically represented as Mercy, Pity, and so forth, often strikes at the words of the Good - ridiculing them as too long, highflown, or Latinate. 21 Vittoria ridicules the lawyer for his Latin, then for his English: LAW. Most literated Judges, please your Lordships, So to connive your Judgements to the view Of this debausht and diversivolent woman Who such a blacke concatenation Of mischiefe hath effected, that to exterpe The memory of't, must be the consummation Of her and her projections — vit. What's all this? LAW. Hould your peace. Exorbitant sinnes must have exulceration. VIT. Surely my Lords this lawier here hath swallowed Some Poticaryes bils, or proclamations. And now the hard and undegestable wordes, Come up like stones wee use give Haukes for phisicke. Why this is welch to Lattin. LAW. My Lords, the woman Know's not her tropes nor figures, nor is perfect In the accademick derivation Of Grammaticall elocution. (Ill.ii. 29-45) Similar to the lawyer's jargon, even to the terrible rhymes, is the long opening speech of Mercy in the morality of Mankind, which concludes thus: From the wyche Gode preserve yow all at the last Jugement, For sekyrly ther xall be a streat examynacyon; The corn xall be savyde, the chaffe xall be brente: I be-sech yow hertyly, have this premedytacyone. Myscheffe replies thus: I be-seche yow hertyly, leve yower calc[ul]acyon! Leve yower chaffe, leve yower corn, leve yower dalyacyon! Yower wytt ys lytyll, yower hede ys mekyll, ye are full of predycacyon! But, ser, I prey this questyon to claryfye.22 21

Pp. 77-78. Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean (Boston, 1897), I, 317.

22

Drama,

ed. John Matthews Manly

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In the course of much witlessly witty clarification, the debate turns explicitly to the question of the proper style of speech, as in Vittoria's arraignment, and throughout the play the Vices, who have nothing real to offer man, try to win him by discrediting his enemy's diction: MERCY.

NEW [GYSE],

Mercy ys my name & my denomynacyon! I conseyve pe have but a lytyll fors in my commenycacyon. Ey, ey, yower body ys full of Englysch Laten! 2 3

Later on Mercy ends a long speech trying to win Mankind from the Vices: My predylecte son, wher be ye? Mankynde, ubi esl MYS[CHEFFE]. My prepotent father, when pe sowpe, sowpe out yower messe. pe are all to-glosyede in yower termys, pe make many a lesse. 24 The idea that the devil is a master of rhetoric was still very much alive in Webster's day. In Adams' sermon "England's Sickness," which Dent's study indicates Webster may have known, occurs the following: The world comes i n . . . . His first allurement is a mellifluous language, able to blanch mischiefe. His words drop Nectar, as if he had bin brought u p at Court. And as by his Logicke he can m a k e . . . any thing of every thing: so by his Rhetorick he can make (stones) hard hearted worldlings dance to his p i p e . . . . There lies a magicke in his tempting speech, able to inchant, and transform mens hearts.. . . His arguments are not empty, but carry the weight of golden eloquence, the musicall sound of profit and pleasure. 25 After the arraignment scene, as after her first scene, Vittoria disappears for a time to permit Webster to make us gag o n the 28

Ibid., p. 320. Ibid., p. 344. 25 Ed. cit., pp. 309-310. See Dent's commentary on "blanch mischiefe", DM, III.v.33, p. 221. Just before the passage quoted, Adams writes of the devil as being able to tempt men in the form of an "Angell of light", and adds "Hee is an ill wooer that wanteth words. Heare his voyce, and see not his face; beleeve his promises, and consider him not as a Iyer, as a murtherer, and hee will goe neere to carry thy heart from all" (pp. 308-309). 24

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evil of her friends and enemies. He does not let her return until our appetites are fully aroused to devour her beauty again. At the end of the arraignment Francisco learns about the murder of Isabella, and he begins his revenge plot by sending a letter to Vittoria protesting his love for her and proposing that he rescue her from the House of Convertites (IV.i.124-134). He makes sure that Brachiano will intercept this letter, for he wants to put the idea in his enemy's head that he should carry Vittoria off to his palace in Padua where they can be destroyed more easily (IV.iii.55-61, 78-82). The initial effect of Francisco's letter is not this at all, however. Despite Flamineo's unmasking of the letter as the murderous thing it is, Brachiano is moved to a rage of jealousy. Against all probabilities, he decides Francisco's letter proves Vittoria a whore in the common sense. Now, this is very funny, a great coup for Webster's plan to keep us sympathetic to Vittoria in spite of her known guilt. Vittoria, the archetypal white devil, whited sepulcher, and Lupa, is accused of being a whore on an occasion when she is innocent! This reminds us of the way Webster turned aside some of the force of Monticelso's attack on her as a whore by making him describe her in terms so general that they mostly missed the target. Vittoria is no ordinary whore, and by repeatedly having her be called one Webster wins our sympathy for her and also makes clear her truly extraordinary nature. Brachiano is a white devil to Vittoria and Flamineo, drawing them to their ruin with the false allurements of his World, but he generally is cast in the role of the white devil's chief victim. As Franklin states in connection with his poor showing in the arraignment, Brachiano is a dupe,26 deceived by every false appearance that is thrust in his path. His chief folly is in falling in love with Vittoria's beauty, of course, and it is his passion for her that makes him such an easy prey of jealousy. A man would have to be a fool to make of Vittoria what Brachiano makes of her, knowing that beneath her white skin, at her heart, are the sepulchers of Camillo and Isabella. Webster makes Brachiano "

P. 46.

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generally a dupe to account for this folly: he is a man who consistently looks only to the surface of things, and to such a man what a glory Vittoria appears! Brachiano's passion for Vittoria is of course Webster's chief device for glorifying her. As Lucas points out, Webster has improved on the Brachiano of history, eliminating his gross corpulence and the open ulcer that finally took his life, and endowing him with great poetry in the agonies of jealousy and death, poetry attesting the depth of his feeling.27 The sincerity of Brachiano's passion for Vittoria is not to be doubted. He risks everything for her, so that at the end his world is "quite lost" for love. Our natural response to his love is to assume the sincerity of her love for him, and to link their love with such affairs as Antony and Cleopatra's, in which we may feel that the world is well lost for love, that the wealth of spirit and the romantic ardor of the lovers overcomes all other considerations.28 Actually, though, the comparison with Antony and Cleopatra should make us concede that the affair of Brachiano and Vittoria is a horror. In Antony and Cleopatra there is nothing comparable to the terrible villainy of these two - nothing comparable to the calculating evil of Vittoria's dream of the yew, nothing comparable to the icy cruelty of Brachiano's indifference as he sees Isabella and Camillo murdered. His response to Isabella's murder in dumb show is "Excellent, then shee's dead", and to Camillo's, " 'Twas quaintly done, but yet each circumstance/ I tast not fully" (II.ii.24, 38-39). But most important of all, there is really no sign that Vittoria loves Brachiano. In her first scene she simply accepts his jewel in exchange for her "ornament/ Of a weake fortune", and in her arraignment she denies that she loves him (I.ii.211-212; III.ii.209-210). In the scene in the House of Convertites it becomes quite evident that her motive is mercenary. When Brachiano jealously accuses her of being a whore, her response is not to swear her true love, but to turn and accuse "

Works, I, 94. Lucas, Works, I, 96; Farnham, Tragic Frontier, p. 30; Fredson T. Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642 (Princeton, 1940), p. w

181.

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him, as she had accused Monticelso in her arraignment (IV.ii. 107-129). He is a murderous, godless duke, and he has ruined the honor of her family! She will have none of him! Far from being a pathetic lover, falsely accused, she is again the brilliant actress and tactician. Above all she wants to keep Brachiano, and despite her great anger she is able to see that the surest way to keep him is to throw him away. This is the tactic of a woman who knows her lover is more deeply passionate than she is. The reversal she manages to achieve is so grandly executed that we can do nothing but applaud; we are stunned, like Brachiano, and surrender to her magic (IV.ii.130-132). No one bothers to listen to what, in reality, she is saying. In all her tirade she never once reproaches him for having betrayed her love. She makes no pretense that she had loved him but that his present ingratitude has destroyed her love. This would have been an effective part of her pose, but she does not waste any time on it. Her reproaches all have one simple and direct refrain: "What have I gain'd by thee but infamie?" (109), "Is this your palace?" (115), "the honour to advance Vittoria" (117), "your high preferment" (119), "for all thou art worth" (128), "Am I not low enough?" (188), "Your dog or hawke should be rewarded better/Then I have bin. lie speake not one word more" (193-194). This last is finally clear enough to get through to Brachiano, and he stops her mouth with a kiss. But he is not allowed to enjoy her embrace long. Flamineo prods him back to reality: My Lord supplie your promises with deedes. You know that painted meat no hunger

feedes.

(204-205)

Brachiano then plans their escape to Padua, and concludes: I will advance you all: for you Vittoria, Thinke of a Dutchesse title. (222-223) The scene fittingly ends with Flamineo's moral tale of the crocodile and the bird that picks its teeth, reminding Brachiano to reward him, too.

VITTORIA AS A WHITE DEVIL

81

Now, I think Vittoria's insistent repetition of advancement, preferment, and reward in this scene is too powerful an undercurrent to be resisted, once it is felt at all. I cannot see how we can agree with W. W. Greg that her performance as a "supreme actress" is simply an adjunct to her being a "glorious woman", that her performance "is not the outcome of cold calculation", that "her pride, her fury, her despair are all alike genuine", the "measure of her love for the duke". 29 Greg's thesis is akin to the argument developed by B. J. Layman, who asserts that Vittoria is a "counterforce to all those black and despairing elements in the play which achieve their focus in Flamineo", a counterforce "capable of interposing the shield of imagination between itself" and the evils Flamineo represents. Layman's view is that "if noble counterfeiting is the prescribed course for great art, why may not it be likewise for great and artful living?" and he argues that Vittoria's imagined self created in these scenes of brilliant acting "is the doubly unsanctioned [neither by Sidney nor Bacon] poetical invention that Webster pits against an obsessively depraved nature". Throughout his essay Layman regards Vittoria's behavior as "life-affirming conduct", and says that when she plays "fast and loose" with reality, it is "to elevate or refine it". He concludes that "to conceive and enact a greatness which is belied by actuality and by one's own evil, yet which triumphs in defiance - this is to play the tragic heroine, to be Vittoria still", adding that our final "Vittorian insight" is that "in dreams begin responsibilities". 80 Layman's thesis chiefly depends on seeing Flamineo and Vittoria as opposed forces making up a single evil reality - he standing for blackness and death, she for whiteness and life. But in view of the tradition of the white devil, as I have shown, Flamineo has as much of a claim to whiteness in his deviltry as Vittoria does. They are both in conflict with the depraved world around them, and they are both creators of it. In dreams begin responsibilities - is the woman who dreamt of the yew one whose conduct is "life-affirming"? Did those imaginings "elevate or refine" reality? Or does her grasping for »

80

"Webster's 'White Devil'", p. 119. Pp. 337, 342, 343, and 347 respectively.

