Jacobean Tragedy
THE QUEST FOR MORAL ORDER
By IRVING RIBNER
Designed as a companion volume to
Professor Ribner's Patterns in Shakespearian
Tragedy, this book applies the same critical
method to some of Shakespeare's most
important contemporaries.
The suggestion implied by the sub-title
is that the work of these dramatists can
profitably be studied as an attempt to
find some sort of moral order in the uni-
verse in the absence or weakening of the
religious sanction. The pursuit of this
thesis involves the closest examination of
the texts and throws incidentally a great
deal of light on the plays as plays.
The author is Professor of English in the Uni-
versity of Tulane.
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Jacobean Tragedy
DATE DUt
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by the same author
PATTERNS IN SHAKESPEARIAN TRAGEDY
THE ENGLISH HISTORY PLAY IN THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE
Jacobean Tragedy
THE QUEST FOR MORAL ORDER
by Irving Ribner
Methua & Co Ltd
36 ESSEX STREET LONDON WC2.
First published in 1962
<c) 1962 by Irving ItLibner
'Printed in Great Britain by
Ebem^er Bay Us and Son Ltd, Worcester and London
Catalogue No. 2/4911/10
For only by breasting in full the storm
and cloud of life, breasting it and
passing through it and above it, can
the dramatist who feels the weight of
mortal things liberate himself from the
pressure, and rise, as we all seek to
rise, to content and joy.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
KANSAS CTY<MO.> PUBUC L.BRARY
, 6854799
FOR
CLIFFORD AND JONATHAN
Contents
Preface page xi
i Introduction *
2, George Chapman 19
3 Thomas Heywood 5
4 Cyril Tourneur 72.
5 John Webster 97
6 Thomas Middleton 123
7
I 77
Preface
In Patterns in Shakespearian Tragedy I suggested that to be truly
great tragedy must spring from the artist's moral concern,
his need to come to terms with the fact of evil in the world,
and out of his exploration of disaster to arrive at some compre-
hensive vision of the relation of human suffering to human joy.
I suggested also that the great ages of tragedy have been those in
which an established system of values was being challenged by a
new scepticism, and that Shakespeare was able to effect his tragic
reconciliation by affirming in poetic terms the validity of his age's
Christian humanism. His tragedies lead to a sense of order, justice
and divine purpose in the universe.
I propose in the following pages to explore the manner in
which Shakespeare's fellow dramatists, each in his own way, met
the same challenge of a growing Jacobean scepticism and dis-
enchantment with traditional values. The writers of tragedy I
have chosen to consider are those who I believe most seriously
attempted the kind of resolution of the problem of mankind's
relation to the forces of evil in the world at which Shakespeare
aimed. None succeeded in the same way, but the tragedies they
wrote are all conditioned by this quest for moral order, and when
they are examined in these terms they reveal new dimensions. This
does not imply that they may not be studied with profit in other
ways,
Like all who venture to write in this area, I have been pro-
foundly indebted to the late Professor Una M. Ellis-Fermor's
Jacobean Drama., and the reader will perceive also that I have been
strongly influenced by Miss M. C. Bradbrook's Themes and
Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy and Professor F. P. Wilson's
Elizabethan and Jacobean. When my work was in final draft,
xi
xii Jacobean Tragedy
The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy by Robert Ornstein was
published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Although Pro-
fessor Ornstein and I approach the subject through different
avenues and with different premisses and come usually to quite
different conclusions, we are both concerned with the moral value
of Jacobean tragedy. I regret that I did not see his work in time
to make more use of it, but I have tried to indicate in my notes
some of our areas of agreement and, more often, disagreement.
For my references to specific plays it has been difficult to find
texts of a uniform reliability. I have been able to use the excellent
"Revels Plays' editions under the general editorship of Professor
Clifford Leech for The Changeling (ed. N. W, Bawcutt, London,
1958) and The White Devil (ed. J. R. Brown, London, 1960). For
Middleton's Women 'Beware Women I have used the edition by
A. H. Bullen (London, 1885), and for the plays of George Chap-
man I have relied upon the editions of the late T. M. Parrott
(London, 1910 and 1914). For The Duchess of Malfi I have
modernized the spelling of F. L. Lucas's 1958 edition, based upon
his own 1927 monumental edition of Webster's complete plays.
For A Woman Killed With Kindness I have used the Mermaid
edition by A. Wilson Verity (London, 1888), and for The Rape of
ILucrece I have modernized the edition by Allan Holaday (Urbana,
111., 1950). For the Cyril Tourneur plays I have modernized the
text of Allardyce Nicoll (London, 1929), and for the John Ford
plays that of Henry de Vocht (Louvain, 1927). To facilitate
reference, I have retained the line numberings of the particular
editions I have used. I am grateful to the editors of JELH,
Modern language Review, The Tulane Drama Review and Tulane
Studies in English for permission to reprint some portions of the
book which were printed in more tentative form while the work
was in progress.
The earliest portions of this book in time of composition were
read to a highly critical group of undergraduates in Miss Enid
Welsford's sitting-room in Cambridge in the Spring of 1959.
For the comments of all my listeners, and particularly those of
Miss Welsford, I have continued to be grateful.
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
r 1 7 he most important writer of tragedy in the Jacobean
I era, of course, is William Shakespeare. Not only do
JL such plays as Othello, ILear, Macbeth represent the highest
reaches tragedy has attained in any age by the perfection with
which they mirror a vision of man's relation to his universe, but
the plays of Shakespeare served also as models for his Jacobean
contemporaries to emulate. Beaumont and Fletcher, Heywood,
Webster and Ford all reveal the influence of their master. But
Shakespeare, while he taught his contemporary dramatists much
of their craft, is still not one of them. While they imitate his
language and ape his situations, the writers of tragedy in the early
years of the seventeenth century generally find it difficult to accept
without question the view of man's position in the universe which
gives to Shakespeare's greatest tragedies their most significant
form.
Thomas Heywood is one exception. Conservative like Shake-
speare, he continued to espouse throughout his career a view of
the universe as the harmonious creation of an ever-loving God,
the parts of creation observing order and degree, with every
element enjoying its proper function as part of the divine plan.
Man was at the centre of the universe, the noblest work of God,
his life guided and controlled by the power of divine providence.
In such a view of the world evil was real and active, and Heywood
like Shakespeare is not afraid to portray its operation, but the
means of overcoming evil are always available to man, and
although sinners like Macbeth might suffer damnation, the move-
ment of the cosmos was towards a constant rebirth of good out of
evil. The end of tragedy written in terms of such a cosmic view
was always reconciliation, with the forces of evil at least
z Jacobean Tragedy
temporarily vanquished in spite of the horror they have wrought.
In Patterns in Shakespearian Tragedy I have tried to suggest that
Shakespeare's tragedies represent successive attempts to embody
in drama steadily more comprehensive visions of the eternal con-
flict of man against the forces of evil in the world, so as to lead to
an affirmation of order and design in the universe, and that they do
this in terms of the optimistic Christian humanism of the early
Renaissance which stressed always the dignity of man and the
providence of God. 1
But Shakespeare wrote his profoundest plays in an age when
their philosophical assumptions already were beginning to appear
anachronistic, when Christian humanism was losing its domi-
nance in the more thoughtful minds, and newer, more pessimistic
notions of man's position in the universe were gaining supremacy.
The seventeenth century is one in which man, as R P. Wilson
has written, Revised his conception of the external universe and
of his relation to it, revised also his conception of himself and of
the powers of his mind. . . . Where the emphasis had been upon
order and degree, hierarchy and discipline, man's duty to God
and the Prince, some now placed it on rights - the rights of the
individual conscience, of criticism, of reason.' 2 It is an age out
of which finally was to emerge in triumph at the end of the
century the new belief in progress and human perfectibility which
Francis Bacon had heralded, and it was to be the true beginning of
our modem era, but the seventeenth century had to go first
through a period of doubt, confusion, and profound pessimism.
The Jacobean dramatists do not reflect the new scientific optimism
of Bacon, although in Webster's emphasis upon the dignity of
human life in spite of the world's corruption there may be some
suggestion of what finally is to come. Jacobean tragedy more
generally reflects the uncertainty of an age no longer able to
x $ee Herschel Baker, The Dignity of Man (Cambridge, Mass., 1947); Douglas
Bush, The Renaissance and English Humanism (Toronto, 1939); Hardin Craig, The
Enchanted Glass (New York, 1936); E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture
(London, 1943).
8 Seventeenth Century Prose (Berkeley, Calif., 1960), p. i. See also Wilson's brilliant
analysis of the cleavage between the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras in Elizabethan
and Jacobean (Oxford, 1945). Perhaps the most comprehensive study of the decline of
Christian humanism in the seventeenth century is Herschel Baker, The Wars of Truth
(Cambridge, Mass., 1952).
Introduction 3
believe in the old ideals, searching almost frantically for new ones
to replace them, but incapable yet of finding them.
The early seventeenth century is the age of paradox. This is a
dominant literary exercise of the time, developed in the best of
Jacobean prose, and a cardinal element in Its metaphysical
poetry. I have already indicated that Shakespeare, in his final
tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus., when he had
thoroughly explored the implications of his own Christian
humanism, came at last to a paradox which he could not resolve. 1
These final plays reveal a world in which man may be destroyed
by evils which are the inevitable concomitants of those very
virtues which make him great, and in which the lust of Antony or
the pride of Coriolanus - examples of vice in traditional terms -
may have an heroic quality to which we cannot help but give our
emotional acquiescence while we recognize the corruption of
divine order from which it springs and its utter sinfulness in
terms of traditional morality. Shakespeare brought his hero at
the end of Coriolanus to a point where he could not renounce sin
without also renouncing virtue. In these final plays of paradox,
and not in the great positive affirmations of Othello, 'Lear, and
Macbeth, Shakespeare reveals his affinity to the Jacobean dramatists
who were his fellows and successors.
We are not to assume that the tragedy of the Elizabethan period
was universally orthodox in its moral position. There has been
intellectual division and dissent in every era in human history,
and among the Elizabethan dramatists there was an important
tradition of scepticism whose leading exponent was Christopher
Marlowe. He had questioned the order and perfection of the
universe and the workings of divine providence in all his plays;
even in Dr faustus, with its outward framework of religious
belief and its morality play technique, Marlowe had protested
against a system of values which decreed damnation as the price
of knowledge and the power inherent in it. Professor Una M.
Ellis-Fermor has indicated the spirit of Marlovian tragedy, with
its steadily increasing sense of human limitations and its tone of
human defeat, as that which comes to dominate the Jacobean
era, and she has seen this c mood of spiritual despair' as the
1 See Patterns in Shakespearian Tra&edy (London, 1960), pp. 168-201.
4 Jacobean Tragedy
product of Marlowe's continuing exploration of the political
system of Niccolo Machiavelli. 1
Although Machiavelli had tried to divorce politics from ethics
as two separate areas of human concern, he did not entirely
succeed in doing so. The inevitable ethical implications of his
political creed tended to emphasize a new materialistic view of the
universe in direct opposition to the divinely oriented Christian
humanism of Richard Hooker and William Shakespeare, and this
new materialism, Miss Ellis-Fermor holds, fostered the spiritual
uncertainty of Jacobean tragedy. But the emergence of Machia-
velli in Italy in the early years of the sixteenth century is merely
one evidence of the spirit of scepticism which is as much a part of
the Renaissance as its Christian humanism. Bruno and Montaigne
exerted a wide influence as "well, and the new astronomy in the
early seventeenth century was a direct challenge to all which men
traditionally had believed about the permanence and immu-
tability of the heavens.
The brief career of Christopher Marlowe may serve as a kind
of index to the shifting currents of Renaissance thought. He came
up to Cambridge as a Parker Foundation scholar, destined for the
Anglican ministry and presumably committed to its doctrinal
position which he must have absorbed at the King's School in
Canterbury. After his wide reading of theology in the library at
Corpus Christi College, he seems to have turned to the new
Renaissance scepticism, and in his Tamburlaim we find an enthu-
siastic espousal of the premisses of Machiavelli, coupled with an
exuberance and faith in the potentialities of mankind. He breathes
the spirit of Renaissance vitality and optimism. But in the
second part of Tamburlaine we find akeady a painful awareness of
the limitations placed upon mankind by the very fact of mortality.
As he grows older his disillusion steadily increases until in
Edward II we find him rejecting his earlier faith in the fall of
Mortimer, 2 and if Dr Faustus is his final pky, as is now generally
1 The Jacobean Drama (London, 1936), pp. 1-5. See also Wilson, "Elizabethan and
Jacobean, pp. 100-1 ; Robert Ornstein, The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy
(Madison, Wis., 1960), pp. 24-31.
2 1 have dealt with these matters in 'Marlowe and Machiavelli', Comp* "Lit., VI
(1954), 549-56, and The English History Play in The Age of Shakespeare (Princeton,
1957), PP- 127-36-
Introduction 5
supposed, it may be also his most pessimistic statement of human
limitation and frustration. Marlowe began, in short, embracing
the new challenge to the old orthodoxy, and he ended disillusioned
with the new but still incapable of accepting the old. He arrived
at the spirit of negation and disillusion which is the mark of
Jacobean tragedy.
Seventeenth-century literature reflects this lack of spiritual
certainty in its concern with death, time, and mutability, and in
the pervasive spirit of melancholy already fully drawn in Shake-
speare's Hamlet, the subject for pseudo-scientific analysis in
Burton's Anatomy, and surviving in the quiet sadness of Ford's
'Broken Heart. There is a renewed interest in a notion which has
its roots in the waning of the Middle Ages, but which in the
seventeenth century becomes an important source of controversy
and a leading motif in literature: the idea that the world is in its
antiquity, nearing the end of a long period of progressive decay
which had begun with the fall of man, and rapidly approaching
total dissolution. It has been argued that the revival of this belief
owed much to the new astronomy. 1 The discovery in 1572 of a
new celestial body among the fixed stars led men to question the
very notion that there were fixed stars. The heavens no longer
appeared to be the immutable evidence of an unchanging, per-
fectly unified creation, in which the destiny of mankind, past and
future, could be read. The continuing discoveries of the astro-
nomers culminated in Galileo's discovery in 1612 of spots in the
sun, which seemed to indicate that the heavens themselves were
subject to decay. Dr Godfrey Goodman in 1616 proclaimed his
thesis of a decaying world in his widely influential The Fall of
Man, in which he related this decay to the fall of Adam and Eve
from Paradise, as Sir Walter Ralegh had related it some two years
before in his History of the World. Goodman was answered in 1627
by Dr George Hakewill in his finally more important work,
An Apology of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the
World, which espoused instead the idea of human progress.
1 George Williamson, 'Mutability, Decay and Seventeenth Century Melancholy,*
EUJ> 31 (1935), 121-50. See also D. C. Allen, 'The Degeneration of Man and
Renaissance Pessimism,* SP, XXXV (1938), 202-27; R. F. Jones, Ancients and
Moderns (St. Louis, Mo., 1936), a condensed version of which appears in The Seven-
teenth Century (Palo Alto, Calif., 1951), pp. 10-40,
6 Jacobean Tragedy
Hakewill's position finally was to triumph, but it is not a
position which is reflected in the tragedies of the period, for these
reflect a search for moral order in a world which seems in its
senility, giving constant evidence of death, decay, and eternal
change. In this fact Jacobean tragedy is not associated with that
movement in seventeenth-century thought which is best repre-
sented by HakewiR and Bacon. It is associated rather with the
despair for humanity which runs through Ralegh's History of the
World, the concern with death and decay and the corrosion of
time which are constant motifs in the poetry of John Donne, and
the melancholy tone of Sir Thomas Browne's Urn-Burial, which
has aptly been called the age's great funeral sermon for a world in
dissolution.