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VITTORIA AS A W H I T E DEVIL

reward in the House of Convertites elevate into reality the potential affirmative force of love? On the contrary, in every scene Vittoria has been the Satanic Adversary and Accuser of man and life, inciting Brachiano to murder and defending herself against the unjust accusations of Monticelso and Brachiano only with counter-accusations. We can agree with Greg that her demonic pride, fury, and despair are all genuine, but not that they are the measure of her love for the Duke; that love is the product of our noble imaginings inspired by the artful illusion Webster has created: love has no discernible place in her imaginings. Vittoria says of herself that "Through darkenesse Diamonds spred their ritchest light" (III.ii.305), but the viewer must supply the light - diamonds reflect light, but they are not sources of it: Glories, like glow-wormes, afarre off shine bright But lookt to neare, have neither heat nor light. (V.i. 38-39) A s an actress, an appearance, a painted sepulcher, Vittoria is magnificent, but there is nothing to admire behind the mask of this histrionic sense. Behind, all is death, a hideous charnel. The fifth Act takes place in Brachiano's palace just after his wedding with Vittoria. The opening of its first scene is enough like the first scene Vittoria appeared in to remind us of it and alert us to other parallels. A s in I.ii, she appears for an instant at the start, then disappears. She does not reappear until Brachiano has been poisoned, at the start of the third scene. I n I.ii, her first exchange with Brachiano had been: [BRA.]

νιτ.

Loose me not Madam, for if you forego me I am lost eternallie. νιτ. Sir in the way of pittie I wish you hart-hole. BRA. You are a sweet Phisition. Sure Sir a loathed crueltie in Ladyes Is as to Doctors many funeralls: It takes away their credit. (197-202)

This pattern is ironically echoed in their speeches when Brachiano is poisoned: νιτ.

Ο my loved Lord, poisoned?

83

VITTORIA AS A WHITE DEVIL [FLA.]

Call the Physitions; a plague upon you; Ent. 2 Wee have to[o] much of your cunning here already.

[BRA.] PHYS.

What say yon scritch-owles, is the venomne mortall? Most deadly, BRA. Most corrupted pollitick hangman! You kill without booke; but your art to save Failes you as oft, as great mens needy friends.

VIT.

I am lost forever. (V.iii. 8, 10-11, 20-23, 35)

Physitians.

I will build little upon this parallel as a parallel, for it is faint, but it is at least an interesting contrast. In the earlier scene Vittoria is like a physician who is supposed to make Brachiano heart-whole, not permit him to perish. In the later scene, the comparison is reversed, and physicians turn out to be as unable to save Brachiano as his needy friends like Vittoria and Flamineo are. Those who minister merely to the flesh, like doctors or Vittoria, are unable to save Brachiano, whose needs are spiritual. The echo of "lost eternallie" in "I am lost forever" is especially noteworthy: "I am lost forever" is Vittoria's first speech since she came upon Brachiano poisoned and called him her "loved Lord". He is a "loved Lord" when she is speaking in public to her husband before it is certain that he will die. When they know Brachiano is dying, she says ' 7 am lost forever". What she says is true, but it is an obsessively self-concerned and fearful woman who speaks, not a loving bride. And when Brachiano finally dies, she departs with the cry "O mee! this place is hell" (V.iii. 182). It is, but she is again thinking of herself. Another parallel of the last act with the meeting of Vittoria and Brachiano in I.ii is more definite and is truly important. As in that earlier scene and again in the arraignment, there is a gradual revelation of the black truth hidden behind the mask of the white devil. In I.ii this revelation came in Vittoria's dream of the yew, and in the arraignment it came in the black fury with which Monticelso and Vittoria finally turned on each other. The movement of the play as a whole might be formulated as toward a fusion of the white devil with the black - a fusion that defines the true nature of Vittoria and all the evils she epitomizes. One fusion of the white devil and the black is developed through the

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VITTORIA AS A WHITE DEVIL

parallels between Vittoria and her black maid, Zanche the Moor, who is more or less openly a devil, a literal lupa to Flamineo: . . . I doe love that Moore, that Witch very constrainedly: shee knowes some of my villanny; I do love her, just as a man holds a wolfe by the eares. But for feare of turning upon mee, and pulling out my throate, I would let her go to the Devill. (V.i. 147-151)

Cornelia objects to Flamineo's involvement with Zanche as she had objected to Vittoria's with Brachiano (V.i. 178). Zanche is not satisfied with Flamineo and wants to move on to greater things with Mulinassar, the Moor, who she does not know is really Francisco in disguise (V.i.94-221). Our suspicion that we are witnessing a parody of Vittoria's move from Camillo to Brachiano is confirmed when Zanche woos Francisco again. She has had a dream of "you"! I knew last night by a sad dreame I had Some mischiefe would insue; yet to say truth My dreame most concern'd you. Mee thought sir, you came stealing to my bed. (V.iii. 227-229, 232)

Zanche also parodies Vittoria's worldliness, for she hopes that by robbing Vittoria and giving the loot to Mulinassar as a dowry she can please him and so . . . make that sun-burnt proverbe false, And wash the Ethiop white. (V.iii. 270-271)

This cannot be done, but the parallel with Vittoria is itself washing the whiting off of her. Zanche's inane idea that stealing can make her white is great mockery of its mirror image in Vittoria's belief that whitewash can make a charnel-house livable. In the final scene of The White Devil, in which Vittoria, Zanche, and Flamineo are murdered by Lodovico and Gasparo, the fusion of the white devil and the black is completed. Yet to the very end Webster contrives to keep our sympathy with

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VITTORIA AS A WHITE DEVIL

Vittoria, to delude us into thinking she is still white when she is really the mirror of blackness. Before considering the scene itself in detail, I want to set the stage with a discussion of the issues involved in deciding whether there is anything of value in the way Vittoria dies. F. L. Lucas and most of the critics writing since his edition appeared have held that Vittoria dies nobly defiant, true to her own course of life to the end, and should therefore be linked with the Duchess of Malfi as one deserving undying fame: Integrity of life, is fames best friend, Which noblely (beyond Death) shall crowne

the

end.

(DM, V.v. 145-146) These critics are mostly willing to concede that in its context in The Duchess of Malfi "integrity" refers not only to wholeness and consistency but to consistency in virtue. But they contend that for Webster the pagan Renaissance admiration of virtü manly strength of purpose for ends either good or evil - has replaced the medieval and Christian love of mere goodness, and they point to the definitely pagan "fame" as the reward of integrity to support their claim. As a result, Webster is supposed to admire the integrity of Vittoria's virtü as much as the integrity of the Duchess's virtue or perhaps even more: some critics have gone so far as to attribute the atheism of Webster's characters, whom he brands as devils, to him.31 He is supposed to have adopted the Senecan and Machiavellian belief in individualism untrammeled by Christian morality. Citing the fact that fame is the first consolation Webster offers in his elegy on the death of Prince Henry, George P. V. Akrigg writes that "Virtue [virtü] winning Honour during life and Fame after, - Webster joins with the paganism of the Renaissance in making these the ends for men's endeavours." 38 But Henry is a candidate for honor and fame in Webster's eyes because he exemplifies the traditional medieval virtues of the ruler and the traditional Christian virtues

31 52

Akrigg, p. 19; Bogard, pp. 141-143; and Whitman, pp. 178-192. P. 68. The elegy, A Monumental Column, is in Works, III, 275-283.

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VITTORIA AS A WHITE DEVIL

of a man. He compares him with Edward, the Black Prince, and praises him repeatedly for his justice, his humility, his heavenly virtue, his devotion to "actuall merite" in promoting his adherents (107), and his opposition to false worldly pleasures. He describes the humility of Henry's death, praising his contemplation of Christian verities and glorying in his passage to heaven (201-230). As the end of the poem approaches, Webster eulogizes Henry in terms that afford a point-by-point contrast with Vittoria: Ο thou that in thy owne praise still wert mute, Resembling trees, the more they are tane with fruit, The more they strive to bow and kisse the ground! Thou that in quest of man, hast truly found, That while men rotten vapours do persue, They could not be thy friends, and flatterers too: That despight all injustice wouldst have proved So just a Steward for this Land, and loved Right for it owne sake. . . . (279-287) The elegy for Henry and the final lines of The Duchess of Malfi are echoed in the closing speech of Monuments of Honour, Webster's 1624 Lord Mayor's Pageant written for the Merchant Tailors' Company: 3 3 Worthy Prince Henry, fames best president, Cald to a higher Court of Parliament, In his full strength of Youth and height of blood, And, which Crownd all, when he was truely good: On Vertue, and on Worth he still was throwing Most bounteous sh[o\wers, where e're he found them growing, He never did disguise his way es by Art But [suited] his intents unto his hart, And lov'd to do good, more for goodnesse sake, Then any retribution man could make. Such was this Prince, such are the noble hearts, Who when they dye, yet dye not in all parts: But from the Integrety of a Brave mind, Leave a most Cleere and Eminent Fame behind.

33

Good rest my Lord! — Integrity that keeps Works, III, 317-327.