As part of this melancholy vision of human destiny, we find a
renewed interest in the ancient notion of the four ages of man,
of which every schoolboy read in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The
present is seen as the 'iron age', and the 'golden age' comes to
be identified with the period before the fall of Adam and Eve
from Paradise, when the forces making for decay and degenera-
tion had not yet been set in motion. There is a tendency also to
look back with nostalgia upon classical antiquity - long accorded
a special place by the Renaissance humanists - as a time when the
world was inhabited by a nobler race of men, less defiled and
vitiated by the process of deterioration. The dominant philosophy
of the Jacobean era comes to be one which had emerged in
different forms in the most pessimistic times of the ancient world,
in the Hellenistic period of Greece and in the Rome of the late*
emperors. This is the philosophy of stoicism, which was perhaps
most influentially proclaimed in the Renaissance by Justus Lipsius
in his De Constantia of 1583, a work which embraced the theory
of the world's deterioration and offered as the only means of
survival in such a world a stoic control of human emotions and a
consequent imperviousness to pain, with an awareness that the
destruction of the world was part of the inevitable scheme of
things. This work was translated into English by John StradHng.
It went through several editions and was widely influential in dis-
seminating the ideas both of the degeneration of the world and
of how man might live in spite of it.
Introduction j
These notions are reflected with a particular clarity in the
tragedies of George Chapman. His Bussj jyAmbou, as I shall try
to show in the following chapter, is based upon the assumption of
a degenerate decaying world in which virtue is incapable of
survival. To make his point Chapman uses the concept of the
"golden age' of prelapsarian perfection for Bussy reflects the
qualities of man in such an age, and his tragedy is the tragedy of
all of us who must live in a world where such virtues can no
longer exist. These motifs are repeated in the Byron plays, with
further emphasis upon the corroding force of the world's evil,
and with a slowly developing stoic insistence on the need for
authority to regulate a degenerate humanity. In The Revenge of
Bussj D'Ambois and Caesar and Pompej Chapman sacrifices every-
thing else in the plays to his need to proclaim, almost frantically,
the virtues of the stoic ideal. There is little stoicism in his final
play, The Tragedy ofChabot, but his theme is the inability of justice
to survive in a vitiated world, and the mood is that of the early
Bussy D'Ambois.
Chapman's career as a writer of tragedy may illustrate that
drive which produced also the greatest plays of the other drama-
tists with whom the following chapters will be concerned. It is a
drive to find a basis for morality in a world in which the tradi-
tional bases no longer seem to have validity. The greatest
tragedians of the Jacobean era seek in their various ways to dis-
cover some meaning in human suffering, some kind of affirmation
which can make life possible in a world which seems to give reason
only for despair. This quest, I believe, has been the traditional
mission of tragedy as an art form, and it is the goal which
Shakespeare in his way most triumphantly achieved. The drama-
tists we are here considering all seek ways of their own, and
although none is so successful as Shakespeare, in the moral
earnestness of their striving, and in the poetic imagination with
which they reflect the tensions of their world, we have what gives
to their works their distinctive character.
D. C. Allen has written that whereas human suffering in the
Middle Ages could be accepted as the road to heaven, the Jacobean
era could look upon it with no such certainty, and he has attri-
buted the pessimism of the age to the failure of Renaissance
8 Jacobean Tragedy
philosophers to create out of conflicting modes of thought a
synthesis as satisfying as that which Aquinas had shaped for
their medieval forebears. 1 This failure of synthesis is what ties the
Jacobean era to our own and gives to its literature so much imme-
diacy. It is a failure, we must not forget, which has not been
without its compensations, for it has made possible the idea of pro-
gress and enlarged the possibility of scientificadvanceandaperhaps
someday to be hoped for amelioration of the human condition.
Far as the seventeenth century may be from the Middle Ages
in this respect, the writers of the Jacobean period tend to fall back
upon motifs particularly characteristic of the medieval mentality.
Of this fact the two plays attributed to Cyril Tourneur may offer
most striking evidence. Here we have all the symbols traditionally
associated with medieval asceticism; the human skull, the charnel
house, the seven deadly sins paraded across the stage, the bitter
excoriations of lust and gluttony, and a world whose evils are
drawn with such brutal exaggeration that they would be merely
ludicrous could we not see them in terms of medieval contemptus
mundi as the author's way of arguing that man must place his
hopes in the world to come.
Tourneur is unique in his age for the moral fervour with which
he uses the drama to espouse a primitive Christianity more closely
related to that of the medieval world than to that of the seven-
teenth century. It is not, however, a philosophy entirely of escape
from the evils of the world, for implicit in it, as I shall try to show,
is the means of overcoming these evils. Tourneur employs the
weapons developed by medieval and Renaissance satirists, but his
final goal is something more than a plea for social improvement;
it is a larger vision of man's relation to the cosmos. His Chris-
tianity is of another sort than that of Thomas Heywood, with his
faith in the essential goodness of man and in the power of love
and divine providence to overcome the evils of the present world.
Tourneur's Christianity is based upon the assumption of a decay-
ing universe and a corrupt and degenerate humanity. His primary
concern is the salvation of the soul, as that part of man which can
survive and transcend the chaos of the world. Heywood also, as
A. Woman Killed with Kindness may superbly illustrate, is cotn-
1 SP, XXXV (1938), 202-27.
Introduction 9
mitted to the Christian thesis that the soul's fate must be man's
most significant concern.
Generally, the Jacobean dramatists are firmly Christian in thek
orientation, although their Christianity may take different forms,
as we may see by a comparison of Heywood with Tourneur. In
some dramatists such as Chapman, Christian belief receives so
little emphasis that the possibility of human salvation is virtually
excluded from the moral framework of thek plays. This is true
also of John Webster who, while he refers constantly to heaven
and hell in conventional terms and fills his plays with common-
places of Christian sentiment, nevertheless creates a world which
is incompatible with any system of religious belief. Webster is
nevertheless among the dramatists who succeed most notably in
thek search for moral order. He bases this order not upon divine
influence in human affaks, but in a celebration of the dignity of
human life which renders man superior to his world, and he finds
his basis for morality in the need to preserve this dignity which
separates man from beast at any cost, for it is man's only weapon
against the chaos of the world. In this attitude Webster is related
to that current of his age which points out of Jacobean uncertainty
and despair towards the future, for it was in terms of man's
human strength and initiative that men like Francis Bacon sought
to resolve thek age's dilemma.
Thomas Middleton, on the other hand, is as fully Christian in
his orientation as Heywood or Tourneur. His moral categories
are clear and precise. There is never any question of the reality of
evil or of its absolute distinction from good. Nor is there any
doubt of the punishment the sinner must suffer inevitably in a
world governed by an inexorable force of divine retribution. But
Middleton's is neither the optimistic religion of Heywood nor the
heaven-oriented Christianity of Tourneur. His vision is one of hell
and damnation. His world is gloomier far than that of Webster,
for he offers little hope for human triumph. There is, as I shall
suggest a Calvinistic strain in Middleton which grows more and
more marked as we move from The Changeling to Women "Beware
Women, In both plays he is concerned with the revelation of an evil
which man is incapable of escaping. His constant theme is man's
slow awareness of his own damnation, which he is able to portray
io Jacobean Tragedy
with a psychological realism unique in his age. In Women Beware
Women we seem to have a symbolic vision of the damnation of all
mankind.
The final dramatist with whom we will be concerned is John
Ford. His literary career begins near the end of the Jacobean
period, and his great tragedies all belong to the age of King
Charles. But Ford looks back as surely as any of his contemporaries
to the great Elizabethans for his inspiration, and among his plays
the echoes of Shakespeare's language are perhaps most frequent.
In Ford we find a melancholy nostalgia for the Elizabethan age
which he imitates but of which he never can be a part. His
tragedies reveal an acute awareness that the world of Shakespeare
is no more, and this awareness lends the characteristic note of
sadness to his plays. Ford reflects both the scepticism of his own
age and a longing for the kind of ordered moral universe which
this scepticism rejects. His tragic heroes stand literally between
two worlds, the one dead and die other incapable of being born,
and his tragic vision is a view of mankind incapable of achieving
the kind of moral order without which survival is impossible.
Ford's moral earnestness has not been sufficiently recognized by
his critics, although they have usually pointed to the negation
which is the only resolution of which he is capable.