VITTORIA AS A WHITE DEVIL

87

The safest Watch and breeds the soundest sleeps, Make the last day of this your houlding seate, Joyfull as this, or rather, more compleate. (349-362, 371-374)

In these passages integrity means uprightness and honesty (with purity or innocence the only senses in which the N.E.D. notes the word to be used of human conduct in Webster's time. So I find also in searching concordances of Elizabethan writers). For Webster, honor and fame result only from this kind of virtue. Webster is surely saying to men that if they would have honor and fame, they must cultivate the traditional virtues. In the Monumental Column, The Duchess of Malfi, and Monuments of Honour there is no sign that he accepts the amoral definition of honor and fame implicit in Machiavellian virtu. In each of these works he implies that honor and fame cannot be associated with mere worldly pride and greatness. Webster fuses traditional Christian virtues with what he likes of the classical tradition - with virtuous fame and honor and with those other pagan values that do not clash with Christianity, like the Stoic fortitude which had entered the Christian tradition so early as to have become fully a part of it. In this he is, with many of his contemporaries, at one with Spenser, Jonson, and Donne. Throughout The Faerie Queene Christian virtues are fused with Aristotelian ethics, and both may be rewarded by fame (e.g., ΙΙΙ.3.Ϊ; IV.9.i-ii). In Jonson's Masque of Queens (London, 1609), there is a fusion of "masculine" heroical virtue with Christian virtue to produce good fame. The masque itself is a sort of morality play, for when Virtue and Fame enter, the witches Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, Falsehood, Murmur, Malice, Impudence, Slander, Execration, Bitterness, Rage, and Mischief all flee. They describe themselves as "faythfull Opposites/ To Fame, & Glory".31 Following Virtue and Fame come great queens of history, whom Jonson praises for chastity, for kindness to their subjects, for their divine souls and great beauty, and for their spirited struggles against enemies, especially against The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford, 1925-1952), VII, lines 132-133.

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VITTORIA AS A WHITE DEVIL

male tyranny. The song at the end of the masque succinctly expresses Jonson's view: Who, Virtue, can thy power forget, That sees these live, and triumph yet?

Th' Assyrian pompe, the Persian pride, Greekes glory, and the Romanes dy'de: And who yet imitate Theyr noyses, tary the same fate. Force Greatnesse, all the glorious wayes You can, it soone decayes;

But so good Fame shall, never: Her triumphs, as theyr Causes, are for ever. (764-773)

For Jonson, the worldly pride that goes with Machiavellian individualism and virtu, and the worldly greatness they achieve, all decay. They are contrasted with Virtue and "good Fame", which go with the Eternal Cause, God. Lest it still appear that concern for fame is too worldly to be compatible with Christian values, let me quote the closing lines of Donne's 1611 Anatomy of the World. The poem is a religious contemplation on the dying state of his world since its soul, representing the traditional Christian values, was taken up into heaven: Verse hath a middle nature: heaven keepes Soules, The Grave keepes bodies, Verse the Fame enroules. 35

In these writers the medieval contempt of the world has slipped just enough that they condemn only the evils of the world. They would still avoid the fallacy of allowing worldly considerations to overcome religious and moral ones, but they work hard for honest worldly success: they want to have heaven and fame too, and their writings show that they have worked out a rationale for winning both. Consistently opposed to integrity, virtue, and fame are Jonson's Falsehood and her friends, the chief characteristics of Vittoria. As Webster writes, Henry's integrity was a result of the fact that 35

Poems, ed. cit., I, 245.

VITTORI A AS A WHITE DEVIL

89

He never did disguise his way es by Art But [suited] his intents unto his hart.**

Compare also the opening lines of "A Reverend Judge", one of the new sketches added to the 1615 edition of Overbury's Characters, and believed to have been written by Webster: A Reverend

Judge

Is one that desires to have his greatnesse onely measured by his goodnesse. His care is to appeare such to the people, as he would have them be; and to bee himselfe such as he appeares: for vertue cannot seem one thing, and be another.37 Integrity is a term that simply cannot be applied to Vittoria. Mere consistency in evil self-service, the formulation of some critics, will not do for integrity, which at the very least must signify wholeness and singleness. A person may be consistently selfish and take many evil forms, as Webster is showing in The White Devil. In the scenes we have thus far reviewed, Vittoria is always the great actress, playing whatever part she is called upon to play by the situation at hand. There are many Vittorias, but is there a Vittoria? Who can say at the beginning of the final scene that he knows the woman behind the mask? We must admire the Devil for his nimble wit, his ability to put on a good show, but we should not call this integrity. Self-knowledge must be the basis of any sort of real integrity, and this Vittoria refuses to acquire. She will not face her true reality until death itself strips the mask away. This is a reason for her constant play-acting: the horrors of her world, which she epitomizes, are too terrible for her to face in her own person, and so she invents fictive selves to escape. Those fictive selves appear to be dealing with reality unflinchingly, though they are actually in full flight from it. In this Vittoria is the white devil still. In The White Devil, then, the characters are atheists and amoral or immoral individualists, and Webster is showing the tragic failure of their approach to life. For all their desperate 3,1 37

Monuments of Honour, lines 355-356, Works, III, 326. Works, IV, 38.

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efforts to create their own private heavens, all they can achieve is what none can deny is hell. And this is true not only for those who die. Francisco and Monticelso "win" their battle with Brachiano and Vittoria, but we know them well enough to say that as white devils they bear their own charnel within themselves. Machiavellian individualism is bankrupt, Webster shows, because it paradoxically denies the only possible basis for healthy individual life. Permit the individual to be false to other men so long as he is true to himself and you permit him to divide into an inner and an outer self, and between them his true individuality, which is defined in his character, will be lost. In the final scene Webster is especially subtle in showing Vittoria for what she really is and at the same time continuing to make her appear like a glory. By this time Flamineo has so discredited himself that anything he says against her, whether true or not, is felt to be in her favor, and when at the last he reverses himself and says she is noble, the effect is electrifying. In our sympathetic admiration of her "nobility", we naturally neglect to notice the meaning of Flamineo's compliment as a whole. For the rest Webster chiefly relies on our being sympathetic to Vittoria because she is the underdog. And we will surely be so swept up by the passions and the violence of the scene that we will miss the continued parallel between Vittoria and Zanche and will fail to think about the reality behind the appearance of courage with which Flamineo and Vittoria die. Vittoria and Zanche are together in Vittoria's chamber, and Flamineo comes to demand that his sister reward him for his service to Brachiano. Vittoria appears to have been praying, and Flamineo's opening remarks define once again the conflict between the spiritual life, which all these people neglect, and the worldly life: FLA. What are you at your prayers? Give o're. VIT. How Ruffin? FLA. I come to you 'bout worldly businesse. (V.vi. 1-3) Vittoria turns him away in her grandest manner. She will have nothing to do with him, for he has just killed their brother Mar-

VITTORIA AS A WHITE DEVIL

91

cello in a quarrel over Flamineo's affair with Zanche. Flamineo has rather expected this response, and if she wants to throw his acts up to him, he is quite prepared to confront her with her own. He openly states that he intends to unmask the devil within her: Is't come to this? the[y] say affrights cure agues: Thou hast a Devill in thee; I will try If I can scarre him from thee: Nay sit still: My Lord hath left me yet two case of Jewels Shall make me scorne your bounty; you shall see them. [Exil.] (18-22)

Vittoria has claimed to be a hard, brilliant diamond that would shine its best in darkness and would be able to resist blows from the false jewels - "glassen hammers" - of her enemies (IH.ii. 304-305, 145-149). Flamineo will test her boasts with his "two case of Jewels". White Vittoria does not understand Flamineo, but black Zanche does, and at this moment begins Webster's demonstration that whatever strength the white devil has is only the strength of the black devil. All the differences between the two in this scene make the black fairer than the white. Vittoria mistakes Flamineo's behavior for distraction, and Zanche rightly names it despair, giving her mistress good counsel: "For your owne safety give him gentle language" (23-24). Flamineo returns and reveals that the jewels he spoke of are pistols. He says he will prove her a false diamond, and her craven response makes him seem right: FLA. Looke, these are better far at a dead lift, Then all your jewell house, vit. And yet mee thinkes, These stones have no faire lustre, they are ill set. FLA. I'le turne the right side towards you: you shall see How the[y] will sparkle, VIT. Turne this horror from mee: What do you want? what would you have mee doe? Is not all mine, yours? have I any children? (25-31)

Flamineo smashes Vittoria's glass diamonds one by one, first mocking the pious rejection of worldliness with which she began the scene:

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Pray thee good woman doe not trouble mee With this vaine wor[l]dly businesse; say your prayers. (32-33)

Next he begins to expose the sham of her love for Brachiano. With death inevitable anyway, will she kill herself for her love? I made a vow to my deceased Lord, Neither your selfe, nor I should out-live him, The numbring of foure howers. vit. Did he enjoyne it? FLA. He did, and 'twas a deadly jealousy, Least any should enjoy thee after him, That urg'd him vow me to it: For my death I did propound it voluntarily, knowing If hee could not be safe in his owne Court Being a great Duke, what hope then for us? VIT. This is your melancholy and dispaire. FLA. Away — . . . This is my resolve — I would not live at any mans entreaty Nor dye at any's bidding, VIT. Will you heare me? (34-43, 48-50)

Flamineo does not need to hear her — he already has all her speeches by heart: he has just smashed another of her diamonds with his mockery of the words she spoke so boldly in the arraignment: . . . I scorne to hould my life At yours or any mans intreaty, Sir. (Ill.ii. 142-143)

In all this Flamineo is of course having a wonderful time. He is showing that Vittoria's false diamonds are not even made of good glass, for the pistols are themselves false jewels, being loaded only with blanks. There is no doubt that Vittoria thinks him in dead earnest, however, for she comes near to panic. She asks Zanche if the doors are locked, she hypocritically and absurdly lectures Flamineo about the spiritual dangers of atheism and suicide, and she is driven to the comical extreme of interrupting this sermon to tell Zanche to cry out for help! This glorious white devil is rescued from her weakness only by the strength of the black devil:

VICTORIA AS A WHITE DEVIL

93

ZAN. [aside] Gentle Madam Seeme to consent, onely perswade him teach The way to death; let him dye first. VIT. 'Tis good, I apprehend it — To kill one's selfe is meate that we must take Like pils, not chew't, but quickly swallow it — (73-78) Vittoria has yet enough of her wits about her to take up this new line without any fumbling, but the rapidity of her switch from Christian pieties against suicide to pagan cliches that accept it makes her ability as an actress begin to appear a bit absurd, as the filmed performance of the most graceful dancer appears absurd if the projection is speeded up. What comes next is perhaps the finest irony in the play. Vittoria makes a passionate statement of love for Brachiano, but it comes when he is dead and it is false, simply a part of her attempt to deceive Flamineo. Its falseness is mirrored in the falseness of the avowals of love between Flamineo and Zanche, who we know from V.i and V.iii have no real affection for each other: Behold Brachiano, I that while you liv'd Did make a flaming Altar of my heart To sacrifice unto you . . . Now am ready To sacrifice heart and all. Fare-well Zanche. ZAN. How Madam! Do you thinke that I'le out-live you? Especially when my best selfe Flamineo Goes the same voiage. FLA. Ο most loved Moore! (84-90) Zanche now suggests that she or Flamineo should teach Vittoria how to die. Flamineo blithely accepts the task of dying first, and begins a bizarre parody of death that mocks the fears of Vittoria and Zanche and pre-enacts what is to follow when Lodovico and Gasparo enter.38 Vittoria and Zanche shoot Flamineo with his blanks, then betray both him and Brachiano by refusing to follow 58 Compare the very different discussion of this parody in J. R. Mulryne, " 'The White Devil' and The Duchess of Malfi'", in Jacobean Theatre, Vol. I of Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London, 1960), pp. 208-209, 212.

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them to death. They jeer at Flamineo and taunt him for foolishly trusting them. Their treachery and cruelty almost exactly parallel the torture of the dying Brachiano by Lodovico and Gasparo: LOD. Devill Brachiano, Thou art damn'd. GAS. Perpetually. LOD. A slave condemn'd, and given up to the gallowes Is thy great Lord and Master, GAS. True: for thou Art given up to the devill. LOD. Ο you slave! You that were held the famous Pollititian; Whose art was poison, GAS. And whose conscience murder. [LOD.] And thou shalt die like a poore rogue, GAS. And stinke Like a dead flie-blowne dog. (V.iii. 150-156, 167-168) Now hear Vittoria and Zanche: They shoot and run to him & tread upon him. VIT. What, are you drop't? FLA. I am mixt with Earth already. As you are Noble Performe your vowes, and bravely follow mee. VIT. Whither — to hell? ZAN. To most assured damnation. VIT. Ο thou most cursed devill. ZAN. Thou art caught — VIT. In thine owne Engine, I tread the fire out That would have bene my ruine. vir.

Thinke whither thou art going, ZAN. And remember What villanies thou hast acted, VIT. This thy death Shall make me like a blazing ominous starre, Looke up and tremble, FLA. Ο I am caught with a springe! VIT. You see the Fox comes many times short home, 'Tis here prov'd true. FLA. Kild with a couple of braches. (V.vi. 120-126, 131-136) If in this action Vittoria is at one with the devils Lodovico and Gasparo, she is even more at one with the devil Zanche: they are indeed a "couple of braches", a true pair. From the beginning to the end of their "murder" of Flamineo they act as a virtual unit, sharing speeches and completing each other's sentences, as in the passage quoted above. At length Flamineo tires of his little charade and rises from

VITTORIA AS A WHITE DEVIL

95

death to taunt Vittoria and Zanche in their turn. He equates Vittoria's betrayal of him with betrayal of Brachiano, an equation that is not entirely unjust, but he makes such an exaggerated generalization about the faithlessness of women that he undercuts the force of his statement, securing our "white" image of Vittoria against the element of truth his accusations contain (149-166). Flamineo has shown Vittoria to be no better than a black devil with the expenditure of nothing more than two blanks and some of his own rather considerable histrionic ability. Sham has sufficed to overcome sham, and now he means to finish the job with a true pair of "jewels", his loaded pistols. But before he can reach these "two other Instruments", their place is taken by Lodovico and Gasparo, who enter upon these words (167). They are to be the hammers that administer the final test to Vittoria. They will kill Flamineo as well as Vittoria and Zanche, and so we can compare Vittoria's conduct at death with that of her brother as well as her maid. For a time Flamineo is Flamineo still: boastfully moralizing ("'Tis

better to be fortunate

then wise"

[183]), bitter, defiant,

and witty: LOD. Dost laugh? FLA. Wouldst have me dye, as I was borne, in whining? (195-196)

In contrast here are all of Vittoria's lines up to the time Lodovico actually gives the command to begin the murders: Helpe, helpe! (168) Ο wee are lost. (175) Ο your gentle pitty: I have seene a black-bird that would sooner fly To a mans bosome, then to stay the gripe Of the feirce Sparrow-hawke. GAS. Your hope deceives you. VIT. If Florence be ith Court, would hee would kill mee! . . . . (184-188) LOD. Ο thou glorious strumpet, (207) VIT.

You, my Deathsman! Me thinkes thou doest not looke horrid enough, Thou hast to[o] good a face to be a hang-man,

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If thou be, doe thy office in right forme; Fall downe upon thy knees and aske forgivenesse.

(210-214) By line 184 Vittoria has recovered her strength and begun to put on her final show. She is the actress still, but the part she chooses to play is a part that betrays her "love" for Brachiano. She openly offers herself to Gasparo, then perhaps to Florence, and even sinks to flattering Lodovico's good looks in a possible effort to seduce him from his purpose. Yet in her lines to Lodovico there is pride, too, as she commands him to his knees. If she is a strumpet, she is, as Lodovico says, a "glorious" one. And by this time we are so fascinated by the horror and suspense of the situation and so glad to see our great actress recover herself that Webster can count on our noticing only the "glory" and missing the relation of her ruse to her affair with Brachiano. Lodovico's command that Zanche be killed first marks the failure of this ruse, but it has served to remind Vittoria of her glory, and she decides that if death is inevitable she will at least die handsomely: LOD. Ο thou hast bin a most prodigious comet, But lie cut of[f] your traine: kill the Moore first. VIT. Y o u shall not kill her first, behould my breast, I will be waited on in death; my servant Shall never go before mee. GAS. Are you so brave? VIT. Yes I shall wellcome death As Princes doe some great Embassadors; lie meete thy weapon hälfe way. LOD. Thou dost tremble, Mee thinkes feare should dissolve thee into ayre. VIT. Ο thou art deceiv'd, I am to[o] true a woman: Conceit can never kill me: lie tell thee what, I will not in my death shed one base teare, Or if looke pale, for want of blood, not feare. [GAS.] Thou art my taske, blacke fury. ZAN. I have blood As red as either of theirs; wilt drinke some? 'Tis good for the falling sicknesse: I am proud Death cannot alter my complexion, For I shall neere looke pale. LOD. Strike, strike, With a Joint motion. [ T h e y strike.] VIT. T w a s a manly blow, The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking Infant, And then thou wilt be famous, FLA. Ο what blade ist?

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A Toledo, or an English Fox? I ever thought a Cutler should distinguish The cause of my death, rather then a Doctor. Search my wound deeper: tent it with the Steele That made it. (215-240)

This is a glorious triumph for Vittoria, and it is these lines, above all, that have won her and Flamineo the admiration of many critics, leading some of them to assert finally that Webster is saying courage in the face of death is the only virtue that has any meaning in an evil world. Here is found the epitome of Vittoria's "integrity of life". But such a conclusion overlooks too many things. These lines come after Vittoria has shown repeatedly she has no integrity of life, and can at best reveal some sort of integrity in death. Now, to pagan Stoic and Christian stoic alike, dying well had great value. Obviously Vittoria is not dying well in a Christian sense, but is she not dying well in a pagan sense — proud in spirit, resolute and firm? Perhaps she has been weak till now, but that was all sham anyway, and now with the real hammers of death crashing against her she proves a true diamond. The trouble with this interpretation is that it ignores the play's main pattern: if Vittoria's death is stoical, then Webster is saying that pagan stoicism is a false glory, for at this moment the pattern of white devil and black rises very prominently into the action. The command to kill the "Moore" first, the reference to her as a "black fury", and her and Vittoria's remarks about pallor in death all point to the significance of what is happening. As in all the other points of strength she has shown, in this scene, the beautiful and glorious Vittoria Corombona is no greater, no firmer than the ugly black fury, her servant. Zanche shall never look pale: the ability to die courageously in a vicious action is no more than an ability of the black devil. It is illuminating to compare Webster's handling of the death of Vittoria with that of the Duchess of Malfi. The truly noble courage of the Duchess, who dies in Christian humility and hope, is contrasted with the cowardly death of her maid, Cariola. Vittoria herself gives the final answer to those of her audience who have admired the devil's last sham show of glory and who

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depart from the theater imagining that she has perished in defiance, refusing to the end to concede anything to her enemies or to conventional morality. She herself ends the illusion of her consistency and resolution in evil by moralizing on her fate, using a set of values that is not consistent with her life. This is the logical consequence of her nature as the white devil of tradition. Really dying, really beginning to appear the charnel she has been all along, she finally faces the reality of her being. Here are all her lines after the ones last quoted: Ο my greatest sinne lay in my blood. Now my blood paies for't. (240-241)

My soule, like to a ship in a blacke storme, Is driven I know not whither. (248-249)

"O happy they that never saw the Court, Nor ever knew great Man but by report. Vittoria dyes. (261-262) B. J. Layman thinks Vittoria preserves her defiance in the wit of the first of these lines,39 but such words are conventional in Elizabethan tragedy, and these are therefore the weariest lines Webster can think of, stressing that the glories have departed, the worms come. Instead of trying to find defiance in these lines, most of Webster's audience has discounted them, and so preserved something of Vittoria's integrity at the cost of the play's. F. L. Lucas writes of Brachiano and Vittoria that Had they repented, we should hardly have forgiven them. And if we feel this of Brachiano, we feel it doubly of Vittoria — and that Webster was right, whether or no he had heard of the saintly conversion of the real Accoramboni, to keep his own heroine defiant to the last. I own that I regret, each time I read them, even the few words of conventional repentance he has left her, though they alter little in the total effect. We do not want Cleopatra or Clytemnestra to don sackcloth before us; our human pride would suffer with the breaking of theirs.40 Webster makes us overlook the reality of Vittoria's death partly by having Flamineo praise her for her courage - which is of just «· P. 346. «

Works, I, 96.