The dramatists we are considering express their visions of man's
relation to his universe in different ways. Of primary importance
in all of them is the shaping of a particular story so that its parts,
in the usual manner of myth, will combine to give expression to a
moral statement, and so that particular characters may stand for
particular moral positions, and in their conflict with one another
opposing moral commitments be resolved. Some rely upon
specific moral preachment. Tourneur's Atbeisfs Tragedy carries
this method to an extreme, and this is one reason why this play is
so much inferior to The "Kevenger*s Tragedy, where the moral sub-
stance of the play is more perfectly conveyed in the total dramatic
structure. Tourneur relies heavily upon his poetic imagery to
emphasize his themes and to establish the tone of his plays, as
does Webster in both of his Italian tragedies and Middleton in
Women Beware Women, although The Changeling, a far greater play
in most respects, is comparatively weak in this. Heywood and
Introduction 1 1
Ford are barren in poetic imagery when compared to Webster or
Tourneur. Chapman shapes his total pky as a reflection of a
specific philosophical point of view. To this end, even in his most
successful plays, he sacrifices consistency of character and plot,
and he does not hesitate to insert long speeches of didactic com-
mentary to further his philosophical argument at the price of his
dramatic structure. His diction is complex and involuted, and he
packs his poetry with constantly recurring symbols, those of the
tree and the ship at sea being two of his favourites. These occur in
different contexts in almost every one of his plays. I propose in
the following chapters to examine the moral vision of six drama-
tists by means of a close analysis of selected plays, and each play
will be approached according to the particular technique upon
which the individual dramatists most heavily depend.
In spite of their diversity of technique, what all of these writers
of tragedy have in common is that their moral purposes are con-
trolling factors in their plays, shaping character, plot and poetry
so as to give expression to the presiding moral statement. This is
generally true of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy. Only in
Shakespeare, and occasionally in a dramatist like Middleton or
Webster, is a moral vision expressed in terms of characters who
have much resemblance to men and women we might have known
or in situations which are likely to have occurred. 1 1 shall stress
in the following chapters, as I stressed in "Patterns in Shakespearian
Tragedy, the conventional, symbolic dimension of the Jacobean
stage, with its roots in the medieval drama, and its constant use,
in the medieval manner, of the specific symbol to express the
universal truth. I will suggest that these dramatists, like Shake-
speare, are always more interested in mankind than in individual
men, and that they rarely hesitate to sacrifice the consistency of
character portraiture to the needs of the larger symbolic statement
which is the play as a whole. We cannot hope to understand the
horrors of Tourneur or Webster while we try to see their plays as
realistic accounts of events which might have occurred, and forget
that the painted skuH at the lecher's lips was a traditional symbol
with connotations deeply rooted in medieval iconography.
1 Wilson, 'Elizabethan and Jacobean, pp. 100-8, has stressed this point, as has
M. C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, 1935).
12 Jacobean Tragedy
I have been able to analyse in the following chapters only a
handful of the tragedies of the Jacobean era. There are some
powerful and important products of multiple authorship, such for
instance as The Witch of Edmonton, to which I have paid no
regard, largely because such works tend to reflect a vision which
is unlike that of any of the individual contributing authors, and
it is upon the total attitudes and developments of individual
dramatists that I wish to place my emphasis. There are also some
dramatists of towering importance in their time whose works I
have not chosen to dwell upon. It is impossible to overestimate
the influence of men like Marston, Jonson, Beaumont and
Fletcher. I do not believe, however, that any of the dramatists I
am excluding from full consideration ever succeeded in conveying
a total vision of the relation of mankind to the forces of evil in the
universe; the impulse behind their tragedies was smaller and
generally directed towards immediate social rather than larger
cosmic issues. Those dramatists upon whom I am concentrating
my attention all reflect a total - and therefore a truly moral -
vision of the destiny of mankind, and this vision they are capable
of conveying with the truth inherent in the greatest of poetry.
Thomas Heywood admittedly never reaches the heights attained
by the others, but I have included him as the dramatist who most
perfectly illustrates the survival of a conservative tradition against
which the greater plays of his contemporaries may be measured.
If The Rape of luucrece is a bad play, it is nevertheless a sincere
attempt to express a view of mankind which we cannot ignore if
we are to have any true understanding of the Jacobean age.
John Marston is in many ways a greater dramatist than Hey-
wood, and he certainly left a heritage which his contemporaries
more assiduously imitated. It could be argued, in fact, that next to
Shakespeare Marston is the most influential dramatist of his age.
In his plays we find the devices which are to be used with greater
artistry by Webster, Tourneur, Middleton and Ford. The hero of
the atrocious Antonio's Revenge shows his influence in Tourneur's
Vindice, and we probably could not have had Webster's Bosolaand
Flamineo without the example of Marston' s Malevole. Marston
created the pattern for the malcontent; he developed the Machia-
vellian villain, and he is Kyd's great successor in revenge tragedy.
Introduction 1 3
He showed his followers how to end a play in the bloody holo-
caust of a final masque scene. He is a master of dramatic irony, and
the technique of The Malcontent, with its central omnipotent char-
acter manipulating the action, is reflected in later plays of such
diversity as The Revenger's Tragedy, Measure for Measure, and
The Tempest.
Yet Marston, in spite of his influence on others, wrote no play
himself which is truly significant among the tragedies of his age.
This is true in spite of the indignant, crusading spirit which marks
everything he wrote. Marston succeeds only in being moralistic,
never in attaining the truly moral vision. This is so because his
impulse is essentially satiric rather than tragic. He is concerned
with attacking vice, painting it in its most horrible and revolting
forms. He is not concerned with the relation of good and evil to
one another within the cosmos, or with the relation of human
suffering to human joy. He is incapable of that kind of acceptance
of the fact of evil which is implicit in any total cosmic vision.
Behind his plays is always the impulse to destroy evil by revealing
how horrible or ludicrous it truly is, and thus his end is not the
understanding of the human condition, but rather the improve-
ment of social life by the eradication of vice. In this distinction is
much of the difference between tragedy and satire.
Antonio's Revenge and The Insatiate Countess, while they deal with
suffering and death, and in spite of the greatness of much of their
poetry, are rendered absurd by Marston 5 s satiric impulse. The
only one of his plays which really can be called a tragedy is that
neglected play he wrote at the end of his literary career, before he
abandoned the stage and disappeared into the obscurity of the
church. This play is Sophonisba, or The Wonder of Women, which
T. S. Eliot in a rather surprising reversal of the usual judgment,
has called the greatest of Marston' s works. 1 But the very qualities
which lead Eliot to praise this play are, I believe, what render it
also so unlike the plays with which we are here concerned.
Sophonisba does not seem to spring from any attempt to reconcile
the confusion and uncertainties of the Jacobean age; it springs
rather from Marston's admiration for the ancients, for it is above
all else an exercise in Senecan imitation. Eliot is perceptive in
1 Selected Essays (London, 1951), pp. 250-3.
14 Jacobean Tragedy
pointing to the greatness of much of Its poetry, but the play's
moral statement is little more than the typical Senecan ack-
nowledgment of the supremacy of fate and the need for man to
face his destiny with stoical courage and acceptance. It reflects the
moral dilemma of Marston's age only to the extent that it illus-
trates that tendency to look to the classical world for models of
an excellence which men in the degenerate present may strive to
emulate, and it is similar to Chapman's Caesar and Pompey. It does
not reflect that agonized struggle with the realities of the drama-
tist's own age which marks Chapman's greater and more success-
ful plays. EHot writes that one must come to this play fresh from
Comeille and Racine, that it belongs with the French and English
classicists rather than with the Shakespearians. This fact sets it
apart from that current in Jacobean tragedy with which we are
concerned.
What is true of Sophonisba is in large measure true also of Ben
Jonson's two Roman tragedies, for they also are the products of
classical imitation, the only essays in tragedy of a dramatist whose
greatness lay in other areas. Not the tragic but the satiric spirit is
the key to Jonson's greatness, and it is why he achieved his
stature as one of the greatest writers of English comedy. He knew
how to attack the evils of mankind, and he did so effectively in
comedy, his goal being always the satirist's object of social im-
provement. His conception of the goals of tragedy is clearly out-
lined in the address to the readers which he prefaced to the 1605
edition of Sejanus, where he listed among its essential qualities,
'truth of argument, dignity of persons, gravity and height of
elocution, fullness and frequency of sentence'. In these principles
Jonson is following not his own native dramatic tradition, but the
neo-classical critics of France and Italy, Scaliger and Castelvetro.