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his own sort - even in the midst of her surrender to conventional moral norms: . . . Th'art a noble sister, I love thee now; if woeman doe breed man, Shee ought to teach him manhood: Fare thee well. Know many glorious woeman that are fam'd For masculine vertue, have bin vitious, Onely a happier silence did betyde them. Shee hath no faults, who hath the art to hide them. (241-247)

Of this Layman writes that at last Flamineo has ended his effort to degrade his sister and has discarded his cynicism. Replacing his cynicism, says Layman, is a recognition that nobility and viciousness may be fused into a single "noble" life solution.41 But what is more cynical than to fuse nobility and viciousness? These lines really mark the depth of cynicism to which Flamineo has sunk in his despair. In not appearing to do so, they conform to the artful pattern of The White Devil as a whole: define an evil, but give it a favorable appearance, here by presenting it as a compliment. The last scene, like all the others, makes glow-worms look like glories. The cruder surface elements of the dramatization, which have the greatest effect from afar, delude us into affirming Vittoria's conduct to have some kind of value for life; only looked to near, in subtleties, in echoes of earlier scenes, in parallels and contrasts, and in symbols, does Webster reveal the reality behind his false appearances. His White Devil is itself a magnificent white devil that makes us feel the glory and the power, the full white heat and the radiance of Lucifer, the Lightbearer. But to say that Webster believes the death of a white devil is without moral value is not to say that he believes it to be without tragic value. In the next chapter I want to show that in the lives and deaths of his white devils Webster has given us a deeply moving tragedy of the hopeless feeling of exclusion that is suffered by those who selfishly and willfully divorce themselves from their proper place in the human community. «

P. 346.

ν BANISHMENT AND DESPAIR IN THE WHITE

DEVIL

In reality, the apparent spiritual triumph of Vittoria, Flamineo, and Zanche in their brave death is what Ian Jack has called it: "the virtue of Hell: the courage of despair".1 If the unity of the play is such that an explication of it as an anatomy of evil can begin and end with the title, we need only move to its first word, "Banisht!" to explicate it as an anatomy of the most terrifying spiritual result of evil, a despairing sense of exclusion from happiness and from life itself. Banishment is the active form of the unifying theme of The White Devil, with its idea that appearances deceive. Action is implicit in the lines Glories, like glow-wormes, afarre off shine bright But lookt to neare, have neither heat nor light. (V.i. 38-39) When we are "banished" we are far from the glories, and they shine bright. When our banishment is repealed, we can come close, and we may see that the glories are mere glow-worms. All the characters in The White Devil are desperately seeking security and happiness in their world, but as things turn out the situations in their world that look secure and attractive are really their ruin, and what they think is banishment is potentially their salvation. This is a principle of life in Satan's kingdom that is stated over and over again in language and action. At the very 1

P. 41. Compare my discussion here with the thesis of Robert Ornstein that "the power of The White Devil is its dramatization of the isolated criminal will shattering moral restrictions", The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy (Madison, 1960), pp. 136-138.

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outset Flamineo warns Brachiano of his infatuation with Vittoria: 1 must not have your Lordship thus unwisely amorous - 1 my selfe have loved a lady and peursued her with a great deale of under-age protestation, whom some 3. or 4. gallants that have enjoyed would with all their harts have bin glad to have bin rid of: Tis just like a summer bird-cage in a garden, the birds that are without, despaire to get in, and the birds that are within despaire and are in a consumption for feare they shall never get out: away away my Lord! 2 (I.ii. 37-44) Brachiano ignores this warning, and Flamineo himself has yet to learn its general applicability in his world. Only at the end of the play does he see that it is true not only of women of the flesh but of that other fatal female, the goddess Fortuna: . . . I have liv'd Riotously ill, like some that live in Court. And sometimes, when my face was full of smiles, Have felt the mase of conscience in my brest. Oft gay and honour'd robes those tortures trie, "Wee thinke cag'd birds sing, when indeed they crie. (V.iv. 112-117) "Quae negata grata" - what is refused is desired (I.ii. 162). In Satan's kingdom even the stories people invent to deceive each other reflect their unceasing discontent. When they are out of the bird-cage, they want in, and when they are in nothing will do but they must be out. Here is the tale Lodovico and Gasparo told Flamineo when they came disguised as monks to the wedding of Brachiano and Vittoria. They are Two Noblemen of Hungary, that living in the Emperours service as commanders, eight yeares since, contrary to the expectation of all the Court entred into religion, into the strickt order of Capuchins: but being not well setled in their undertaking they left their Order and 2

Following this up, Webster repeatedly uses imagery of the capture, confinement, or release of birds to describe the action of his people. Flamineo's fable of the crocodile develops this theme in a striking fashion: IV.ii.224-237. Here is the all-devouring great man, and his tool who risks confinement for his master. See also II.i.3-5, 47-52; IV.i.139; IV.ii.83-84; V.i.125-129, 178, 187-189, 223; V.vi.185-187.

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returned to Court: for which being after troubled in conscience, they vowed their service against the enemies of Christ; went to Malta·, were there knighted; and in their returne backe, at this great solemnity, they are resolved for ever to forsake the world, and settle themselves here in a house of Capuchines in Padua. (V.i. 13-22) Virtually everything that happens in the play conforms to a pattern in which what appears to be banishment may really be escape, and vice versa, or what appears to be secure and happy may really be confinement, and vice versa. Thus in Li Lodovico is banished from Rome, and he wants desperately to return. If he were wise, he would stay away, for when his banishment is repealed at Francisco's request, it is for the express purpose of using him in the revenge that finally destroys him. In I.ii Brachiano feels himself "quite lost" for love of Vittoria, and nothing will satisfy him but to be admitted to Camillo's "Dove-house", as Francisco calls it (II.i.3), despite Flamineo's warning that bird-cages look better from the outside than from the inside. To get Camillo out of the way, Flamineo first convinces him that it would be foolish to confine Vittoria, citing his bird-cage rule; . . . women are more willinglie & more gloriouslie chast, when they are least restrayned of their libertie.... These polliticke inclosures for paltry mutton, makes more rebellion in the flesh then all the provocative electuaries Doctors have uttered sence last Jubilee. (Lii. 91-92, 95-97) Then Flamineo persuades Camillo to confine himself to whet Vittoria's appetite (I.ii. 157-178). In ILi, paralleling this, Isabella similarly takes upon herself a divorce from her husband which is against her real interests, banishing herself from Rome (ILi. 195-272). At the end of this scene Monticelso and Francisco delude Camillo with the appearance of sending him to gain honor in capturing Lodovico, rumored to have turned pirate, but actually Camillo's mission is a sort of banishment, for they are sending him away so that Brachiano will have greater opportunity to involve himself with Vittoria (II.i.352-385). Camillo fears what may happen in his absence, but on the whole he seems well enough pleased with his mission. He does not know that he is being sent to his death:

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They are sending him to Naples, but I'le send him to Candy (Il.i. 289-290)

The efforts of these people to make themselves secure become the means of their destruction. At the outset Brachiano offers Vittoria security in his arms: You are lodged within his armes who shall protect you, From all the feavers of a jealous husband, From the poore envy of our flegmaticke Dutchesse — I'le seate you above law and above scandall, Give to your thoughts the invention of delight And the fruition (I.ii. 250-255) But as we learn also in The Duchess of Malfi, Securitie some men call the Suburbs of Hell, Onely a dead wall betweene. (DM, V.ii. 372-373) Francisco passes sentence on the hopes of Vittoria and Brachiano to find security and happiness in each other's arms: Like mistle-tow on seare Eimes spent by weather, Let him cleave to her and both rot together. (Il.i. 392-393) Brachiano has Camillo and Isabella murdered on the principle that "Small mischiefes are by greater made secure" (Il.i.315). The result of the murders, however, is that he and his friends all lose their freedom and security. Flamineo, Vittoria, and even the innocent Marcello are all apprehended, and Brachiano must flee to avoid being taken himself (II.ii.46-51). He escapes physically, but acknowledges his spirit to be bound forever to the evil magician who enabled him to watch the murders: . . . Noble friend. You bind me ever to you — this shall stand As the firme seale annexed to my hand. It shall inforce a payment. (Il.ii. 51-54) The pattern continues to develop in the following scenes. As the result of her arraignment, Vittoria is confined in a House of Convertites, and she pretends that she will triumph even there,

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that her imagination will make it honest and peaceable to her (III.ii.272-30). Actually she is anxious to escape from the moment she is confined. Yet perhaps she should not be, for when she escapes with Brachiano their flight is turned into literal banishment and excommunication by Monticelso (IV.iii.70-73), and it leads to their death at Francisco's hands. Monticelso is able to pervert the power of the church to persecute his enemies because he has become pope while Vittoria was in confinement. In his election is epitomized the power of evil to penetrate the most careful security measures men can invent: Webster makes much of the precautions taken to keep worldly influence from reaching the conclave of cardinals electing a pope, yet the devilish and worldly Monticelso is the winner (IV.iii. 1-47). Vittoria and Brachiano think they will be secure when they reach his palace in Padua, but as it was not secure for Isabella, even in her own chamber with guards and her son attending upon her, so also it is not secure for them. The murderers penetrate the palace in disguise, and what looked from afar in Rome to be a glory, looked to near turns out to be worms. Webster mounts irony on irony in these final scenes. To celebrate his wedding, Brachiano will fight at barriers - a kind of duelling sport especially designed to be safe. As extra insurance he wears a beaver on his face. But Lodovico poisons this beaver, and so the very means of security becomes the instrument of Brachiano's death! Neither the walls of his palace nor of his helmet can save him from retribution, and he dies in despair as the supposed means of salvation, the security of the rite of extreme unction, is also perverted by the devils who are destroying him (V.ii-iii). Vittoria and Flamineo find that their advancement into worldly profit and glory as Brachiano's Duchess and brother-in-law bring them only to destruction. Like Brachiano, they are unable to find any place where they will be secure. Flamineo kills his brother, and says he will go seek sanctuary, but there is no sanctuary in his world (V.ii.18). Brachiano repays him by requiring him to beg pardon for this crime anew every day (V.ii. 72-75), and after Brachiano is dead, Giovanni banishes Flamineo

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from his presence (V.iv.27-29). This brings Flamineo to despair, yet he would have been wise to have fled then, instead of going to seek reward of his sister. The final scene, in which Vittoria and Flamineo die, is a long and grotesquely brilliant demonstration that there is no true security in this world. Vittoria has retired to her own chamber to escape the place where Brachiano died. Flamineo violates the security of her chamber, turning it into a trap: FLA. What are you at your prayers? Give o're. VIT. How Ruffin? FLA. I come to you 'bout worldly businesse: Sit downe, sit downe: Nay stay, blouze, you may heare it, The dores are fast inough. (V.vi. 1-5) Still there is no security. The doors are not fast enough, and soon Lodovico and Gasparo find them: [FLA.] Here are two other Instruments. Enter Lod. Gasp. VIT. Helpe, helpe! FLA. What noise is that? hah? falce keies i'th Court. (V.vi. 167-169)

[disguised].