All of the qualities he lists are evident in his Sejanus and Catiline >
but these remain among the last read of all his plays. They do not
reveal the kind of struggle for a vision of man's role in the universe
which is an essential feature of the greatest tragedies. Jonson's
Roman plays belong, perhaps, more closely in the tradition of
Roman satire than they do in that of English tragedy.
Sejanus and Catiline remain the scholar's attempts to achieve a
classical ideal in tragedy, and like Marston's plays they are
Introduction 1 5
moralistic rather than moral., for they do not use the events of
Rome to reflect as Shakespeare always does in his Roman
tragedies, upon the larger questions of mankind in general.
Roman history is used for the parallels it may afford to the specific
political vices of Jonson's own day. His supposed tragedies reveal
the same impulse towards social correction which more properly
governs Jonson's comedies. He is concerned not with mankind
but with the corruption in the court of King James. His 'fullness
and frequency of sentence' becomes not a statement of general
moral truth, but simply the repetition of commonplace moral
injunctions gleaned from the ancients, and primarily from Seneca.
His 'truth of argument' gives to his plays perhaps a greater validity
as history than as tragedy, while his 'dignity of persons' and
'gravity and height of elocution' firmly link his plays to the
Senecan ideal he is imitating, with its heavy reliance upon essen-
tially sterile devices of rhetoric. Sejanus and Catiline in many
respects are interesting plays, and they deserve perhaps a greater
place than usually has been accorded to them in critical estimates
of Jonson's achievement, but they do not belong in the company
with which we here are concerned.
The final years of the Jacobean era are dominated by the influ-
ence of Beaumont and Fletcher, through the plays they wrote
individually and together, and through those which they produced
in collaboration with Massinger, Field and Shirley. Their influ-
ence is strong upon John Ford, and I shall suggest that only as he
learned to overcome this influence did Ford write the kind of
truly moral tragedy which links him rather with Shakespeare and
Webster. Although the tragedies of Beaumont and Fletcher are
concerned with ethical and political problems, and although their
work is an intimate reflection of the age which produced it, the
kind of tragedy they wrote - of which The Maid's Tragedy is the
finest example - is incapable of expressing the kind of moral
vision with which we are concerned.
J. F. Danby has pointed to Beaumont and Fletcher as the
dramatists who best express a nostalgia for Elizabethan values -
the elegant aristocratic life of the great house - which can no
longer survive in the seventeenth century, and he has called
The Maid's Tragedy a perfect reflection of the tensions of the
1 6 Jacobean Tragedy
Jacobean world. 1 There is much truth in this, and it is possible
co see Aspatia, as Danby sees her, as a symbol of the rejected
Elizabethan values, and Amintor as the symbol of an honour
which consists only in outward appearance, and thus is only a
debased shadow of the true code of honour represented by
Melantius. Beaumont and Fletcher might have written truly moral
tragedy. I would suggest that they failed to do so because of their
very attachment to a past social ideal which may never have fully
existed except in men's minds, and because the ethical paradoxes
they examine are related only to artificial - and ultimately unim-
portant - patterns of social conduct, and never to the larger prob-
lem of the relation of good to evil in the world. There is, more-
over, no real working through of these paradoxes in thek plays,
no evidence of real intellectual and emotional involvement, what
Eliot has called a struggle for harmony in the soul of the poet. The
paradoxes which form the central conflicts of thek plays are
resolved by dramaturgy, the clever manipulation of situation,
with a masterly control of shock and suspense. There is no real
quest for moral certainty in thek plays, only the facile reduction
of artificially contrived paradoxes, with no attempt to resolve
moral issues.
The Maid's Tragedy rings its many changes on the themes of
honour, love and friendship, values dear to the Elizabethan world
of Wilton and Penshurst, but in this play reduced to a specious
shallowness. Amintor is torn at first between his love for Aspatia
and his loyalty to the king, two conflicting absolute values, and
we must remember that Beaumont and Fletcher are as conservative
as Heywood in their doctrine that the king, no matter how evil he
may be, must be unconditionally obeyed. Amintor must sacrifice
the honour of his betrothed for his loyalty to the king. When he
learns that Evadne is the king's whore, he is again torn between
duty and honour, for he cannot oppose the king who has made
him a cuckold. The shallowness of the ideal of honour to which
these characters so thoroughly are committed is revealed by
Evadne : she has married Amintor to preserve an honour which in
truth akeady has been forfeited, and to do so she must destroy
the honour of her husband by making him a cuckold. In the same
1 Poets on Fortune's Hill (London, 1952), pp. 152-206.
Introduction 17
way Amintor must be a knowing bawd to his wife in order to
preserve Ms own honour because to reveal his cuckoldry is to
destroy his reputation and thus his honour. Honour here is a
meaningless pretence.
Similarly, Melantius, when Amintor calls Evadne a whore, must
kill his friend to preserve the non-existent honour of his sister.
When Melantius, moved by friendship, finally offers to kill the
king to preserve the honour of Amintor, his friend draws his
sword against him, for an exposure of the king again will destroy
Amintor' s reputation. Melantius is faced with the paradox that to
preserve the already forfeited honour of his family he must
destroy the already forfeited honour of his friend.
Such paradoxes have no validity in moral terms because they
are merely explorations of the nuances of a code of behaviour
which has no relation to reality, and it is a code from which no
character is capable of the slightest departure. Their absolute
stances represent no real moral positions, merely varieties of pre-
tence. The paradoxes must be resolved if the audience is to be
satisfied, and for this purpose Beaumont and Fletcher use the
simple device of having Evadne undergo a sudden reformation
and then murder the king. The conflict of absolutes upon which
the play is constructed is in no way resolved. No moral statement
emerges, although in the death of Aspatia there may be, as Danby
holds, a lament for the beauties of a world which can be no more.
The great popularity of such drama may signal the decline of
tragedy of real moral intensity. In the plays of Beaumont and
Fletcher we see the triumph of theatricality over philosophical
substance. This may be related to the growing dominance of the
particular coterie theatre for which these dramatists wrote, the
influence of the court with its particular tastes and attitudes, and
the gradual relegation of the great popular theatre for which
Shakespeare wrote to the confines of the lower middle class
audiences at the Red Bull.
It is also true that in the age of Shirley and Massinger many of
the intellectual conflicts of the Jacobean era were ceasing to have
the intensity they had had when Chapman, Tourneur and Webster
were writing their plays. The great issues of the seventeenth
century were approaching some resolution. The idea of human
1 8 Jacobean Tragedy
progress had begun to triumph; the new scientific age was coming
into its maturity, and England was becoming more deeply in-
volved in the political and social problems which in 1642 were
to bring the theatres to a close. The plays of Massinger and
Shirley are no longer vehicles for profound self discovery and
philosophical statement. They are exploitations for the sake of an
amusement-loving court of the theatricality learned from Beau-
mont and Fletcher. A play like Shirley's The Cardinal, although
brilliantly constructed and no doubt extremely effective upon the
stage, is merely the shallow imitation of only some external
features of Webster's Italian tragedies. These men succeed most
notably in facile court comedy. The great age of English tragedy
had come to a close with John Ford, some ten years before the
closing of the theatres.