This bizarre sequence has its culmination in the entrance of Giovanni and the English Ambassador: ENG. E. This way, this way, breake ope the doores, this way. LOD. Ha, are wee betraid? (V.vi. 277-278) Everywhere a person turns in the world of the white devil he is insecure. Like Flamineo he must beg his life anew each day. Worldliness is such corruption that banishment from it may really be an escape, while escape from a place secluded from the world may really be banishment. The places supposed to be sanctuaries turn out to be traps, and the seeming traps might be sanctuaries, if only the people knew. The escape to possible sanctuary that they know the least about is the way to death. Because they utterly lack any true faith in God, in love and life, they are denied any hope in death. To their eyes death is at best a darkness, a mist, a silence, an escape into non-being; at worst,

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it seems a path to confinement and torment. As in their lives they have been sumptuously whited and painted sepulchers, so in their deaths these proud great ones will be buried by the white devil of the church in splendid sepulchers, but there will be no more security for them there than anywhere else in their world; their reality will still be a hideous charnel. Nor will the poor ones like Marcello find security from the lupa in the grave: COR. Call for the Robin-Red-brest and the wren, Since ore shadie groves they hover, And with leaves and flowres doe cover The friendlesse bodies of unburied men. Call unto his funerall Dole The Ante, the field-mouse, and the mole To reare him hillockes, that shall keepe him warme, And (when gay tombes are rob'd) sustaine no harme, But keepe the wolfe far thence, that's foe to men, For with his nailes hee'l dig them up agen. (V.iv. 89-98)

In life and in death these people are the same, "the friendlesse bodies of unburied men". They are the living dead, who, like Flamineo, must finally recognize that their lives have been black charnels (V.vi.270), who can only "cease to greive, cease to be fortunes slaves,/ Nay cease to dye by dying" (V.vi.252-253). And in life and death alike these people are in hell, for, as Donne writes, "That is the state of hell it self, Eternall dying, and not dead." 3 The fifth Act is a sustained agony of despair as Webster's people pass from their death in life into the second death of death.4 It is the culmination of all the banishments and excommunications of the play, the interpretation of them: "Banisht!" "de spero" - excluded from hope. The most profound fear of any man is the fear of exclusion, of being cut off forever from others, from God, or from hope. The individualist who sets his values and his will above those of the community wills his own separation from others and so brings on his own exclusion and 3

Sermons, ed. cit., IV, 52, in a sermon preached at Whitehall, March 8,

1621/2.

4

Compare Baldini's analysis of Act V: pp. 95-150.

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despair. In Christian terms, individualism of this sort is the direct result of pride, the deadliest of the seven deadly sins and the key that unlocks the door for the other six. Pride makes a man presume to set himself above other men and above the moral order. And this same presumptuous pride leads a m a n to despair, as Donne and Adams both tell u s : 5 Flashes of presumption a calamity will quench, but clouds of desperation calamities thicken upon us; But even in this inordinate dejection thou exaltest thy self above God, and makest thy worst better than his best, thy sins larger then his mercy.« In Gods just punishment Desperation is the reward of Presumption. They that earst feared too little, shall now feare too much. Before they thought not of God's Justice, now they shall not conceive his mercy. Consciences that are without remorse, are not without horror. It is the kindnesse which presumptuous sinne doth the heart, to make it at last despaire of forgivenesse.7 The sinner who dies in despair is certain to go to hell, and Christians have traditionally imagined hell not only in terms of undying death but in terms of eternal banishment and despair: depart from me, ye wicked - abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Thus Romeo cries out to Friar Laurence: . . . 'banished'? Ο friar, the damned use that word in hell; Howling attends i t ! . . . (Ill.iii. 46-48) Similarly Donne writes that the worst aspect of damnation is " t o be secluded eternally, eternally, eternally from the sight of God". A sinner is "a banished, and a damned creature." 8 T h e whole pattern of individualism leading to banishment has 5

See Helen Gardner, "Milton's 'Satan' and the Theme of Damnation in Elizabethan Tragedy", Essays and Studies, new series, I (1948), 46-66. 6 Sermons, ed. cit., Ill, 303, in a sermon preached at Lincoln's Inn, probably during Trinity Term, 1621. 7 "Presumption Running into Despair" (London, 1618), ed. cit., p. 753. See DLC, Il.iii.154-155: "He that is without feare, is without hope,/ And sins from presumption"; also see Chapter XI below. 8 Sermons, ed. cit., V, 266-267, in a sermon preached to the Earl of Carlisle, probably in 1622. See The "Summa Theologica" of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans, the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd ed. (London, 1927), VII, 466, and the discussion of the pain of loss and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus in Douglas Cole's Suffering and Evil in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Princeton, 1962), pp. 191-243.

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its archetype in Satan, the proud rebel against the Godhead itself. Some form of Lodovico's "Banisht!" was from earliest medieval times the sign of his arrival in hell. Thus in one of the very early mystery plays, the York Creation and the Fall of Lucifer, scene two opens with this speech of "Lucifer Deiabolus in Inferno": Owte owte! harrowe! helples, slyke hote at es here, This es a dongon of dole that I am to dyghte.9 Brachiano dies in self-created banishment if ever a man did: FLA. To see what solitarinesse is about dying Princes! As heretofore they have unpeopled Townes; divorst friends, and made great houses unhospitable: so now, 6 justice! where are their flatterers now? (V.iii. 42-45) Brachiano's death dramatizes traditional Christian ideas of despair and damnation. At death, it was thought, the devil makes his greatest effort to bring a sinner to despair, in order to prevent his salvation at the very end. Demons dance about the dying man, making horrible faces and taunting him with his sins,10 as Lodovico and Gasparo do to Brachiano (V.iii.150-169). This torment along with the "tyrannical tortures" of despair itself are "an Epitome of hell".11 The despairer usually becomes irrationally fearful in the face of death: 1 2 BRA. On paine of death, let no man name death to me, It is a word infinitely terrible — (V.iii. 39-40) After these lines Brachiano never utters a sane word. The effect of the poison working its way into his brain is to make him rave fearfully in words whose demonic substance and quality show that he is among the damned: [BRA.] Yonder's a fine slave come in now. FLA. Where? BRA. Why there. " English Miracle Plays Moralities and Interludes, ed. Alfred W. Pollard, 8th ed. (Oxford, 1927), p. 5, lines 97-98. 10 Spencer, pp. 10-11. 11 Burton, Anatomy, ed. cit., p. 946. 12 Adams, "Presumption Running into Despair", ed. cit., pp. 753-755.

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In a blew bonnet, and a paire of breeches With a great codpeece. Ha, ha, ha, Looke you his codpeece is stucke full of pinnes With pearles o'th head of them. Doe not you know him? FLA. No, my Lord. BRA. Why 'tis the Devill. I know him by a great rose he weares on's shooe To hide his cloven foot. He dispute with him. Hee's a rare linguist.... (V.iii. 97-106) Brachiano's final cry at the end of his torture by Lodovico and Gasparo is "Vittoria! Vittoria!" (V.iii. 170). These words make us feel the glory of his damnation, for they attest the overwhelming power of his passion for her, but they also make us feel the fact of his damnation, for the love and she are both deeply criminal. This dual effect is one Webster has prepared for in this scene by having the dying Brachiano speak of the magnitude of his passion, but in terms of worldly magnitude, and by having him recognize, in his madness, that Vittoria is essentially criminal: . . . Ο thou strong heart! There's such a covenant 'tweene the world and it, [Enter Giov.] They're loath to breake. GIO. Ο my most loved father! BRA. Remove the boy away, Where's this good woman? had I infinite worlds They were too little for thee. Must I leave thee? (V.iii. 14-19) [BRA.]

VIT.

Ο my good Lord! BRA. Away, you have abus'd mee. You have convayd coyne forth our territories; Bought and sold offices; oppres'd the poore, And I nere dreampt on't. Make up your accountes; lie now bee mine owne Steward.... . . . what's shee? FLA. Vittoria, my Lord. BRA. Ha, ha, ha. Her haire is sprinckled with Arras powder, That makes her looke as if she had sinn'd in the Pastrie. (V.iii. 82-86, 117-119) Although it was thought that a great fear of death usually accompanies despair, as in the case of Brachiano, it was also recognized that there is another pattern of despair in which the sufferer exhibits something resembling courage in the face of death. The presumptuous sinner has never cared for the reality

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of life; he has insisted on deforming it to suit himself, and at the last he may welcome death in suicide or at the hand of others as a final escape from it.13 The hope of despair is that death will bring oblivion. Despairers "would prize and embrace" death "as the best happinesse that ever saluted them, if, like beasts, they might perish to nothing".14 Flamineo, who has consistently striven to reduce all men, including himself, to beasts, suffers this kind of despair in his reiterated wish to "cease to dye by dying", his hope that he is "ith way to study a long silence" (V.vi.253, 204; see also 205-207, 273-274). In his infernal aspiration Flamineo has sought an exclusive place in the world by detaching himself from all his real human relationships. Most of the time he is content to be a spectator or commentator, neglecting those actions he should take if he understood his real relation to what is happening. He destroys his family, delivering his sister to Brachiano, killing his brother, and so driving his mother to madness. In killing Marcello he links himself with Cain, the first man banished from society (V.vi.15). He is all for himself, absorbed in his own perspective and his own career. He thinks that to serve the self he must divorce the self from all moral considerations, losing sight of the fact that the self in isolation becomes blind, that to seek the self is to lose it: . . . I doe not looke Who went before, nor who shall follow mee; Noe, at my seife I will begin and end. "While we looke up to heaven wee confound "Knowledge with knowledge, ο I am in a mist. (V.vi. 256-260)

This attitude is of "the nature of the wicked", says Thomas Adams: they are all for themselves, they are borne to themselves, live themselves (so let them die for them selves, and go to Hell for themselves. 15 13 14 15

Burton, Anatomy, ed. cit., p. 947. Adams, "Presumption Running into Despair", ed. cit., p. 759. "The White Devil", ed. cit., p. 41.

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111

Of all the legions of the damned, the white devils suffer the most extremely horrible kind of banishment. By pretending to be other than what they are, they double their isolation, as Adams says: An hypocrite is hated of all, both God and m a n . . . . miserable man, destitute of both refuges, shut out both from Gods and the worlds dores. Neither God nor the Devill loves thee, thou hast been true to none of them both, and yet most false (of all) to thy selfe. . . . An hypocrite is in greatest difficultie to be cured. Why should the Minister administer physicke to him that is perfectly sound?1«

A white devil loses all self, all true character and personality, behind the mask of his persona. Flamineo loses himself in the role of self-appointed and self-seeking chorus, and Vittoria, too, loses herself in self-dramatization. Her whole career depends on her beauty and her ability as an actress, and so it is natural that she has become obsessed with her beautiful mask. She cannot love others because she is too much in love with herself: it is noteworthy that she uses a Narcissan image when she describes the effect of her beauty: VIT.

VIT.

Condemne you me for that the Duke did love mee? So may you blame some faire and christall river For that some melancholike distracted man, Hath drown'd himselfe in't. MON. Truly drown'd indeed. Summe up my faults I pray, and you shall finde, That beauty and gay clothes, a merry heart, And a good stomacke to [a] feast, are all, All the poore crimes that you can charge me with.

(Ill.ii. 211-218) Vittoria drowns in her own beauty, but it must be remembered that she does so in an effort to flee from the black charnel behind her mask, from the death that waits beneath the fair surface of that crystal river. Desperately, desperately she banishes herself into a life of appearances in order to escape her share of the responsibility for the evils of her world. Thus she is caught in webs of her own weaving. Her efforts to escape the horror within lead her to make the more of her beauty and the appearances ·« Ibid., pp. 46-47.

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she can create by acting. The more she devotes herself to these, the further she gets from having any true inner life; and the more prone she is to forget the inner life, the more ready she is to perform evil. And so the psychological pattern of this character who epitomizes the play's theme is the same as the cycle of flight and entrapment, banishment and despair, that is the pattern of the play as a whole. Webster's greatest achievement in The White Devil is the power and the truth with which he has dramatized the despairing abandonment of the true self as a ghastly illusion of life masking a reality of death. Vittoria, Flamineo, and Brachiano are never more alive than when they are dying, and this is the sign that their lives themselves are defined by death. Whether in their ghastly humor, their defiant courage, their grotesque madness, or their bitter weariness they have the lurid and frenzied vitality that is precisely what we expect to find in the friendless bodies of unburied men. Webster has brought such great sympathy and insight to the creation of his characters that their entrapment in despair, for all its grotesque, farcical qualities, is still profoundly tragic, moving us to terror and pity.17 But we must remember to distinguish between this sort of dramatic sympathy and moral approval. Webster pities and has profound insight into the inferno of despair, and he sees that despair, like the evil it accompanies, is an extremely important part of human experience, but this does not at all imply that he agrees with his characters that the virtues of despair are the only ones possible in a world devoted to death. Instead, that belief is what Webster exposes as the depth of the horror a man comes to when he embraces the World, the Flesh, or the Devil. 17

In "Tragic effect in Webster's The White Devil", SEL, V, No. 2 (1965), 345-361, George F. Sensabaugh argues that "Webster obviously wished to involve his audience in a tragic experience, but the satiric stance he periodically assumed pushed the spectators away from even the most moving and heroic scenes", but what his essay has shown is that Flamineo and others have assumed a satiric stance, and my view is that for Webster part of the tragedy of such characters is that they are so alienated as to mock alike good and evil, life and death.

VI CONCLUSIONS ON THE WHITE

DEVIL

In scene after scene Webster presents Vittoria first as the whitest of white devils and then goes on to reveal her inner blackness. In the last scene he gives us the climax of this movement in a virtual fusion of white and black in the parallel of Vittoria and Zanche in death. This movement from white to black and then to a fusion of white with black is also the movement of the play as a whole, and in order to make the play's structure clear I now want to review this pattern and others linked with it. The play's typical scene begins with dissimulation and ends in open passion or evil, as the fine appearances of World, Flesh, and Devil lead Camillo, Isabella, Brachiano, Vittoria, and the others to the black reality of the sepulcher. And this pattern governs not only individual scenes but also the groups of scenes that make up the two major movements of the plot. The action begun in the first three scenes, introducing the white devils of World, Flesh and Devil in parallel, leads to the black evil of the plot to murder Isabella and Camillo. But in the murders themselves there is a curious fusion of the black and the white: the murders are obviously evil, yet they come masked in innocentseeming circumstances and they are staged in stylized dumbshows that keep us at a distance from their brutal black reality. The action of the rest of the play is dominated by the revenge of Monticelso and Francisco for these murders, and in this revenge there is again a movement from the white to the black and then to a fusion of the white with the black. From the first time we meet them in Il.i there is the suggestion that Monticelso is to play the white devil to Francisco's black. Near the beginning of that scene, just before they start their attack on Brachiano, Francisco asks Monticelso to speak for him because his heart is

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CONCLUSIONS ON 'THE WHITE DEVIL'

too full, and Monticelso's pious oratory acts as a white mask for Francisco's black wrath, which finally emerges when Brachiano invites him to speak up (II.i.22-84). After the murders of Isabella and Camillo, this relation of Monticelso to Francisco as white to black continues. Webster has them learn of the murders one at a time, so that Monticelso's revenge for Camillo is nearly completed before Francisco's for Isabella really begins. Monticelso's revenge is the masterwork of Luther's pious white devil: he perverts justice in the arraignment of Vittoria, he incites Francisco to seek revenge for Isabella, and he excommunicates Brachiano and Vittoria. After this he disappears forever from the action on just the right note: his completely straight-faced denunciation of Lodovico for wanting revenge. As Monticelso's revenge is whited to the end, Francisco's leads to a fusion of the white and the black. From the time when he learns of his sister's death he is in reality "nothing but her grave", as he says (III.ii.350). But whereas until this moment he has been barely able to control his black wrath, he now begins to whiten his sepulcher. He emerges as a great dissembler, and we see him actually beat Monticelso at this game in IV.i, when he smoothly pretends not to want revenge for Isabella in order to keep Monticelso from knowing of his plans. He dissembles again in IV.iii, when he ingeniously sends gold to Lodovico in Monticelso's name to convince him that Monticelso is behind the revenge just after Monticelso himself had nearly persuaded Lodovico to give up his part in the affair! In Act V the role of Francisco is surely one demonstration that the reality of the white devil is blackness and the grave. Here is a masterly fusion of the white devil and the black: for the black murder of Brachiano, Francisco disguises himself as a Moor, so that the dissembling whiteness of the white devil is in fact blackness. In this movement from white to black and finally to a fusion of white and black, the murderous action of Monticelso and Francisco against Brachiano and Vittoria parallels the earlier murderous action of those two against Camillo and Isabella. The underlying unity of all the play's evils is suggested in this parallel, as well as in the parallels of banishment and despair and of

CONCLUSIONS ON 'THE WHITE DEVIL'

115

World, Flesh, and Devil. This unity of evil is implicit in Luther's writings on the perversion of all goodness in the world because the world is Satan's kingdom: all the evils have their source in Monticelso's Church. Yet also Vittoria's Flesh is a source of evil, since all the deaths are caused by her affair with Brachiano. And the World of Brachiano and Francisco is still another source of evil, tempting Vittoria and Flamineo. In the final analysis the structure of evil is shown to be very complex: each of the evils causes the others and is itself caused by them. There is another important pattern unifying the characters and pointing to the essential similarity of the evil forces behind the initial murders and the final murders, and that is the great number of parallels between the party of Francisco and Monticelso and the party of Brachiano and Vittoria. Most of these link Francisco with Brachiano, Isabella with Vittoria, and Lodovico with Flamineo, but some simply parallel the family of Vittoria with the family of Isabella. Francisco and Brachiano are both great dukes, only Francisco as Duke of Florence is the greater, and he tells us he very nearly controls Brachiano's court through his friends there (IV.iii.79-80). To get his revenge, Francisco reverses their relative heights in the world, going in disguise as a Moorish warrior to attend the wedding of Brachiano and Vittoria. There one of his speeches shows Francisco's awareness of his closeness to Brachiano: What difference is betweene the Duke and I? no more than betweene two brickes: all made of one clay. Onely't may bee one is plac't on the top of a turret; the other in the bottom of a well by meere chance; if I were plac't as high as the Duke, I should sticke as fast; make as faire a shew; and beare out weather equally. (V.i. 106-111) In this same scene black Francisco and black Zanche begin a grim parody of Brachiano's involvement with his white devil Vittoria; Brachiano and Vittoria are married just before the scene begins, and at its end Zanche is wooing Francisco. As this parody continues, its parallels with the affair of Brachiano and Vittoria multiply (see especially the end of V.iii and my discussion on pp. 83-84).