CHAPTER TWO
George Chapman
We are not sure when in the long career of George
Chapman, spanning the kst decades of Elizabeth's
reign and all of that of James, he turned to the
writing of tragedies, but the earliest of them could not have been
written much later than 1603, when a new king ascended the
English throne and a new era began. It would be fitting indeed if
'Bussy D^Ambois could be dated with certainty in that year, 1 for
Chapman's first tragedy is a mirror of the pessimism which comes
to dominate the vision of the Jacobean era, and his later plays
reveal his attempts to resolve moral conflicts which are particu-
larly a part of that era. He comes to do so in terms of a stoic
philosophy learned from classical antiquity. The ILevenge of Bussy
U > A.ml>ois and Caesar and Pompey are his most deliberate efforts to
teach his age such a stoic creed; that they are the least successful
of his plays may stem in part from Chapman's own inability to
embrace wholeheartedly the philosophy he proposed. It is very
significant that in his Tragedy of Chabot, first written probably in
1614 at the end of his career as a dramatist, and years later revised
in collaboration with the younger James Shirley, Chapman seems
to renounce the stoicism he had espoused in the intervening plays
and to reassert the moral vision of his early Busy D'Ambois.
Chapman's career as a writer of tragedy reflects that search for
moral order out of which the greatest of Jacobean tragedies
emerged, but Chapman's search led to no such affirmation as we
shall note particularly in the plays of Tourneur and Webster.
It led to failure and resignation.
All great tragedy has its didactic and allegorical dimension, for
1 It has been dated as early as 1597. On the chronology see Elias Schwartz,
'The Dates and Order of Chapman's Tragedies,* MP, LVII (1959), 80-82. The most
comprehensive study of Chapman is Jean Jacquot, George Chapman (1559-1643):
sa me, sapo/sze, son tbtdtre, sapenste (Paris, 1951).
zo Jacobean Tragedy
it succeeds only to the extent that out of it emerges some general
view of man's relation to his world, a view which transcends the
immediate fate of the particular characters with whom the play is
concerned. Tragedy must move always from the specific to the
general. In the greatest tragedians, like Shakespeare and Webster,
the didactic function is subsumed into the total structure of the
play. In Chapman it is not. He is the most deliberately didactic
tragedian of his age. He wrote to Sir Thomas Howard in his
dedication to The ULevenge ofBussy D'Ambois of 'material instruction,
elegant and sententious excitation to virtue, and deflection from
her contrary, being the soul, limbs, and limits of an authentical
tragedy*. To this end Chapman sacrificed all else. It has been
pointed out that after Bussy D'Ambois his development was not
towards a fusion of his poetic talents with the needs of the drama,
but rather towards an exclusion from his plays of every element of
drama which did not further his ethical purpose. 1
Chapman proudly proclaimed as the function of the artist what
others more diffidently accomplished: he sought to teach his age
how to live. Although we recognize Chapman's avowed didactic-
ism, however, we must avoid the temptation to reduce his plays
to moral exempla, as some critics have done, or to consider the
total body of Chapman's work as the reflection of an ethical system
which the poet had fully evolved before he began to write and
of which die various poems and plays merely reflect different
aspects. 2 Chapman's tragedies, as I have suggested, fall into at
least three major divisions, reflecting different stages in his intellec-
tual growth. His career like that of almost every major writer was
one of constant development and change. 3
1 See Moody E. Prior, The Language of Tragedy (New York, 1947), p. in.
2 These dangers are reflected in Ennis Rees, The Tragedies of George Chapman:
Renaissance Ethics in A.ction (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), a study which has done much
to redirect our attention to Chapman's moral content. On its limitations, see also
Robert Ornstein, The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, pp. 48 S.
8 On Chapman's changing perspective in tragedy, see the essays by Elias Schwartz :
'Seneca, Homer, and Chapman's Bossy D'Ambois, y JEGP, LVI (1957), 163-76;
'Chapman's Renaissance Man: Byron reconsidered,* /EGP, LVIH (1959), 613-26.
Ornstein sees Chapman's career as one of steady progression from the supposed
moral confusion of Bussy D'Ambois to the stoicism of Caesar and Pompey which he
takes to be Chapman's latest and most mature intellectually play, one which seems
*to complete the pattern of his tragedies and to represent the end of a long artistic
and intellectual pilgrimage' (p. 79).
George Chapman 21
Chapman's greatest achievement in tragedy is the pky with
which he began 9 Bussy D^^Lmbois. It is not - as it traditionally has
been regarded - Chapman's celebration of the self-sufficient 'com-
plete man' whose own virtk places him above morality and whose
stoic fortitude makes him the master of his world. 1 But neither is
the play a work of orthodox Christian humanism, as Rees main-
tains, which holds up the fate of Bussy, one of Chapman's "bestial
servants of self love', as a 'cautionary example' of what might
happen to any man who allowed his passion to govern him,
challenged the just kws of society, and permitted lust to overcome
his reason and render him its slave. We cannot approach this play
in the simple terms of whether Chapman approved or disapproved
of Bussy, for this is greatly to oversimplify the author's complex
tragic vision.
I would suggest that Bussy D'Ambois is deliberately shaped as
a dramatic symbol of humanity, faced with a problem which all
mankind must face. In this we have much of the difference be-
tween moral exemplum and the kind of philosophical exploration
which is tragedy. It is this range which links Chapman to Shake-
speare. In Bussy D'Ambois Chapman set himself to answer in
drama the ancient question of how man, endowed by his creator
with reason, strength and knowledge of virtue, can live in a world
corrupted by evil. But to this question Chapman can find no
answer, and the total impact of his play, conveyed with a striking
emotional force, is to affirm that virtue cannot survive, for it must
inevitably be corrupted and destroyed by the baseness of the
world in which it is forced to live.
In The Conspiracy of Charles,, Duke of Byron, and its companion
Tragedy of Charles, Duke ofBjron, Chapman returned to the same
1 See, for instance, Parrott, Tragedies , pp. 545-6; A. S. Ferguson, "The Pkys of
George Chapman/ MLR, XIH (1918), 1-24; XV (1920), 223-39. This view is
implicit among more recent studies in Michael Higgins, "The Development of the
"Senecal Man" : Chapman's Bossy D'Ambois and some Precursors/ RES, XXTTT
(1947) 24-33; W. G. McCollom, 'The Tragic Hero and Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois, 9
Univ. of Toronto Quart., XVHI (1949), 227-33; Clifford Leech, 'The Atheist's Tragedy
as a Dramatic Comment on Chapman's Bussy plays/ JEGP, LIU (1953), 525-30. On
Chapman's stoicism, see J. W. Wider, George Cbapman-Tbe Effect of Stoicism on bis
Tragedies (New York, 1949). Wieler, pp. 21-51, finds little stoic philosophy in
Bussy D'Ambois. I would agree with Ornstein (p. 5 1), that Bussy is *an isolated virtu-
ous man without a place in the society which destroys him', but I cannot agree that
the total play is confused in its moral point of view.
22 Jacobean Tragedy
theme, but these plays do not extend the moral vision of Bussy
D'AmbotS) although certain elements receive greater emphasis.
Byron at the beginning of his career is as heroic as Bussy in his
assertion of the rights of the natural man, but he is even more
blackened by sin than Bussy at its close, with the virtuous king
Henry IV, against whom he conspires, to emphasize the complete
degeneration which Byron has undergone, and to suggest, as
Chapman had not suggested before, the need for human authority
in spite of the world's evils. Elias Schwartz 1 has seen in the Byron
plays a transition between Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of
Bussy > the two opposite poles of Chapman's vision. In Chapman's
ambivalence towards Byron - an admiration for his heroic stature
which persists even while he most strongly condemns him for his
behaviour - Schwartz sees a movement towards a new ethical
outlook.
There is truth in this, but the transition involves no changing
view of the world or of man's position in it. The world of Bussy
is the world of Byron, and it is still the world of Clermont
D'Ambois. But in Clermont Chapman tried to create a man who
by practising a kind of virtue could survive in spite of the world,
as Bussy and Byron could not. That Clermont is never more than
a wooden figure, his behaviour as absurd as it is essentially incon-
sistent, and that The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois is entirely incapable
of imparting the emotional impact in which the truth of tragedy
must be conveyed, shows the failure of Chapman truly to embody
any such moral vision in drama. In Caesar and Pompej he tried
again, offering the stoic, Cato, as a model for his audience, but
this play becomes a series of dull moralistic speeches, entirely
ineffective as drama. Only in Chabot, at the end of his career, did
Chapman again succeed in imparting the emotional equivalent of
a moral vision. This play, along with the Byron plays and Bussy
D'Ambois, must represent the essence of Chapman's contribution
to English tragedy. I should like here to concentrate upon Bussy
D'Ambois and Chabot, the plays which mark the beginning and
the end of Chapman's writing of tragedy, and in which his moral
vision is most perfectly expressed.