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Isabella and Vittoria are paralleled when Francisco and then Marcello say they wish they had seen their sisters dead before seeing them go with Brachiano 1 (II.i.66-69 and III.i.32-34). Marcello, dying by his brother's hand, cries out that some evils taint the entire family of a wicked person, an idea similar to Lodovico's statement at the end of the play that Giovanni is tainted by his uncle's crime (V.ii.20-24 and V.vi.284-287). Flamineo kills his own brother, and Monticelso says he would stake his brother's life for revenge (II.i.388). The parallel of Flamineo with Lodovico is the most obvious of all. One is the tool of Brachiano, the other of Francisco: the one panders to his master's lust, the other to his master's wrath, both in hopes of advancement in the courtly world. A s railing, cynical satirists they are a match for each other, and when Flamineo is not on stage, Lodovico can take over the job of keeping up a running commentary on the action (see especially V.iii.220-262). They have a wit-duel with each other in Ill.iii that carries forward in a different key the duel of Monticelso and Vittoria in Ill.ii. As the duel is about to begin, their positions are shown to be quite similar: LOD. [aside} This was Brachiano's Pandar, and 'tis strange That in such open and apparant guilt Of his adulterous sister, hee dare utter So scandalous a passion. I must wind him. Enter Flamineo. FLA. [aside] How dares this banisht Count returne to Rome, His pardon not yet purchast? I have heard The deceast Dutchesse gave him pension, And that he came along from Padua I'th' traine of the yong Prince. There's somewhat in't. Phisitians, that cure poisons, still doe worke With counterpoisons. (Ill.iii. 50-60) Lodovico was banished at the beginning of the play, and Flamineo is in effect banished when he is made a "Court ejectment" by Giovanni after the death of Brachiano (V.iv.41). In suffering banishment Lodovico is paralleled not only with Flamineo, but with just about everyone in his world, as I have shown. Symbolically, at least, Lodovico is a central figure, for 1

Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions, p. 188.

CONCLUSIONS ON 'THE WHITE DEVIL'

117

his voice sets the tone of evil at the beginning and the end of the action, and his career epitomizes the variety of evil in the world of the play. He is linked with Flamineo in being overcome by the World, with Brachiano in being overcome by the Flesh (he lusts for Isabella), and with Francisco in being overcome by the Devil of wrathful revenge. Other sinners may be destroyed by the World, the Flesh, or the Devil, but only Lodovico is clearly the victim of all three. Such is Webster's perception of the anatomy of evil. Through pattern after pattern he gives us a sense of unity within variety in the way all of man's impulses work together for evil when he embraces false values. Evil begets evil and evil destroys evil, and when all the hectic action ceases, evil is still very much in command of the world, for Monticelso is Pope and Francisco is still the great Duke of Florence. When we look at Vittoria against the background of evil, we must finally see her as Webster does, as a terrifying but exciting woman, a magnificent actress, and a great tragic figure. We may deny that her actions have any value for life, but we cannot deny her a certain grandeur in her effort to escape inner horror by devoting herself to a life of appearances. Webster is not so strongly in reaction against Renaissance individualism that his imagination is not fascinated by it. Indeed, I think that Webster's imagination is equally excited by the traditional Christian symbols and by the disintegration of the Christian order under the impact of historical change. In his mind the symbols still live, but their perversion is one of their most vivid manifestations in his world. The inability of goodness to triumph in The White Devil is often cited as evidence that Webster rejected the Christian idea of providence. Actually, however, the inability of human effort alone to conquer evil in this world had from the beginning been part of Christian belief. Luther, for example, surely does not deny the doctrine of providence when he writes of the world as the kingdom of the devil. In the Christian view, goodness may suffer martyrdom in this world, but it has the hope of heaven. This is the hope that sustains the Duchess of Malfi in her tragedy.

VII THE DUCHESS OF MALFI

Th'heaven ore my head, seemes made of molten brasse, The earth of flaming sulphure, yet I am not mad. (TV.ii.27-28)

The White Devil is negative, a searing revelation of the evil that hides under the fair surface of worldly life, and Webster felt the need to go on in his next play and explore the possibility of goodness in life. The Duchess of Malfi is the result, a play extending the themes and materials of the earlier play and also transcending them by evoking pity and terror for the fate of good as well as for the fate of evil. In The White Devil positive values were only implied through contrast with the evils exposed. In The Duchess of Malfi the evils are still present, but stripped of their masks and clearly false, and the positive value of true integrity and of life itself are given full development. The world of the second play, like that of the first, is an Italianate hell, but whereas in The White Devil the hell was created realistically for the most part, in The Duchess of Malfi Webster's technique becomes more symbolic: the central part of the play, with its ghastly torments, is an epitome of hell in which the world is reduced to a dance of madmen. And at the end the devil's own child, Ferdinand, appears in his true shape as a mad wolf. The parallels between the evil worlds of the two plays are extensive and significant.1 Both worlds are dominated by a 1

Parallels between similar characters have been remarked by a number of critics. See Stoll, pp. 93-94; Una Ellis-Fermor, pp. 176-178: FlamineoLodovico-Bosola, Monticelso-Cardinal, Francisco-Ferdinand, ZancheVittoria-Julia, Isabella-Duchess, Camillo-Castruchio.

'THE DUCHESS OF MALFI'

119

wrathful Duke and a dissembling Cardinal, symbolizing the union of church and state for evil in the kingdom of Satan, a union made the stronger in The Duchess of Malfi by virtue of the Duke and Cardinal being brothers who are twins in quality (I.i.173174). In both plays the evil Cardinals dominate an evil Roman Catholic Church to banish and to imprison and destroy the heroine. And in both plays this abuse of power by churchmen is part of a larger pattern showing the perversion of religion in the kingdom of Satan. The pattern of perverted rituals in The White Devil finds a counterpart in the later play's repeated suggestion that the nearer to the Church one gets, the farther he is from God. This pattern is faintly suggested by the passing allusion to the legend of Winifred, the famous Welsh saint beheaded by her would-be rapist in a churchyard; by the gift of the citadel of St. Bennet to Julia, the Cardinal's concubine; and by the discovery of the mad Ferdinand, in his lycanthropy, "in a lane/ Behind St. Markes Church, with the leg of a man / Upon his shoulder" (I.i.445, V.i.32-36, V.ii.14-16). The pattern is strongly suggested by the pretense of Bosola, when he is about to murder the Duchess, that he is the bellman, and it is obvious in the false, dissembling pilgrimages to religious shrines, in which we see that it is literally true that the nearer the false pilgrims approach their goals, the farther they are from God. Julia makes a pretended pilgrimage to Rome in order to be available to the Cardinal (II.iv.1-7). The Cardinal makes a pilgrimage to Loretto to lay aside his holy appearance and reveal the worldly reality beneath, and there he meets his sister, the Duchess: 1. PILG.

2.

PILG.

1. PILG.

I have not seene a goodlier Shrine then this, Yet I have visited many. The Cardinall of Arragon Is, this day, to resigne his Cardinals hat, His sister Duchesse likewise is arriv'd To pay her vow of Pilgrimage — I expect A noble Ceremony. No question: — They come.

Here the Ceremony of the Cardinalls enstalment, in the habit [of\ a Souldier: perform'd in delivering up his Crosse, Hat, Robes, and Ring, at the Shrine; and investing him with Sword, Helmet, Sheild, and

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'THE D U C H E S S OF MALFI'

Spurs: Then Antonio, the Duchesse, and their Children, (having presented themselves at the Shrine) are (by a forme of Banishment in dumbe-shew, expressed towards them by the Cardinall, and the State of AnconaJ banished... (IH.iv. 1-8 and s. d.) The Duchess finds that her pilgrimage to a holy shrine only brings her into the arms of her satanic brothers. This is the fittingly ironic result of the falseness of her pilgrimage: BOS.

DUCH.

Let me thinke: I would wish your Grace, to faigne a Pilgrimage To our Lady of Loretto, (scarce seaven leagues From faire Ancona) — so may you depart Your Country, with more honour, and your flight Will seeme a Princely progresse, retaining Your usuall traine about you. Sir, your direction Shall lead me, by the hand.

[CAR.] I do not like this jesting with religion, This faigned Pilgrimage. DUCH. Thou art a superstitious foole, Prepare us instantly for our departure: Past sorrowes, let us moderately lament them, For those to come, seeke wisely, to prevent them. (IILii. 352-360, 365-370) The Duchess thinks that to follow Bosola's advice is to act "wisely", but the event proves otherwise. As in The White Devil, we find that the opinion of wisedome is a foule tettor, that runs all over a mans body: if simplicity direct us to have no evill, it directs us to a happy being: For the subtlest folly proceedes from the subtlest wisedome . . . (Il.i. 81-84) Se//-confident Worldly wisdom of cunning, "subtle" plots and guileful measures to obtain security are all to no avail: Securitie some men call the Suburbs of Hell, Onely a dead wall b e t w e e n e . . . . (V.ii. 372-373) In The Duchess of Malfi, as in the earlier play, people may be murdered in their own palaces and are never secure from the

'THE D U C H E S S OF MALFI'

121

invasion of enemies even into their private chambers (III.v.122125). Ferdinand gets a false key to the Duchess's chamber, and steals in upon her at the very moment when she feels most gay and secure in love-banter with Antonio (III.i.95-99, III.ii.70ff). Later this has a parallel in V.ii, when Bosola invades the lovenest of Julia and the Cardinal. In both The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi the culmination of this exposure of the false confidence of "security" comes in the final scene, where the idea is carried to grotesque lengths. In The White Devil, first Flamineo breaks into Vittoria's chamber, then Lodovico, and finally Giovanni. In The Duchess of Malfi, the Cardinal, "wisely" wanting to conceal his own villainy, tells his friends not to come into the courtyard even if he calls for help, and we see that he has outwitted himself when Bosola attacks him and his friends refuse to come to his aid. In the world of the Duchess, then, as in the world of The White Devil, appearances deceive: what appears to be near God may in reality be far from Him, and what appears to be wisdom and security may in reality be folly. Conversely, what is far from the Roman Church and appears to be folly may in reality be true holiness and wisdom: the marriage of the Duchess and Antonio, foolish by any of the standards of their world and explicitly lacking the sanction of the Church, is fruitful and spiritually true. Through this and other patterns I shall review later, Webster directly contrasts the good in the world of the Duchess with the evil of the world of both that play and The White Devil. This second contrast, between the good in the Duchess and the evil in The White Devil, may be seen in nearly every element of the plays, from their beginnings: LODOVICO. DELIO.

Banisht! (I.i. 1) You are wel-come to your Country (deere Antonio)