, LVHI (1959), 613-26.
George Chapman 23
ii
Critics traditionally have pointed to Chapman's weakness in
character portrayal, and they have compared him unfavourably to
Shakespeare in this respect. 1 Such a comparison does grave in-
justice to Chapman, for it slights the particular quality of his own
dramatic artistry. Chapman was not a naturalistic dramatist. He
was never concerned with portraiture of character as a significant
end in itself. The wide division among critics of Bussj D y A.mbois
may come in part from a failure to recognize that none of the
characters in this play was designed as a realistic portrait from life,
but that each performs various thematic functions within the
total design, and that these functions are often incompatible with
one another in terms of psychological verisimilitude. All together
they constitute the ethical statement which is the primary concern
of the play. 2 Bussy, Monsieur, Tamyra, and the rest may at times
be used to comment with the voice of Chapman on the events of
the play in terms inconsistent psychologically with the moral
positions for which they already have been made to stand. What
results is a sometimes confused and always difficult play, more
gratifying perhaps to the reader in his study than it has ever been
to an audience in the theatre. Part of this difficulty may have
resulted from Chapman's failure adequately to work his philo-
sophical substance into the total structure of his play, his tendency
to present it in set speeches which themselves are highly poetic,
but which are not well integrated into the dramatic action. Chap-
man, in short, found it difficult to adapt his concept of the
dramatist's high philosophical mission to the requirements of a
popular stage.
Bussy himself performs three distinct roles within the play. On
one level he is a symbol of ordinary humanity, with its mixture
of good and evil, striving to live virtuously, but by his very
involvement in living inevitably corrupted and destroyed. Man
cannot divorce himself, Chapman is saying, from the corrupt
1 Chapman's ability as a dramatist, however, has been defended by James Smith,
'George Chapman/ Scrutiny, 331 (1934-5), 339~5; TV" (i935-6) 45~6i-
a Some such multiple use of character has been perceived in Chapman's 'Byron
pkys by Peter Ure, 'The Main Outline of Chapman's Byron,' SP 9 XLVH (1950),
568-88.
24 Jacobean Tragedy
society of which he is a part, and as he lives in society man
must inevitably be infused with its own corruption until his world
destroys him. Chapman's 'nature' is the vitiated and corrupt
'nature* of Renaissance pessimism. For the evil world into which
man is born, Chapman probably could find no symbol more
meaningful to his audience than that of the corrupt court of
Henry III. Bussy's life journey is framed to mirror the awful
paradox that to live is to know evil and to die. In his continuing
effort to resolve this paradox, Chapman came in later years to
create the mythical brother of Bussy, Clermont D'Ambois, who
in The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois offers one possible answer: that
man may become impervious to the evil of the world and the
master of his own fate by the cultivation of his own knowledge
and religion and by attuning his human will to the will of God
with a confidence in the goodness and wisdom of the divine
master plan. There is no such answer in Bussy D'Ambois. There is
only the heroic spectacle of suffering man at least able to accept
his end with courage and fortitude.
On another level Bussy is used to suggest a reason for this
tragedy which Chapman sees as the universal lot of man. This
reason is the fall of man from Paradise and the consequent cor-
ruption of nature which in a large area of Renaissance belief had
brought to an end the "golden age' when man could live by his
own natural instincts, sharing in the perfect harmony of God's
creation. Then all hierarchies of order and degree, all institutions
of government and law were unnecessary. Bussy is framed as a
natural man such as lived in this 'golden age'; his own natural
instincts are above human laws :
since I am free,
(Offending no just law), let no law make
By any wrong it does, my life her slave:
When I am wrong'd, and that law fails to right me,
Let me be king myself (as man was made),
And do a justice that exceeds the kw;
If my wrong pass the power of single valour
To right and expiate; then be you my king,
And do a right, exceeding kw and nature:
Who to himself is law, no kw doth need,
George Chapman 25
Offends no law, and is a king indeed.
(II, i, 194-204)
Bussy is thus described by King Henry HI, speaking as choral
commentator:
A man so good, that only would uphold
Man in his native noblesse, from whose fall
All our dissensions rise; that in himself
(Without the outward patches of our frailty,
Riches and honour) knows he comprehends
Worth with the greatest: Kings had never borne
Such boundless empire over other men,
Had all maintain'd the spirit and state of D'Ambois;
Nor had the full impartial hand of Nature
That all things gave in her original,
Without these definite terms of Mine and Thine,
Been turn'd unjustly to the hand of Fortune,
Had all preserv'd her in her prime, like D'Ambois;
No envy, no disjunction had dissolved,
Or pluck'd one stick out of the golden faggot
In which the world of Saturn bound our lives,
Had all been held together with the nerves,
The genius, and th'ingenuous soul of D'Ambois.
(HI, ii, 90-107)
Had D'Ambois, the natural man, prevailed, he is saying, there
would be no need for laws, no social ills or inequalities, none of
those attributes of a fallen social order which medieval and
Renaissance churchmen held to have proceeded from the fall of
man from Paradise. That this was a notion close to Chapman's
heart we can tell from a passage in The Gentleman Usher, which
was entered in the Stationers* Register in November, 1605, and
thus must have been written close in time to Bussy D'Ambois.
Here the virtuous Strozza, who through his faith in God has been
endowed with a miraculous power of prophecy and wisdom,
speaks similar words :
Had all been virtuous men,
There never had been prince upon the earth,
And so no subject; all men had been princes:
A virtuous man is subject to no prince,
But to his soul and honour, which are laws
26 Jacobean Tragedy
That carry fire and sword within themselves,
Never corrupted, never out of rule.
(V.iv, 56-6*)
But there are no such virtuous men: the 'golden age* is no
more. The tragedy of Bussy is that natural man cannot survive and
retain his virtue in the corrupt present world as he might have had
not man fallen. Human laws are necessary, as Chapman is to
affirm in the magnanimous and pious King Henry IV of the later
Bjron plays,, but that these laws are now reflected in the shallow
and treacherous Henry III and his brother heightens the tragic
irony of Bussy' s fall for his unwillingness to recognize their
necessity. How Chapman intended us to regard his hero is
indicated by the ghost of the Friar :
Farewell, brave relics of a complete man,
Look up and see thy spirit made a star;
Join flames with Hercules, and when thou sett'st
Thy radiant forehead in the firmament,
Make the vast crystal crack with thy receipt;
Spread to a world of fire, and the aged sky
Cheer with new sparks of old humanity.
(V, iv, 147-53)
This is not the death of the bestial sinner without learning or
religion, which Rees sees in Bussy, but of c old humanity' who
cannot survive on earth but will lend splendour to the heavens.
This is Chapman's lament that such a man as Bussy D'Ambois can
be no more. That the fate of Bussy reflects the general corruption
of nature is made clear in an important speech of foreshadowing by
Monsieur, speaking here not In his role of villainous plotter, but
in that of choral commentator upon the action of the play:
If thou outlive me, as I know thou must,
Or else hath Nature no proportioned end
To her great labours; she hath breathed a mind
Into thy entrails, of desert to swell
Into another great Augustus Caesar,
Organs and faculties fitted to her greatness;
And should that perish like a common spirit,
Nature's a courtier and regards no merit.
(IV, i, 101-8)
George Chapman 27
This heroic, complete Bussy D'Ambois will not outlive the vile
politician, Monsieur. He will die like a common creature, and in
this defeat Chapman mirrors the corruption of nature which has
lost forever the harmonious perfection of the 'golden age' before
the fell.
With these two functions of Bussy., as symbol of ordinary man
and as symbol of prelapsarian perfection, is combined a third:
that of choral commentator which Bussy shares with most of the
other characters of the play. It is in this role that we find him in
his opening speech, commenting upon the corrupt world he is
about to enter, but of whose corruption we have little reason to
believe he yet has had experience:
Fortune, not Reason, rules the state of things,
Reward goes backwards, Honour on his head;
Who is not poor, is monstrous; only Need
Gives form and worth to every human seed.
As cedars beaten with continual storms
So great men flourish . . .
Man is a torch borne in the wind; a dream
But of a shadow, summ'd with all Ms substance.
(I, i, 1-19)
In this imperfect world, where greatness is an illusion, and where
a capricious fortune (the very first word of the play) rules the
lives of men, there is only one resort :
We must to virtue for her guide resort,
Or we shall shipwreck in our safest port.
CU, 32-33)
On another level the speech introduces us to Bussy, the young
man about to enter the world. His poverty - Chapman's quite
unhistorical innovation - is symbol both of his virtue and of that
alienation from the world of men which in a corrupt society must
be the price of virtue. He 'neglects the light and loves obscure
abodes' (I, i, 47), but this is a role foreign to the nature of man,
and when Monsieur comes to offer him wealth and position, he
cannot refuse this symbol of entry into the active world, although
he knows the shallowness of the world he enters and that he will
be but a pawn in the hands of the power-hungry Monsieur. He
28 Jacobean Tragedy
accepts the decree of fortune that man must assume the social role
of man, but he trusts in his own virtue to protect him:
He'll put his plow into me, plow me up;
But his unsweating thrift is policy,
And learning-hating policy is ignorant
To fit his seed-land soil; a smooth plain ground
Will never nourish any politic seed;
I am for honest actions not for great;
If I may bring up a new fashion,
And rise in Court for virtue, speed his plow!
(I, i, 123-30)
Before the end of the play Bussy will have himself embraced the
'policy' he now decries in Monsieur; his initial virtue will not
save him. He knows the world into which he enters, but he
rationalizes his choice:
Man's first hour's rise is first step to his fall.
I'll venture that; men that fall low must die,
As well as men cast headlong from the sky.
(I, i, 141-3)
No sooner has Bussy's choice been made than Chapman shows
with a fine dramatic irony that Bussy's virtue will be to no avail.
His first fruit of his new social role is gold, and in receiving this
he must cope with human avarice, embodied in the loathsome and
obsequious Maffe. Thus Bussy begins his first quarrel, and thus
he acqukes the first of the enemies who will at last destroy him.
The French court is all affectation and pretence, and when Bussy
enters it he must assume the normal role of the courtier which is
reflected in his formal and artificial wooing of the Duchess of
Guise. Bussy, the natural man, however, will not accept the social
canons of order and degree, and his baiting of his superior, the
Duke of Guise, wins him another more powerful enemy. In the
contrapuntal lines of Bussy's wooing of the duchess and baiting
of her husband we have the two roles of Bussy neatly juxtaposed :
ordinary man entering the corrupt world and assuming its values,
and the natural man rebelling against the false values of that very
world.
From the false code of courtly dalliance Chapman turns to the
false code of courtly honour, by whose rules also man in society
George Chapman 29
must live. Thus Bussy must fight with the taunting nobles,
Barrisor, L'Anou and Pyrot, and the result must be the death of
five men, including the great soldier of France and the two friends,
Brisac and MelyneU, who have come to Bussy's aid. This in terms
of the world's law is murder, as King Henry declares (IT, i, 149),
but Monsieur, in a choral role, defends the action as the proper
behaviour of the natural man:
Manly slaughter
Should never bear the account of wilful murther,
It being a spice of justice, where with life
Offending past law equal life is laid
In equal balance, to scourge that offence
By law of reputation, which to men
Exceeds all positive law, and what that leaves
To true men's valours (not prefixing rights
Of satisfaction, suited to their wrongs)
A free man's eminence may supply and take.
(II, i, 150-159)
But no man in the corrupt present world can be truly free. Bussy's
very exercise of the attributes of the natural man has made him a
murderer in terms of the world's law, just as it will make him an
adulterer.
The relation between Bussy and Tamyra has been described as
one of passionate lust. What is remarkable, however, is that Chap-
man, who knew well how to paint the lust of Monsieur and the
jealous frenzy of Montsurry, does not dwell at all on any lustful
passion on Bussy's part. The lust of Monsieur, Chapman's own
addition to the historical story, serves rather to set off by contrast
the utterly different love of Bussy for his lady. She is an embodi-
ment of the animal passion which is a part of the nature with
which Bussy must live. He is introduced to Tamyra by the Friar
as one fitting to satisfy the passion of a noble lady:
Come, worthiest son, I am past measure glad,
That you (whose worth I have approv'd so long)
Should be the object of her fearful love;
Since both your wit and spirit can adapt
Their full force to supply her utmost weakness :
You know her worths and virtues, for report
Of all that know is to a man a knowledge:
}o Jacobean Tragedy
You know, besides, that our affections storm,
Rais'd in out blood, no reason can reform.
Though she seek then their satisfaction
(Which she must needs, or rest unsatisfied)
Your judgment will esteem her place thus wrought,
Nothing less dear than if yourself had sought.
(II, ii, 133-45)
In responding to Tamyra Bussy is accepting the normal condition
of corrupted nature over which human reason can have no
control. He has not sought her love, but in the world he has
entered the role of the illicit lover is a natural one, and he assumes
it as lightly as he had assumed the defence of his honour against
his sneering detractors. That adultery is the normal way of the
French court had been made clear by Monsieur in pressing his
own suit of Tamyra:
Honour, what's that? Your second maidenhead:
And what is that? A word: the word is gone,
The thing remains: the rose is pluck'd, the stalk
Abides; an easy loss where no lack's found:
Believe it, there's as small lack in the loss
As there is pain i'the losing; archers ever
Have two strings to a bow; and shall great Cupid
(Archer of archers both in men and women)
Be worse provided than a common archer?
A husband and a friend all wise wives have.
(II, ii, 10-19)
Even Montsurry counsels Ms wife to bear the advances of Mon-
sieur, since immorality is the prerogative of princes (II, ii, 68-84).
That Bussy should begin his intrigue with Tamyra is thus, on
the one hand, the inevitable result of his entry into the world and
his acceptance of its values, and on the other an ordinary exercise
of the functions of natural man. Their love is dictated by neces-
sity, 1 as Tamyra affirms for the audience:
1 See Hatdin Craig, 'Ethics in Jacobean Drama: The Case of Chapman,' in The
Parrott Presentation Volume (Princeton, 1935), pp. 25-46. The important role of
fortune or necessity in the play has been recognized also by Smith, Scrutiny, IV
(1935-6), 50, who -writes that 'in the matter of vice, both she [Tamyra] and the
whole of mankind are at the mercy of nature*. This emphasis in the play makes it
impossible for us to view Bussy, like Rees, as a 'cautionary example*. Nature being
what it is, his fate cannot be escaped.
George Chapman 3 1
It is not I, but urgent destiny,
That (as great statesmen for their general and
In politic justice, make poor men offend)
Enforceth my offence to make it just.
What shall weak dames do, when the whole work of nature
Hath a strong finger in each one of us.
CEDE, i, 62-67)
The theme of an invidious fortune guiding Bussy's life is worked
into the texture of the play.
Tamyra, whose inconsistency has so puzzled critics of the play,
is cast by Chapman as a symbol both of the natural force which
man cannot evade and of the conflict between the demands of this
force and those of the social order. Her frenzied protestations first
of loyalty to her husband, then of passion for Bussy and of shame-
ful remorse for her transgressions, are reflections of this conflict for
which she stands. Bussy, in his role as natural man, can feel none
of this conflict. His relation to Tamyra is the natural relation of
man and woman belonging to a 'golden age' without the restraints
of marriage (symbolized by the union of Tamyra and Montsurry
which can evoke no real feeling other than that of the wronged
husband who must defend his honour at whatever human cost).
Bussy loves outside all moral law; he has no sense of sin:
Sin is a coward, madam, and insults
But on our weakness, in his truest valour:
And so our ignorance tames us, that we let
His shadows fright us.
(Ill, i, 20-23)
The affair between Bussy and Tamyra is the crucial element in
his career and the immediate cause of his death. It is, on the one
hand, a dramatic reflection of the involvement in sin which is the
inevitable consequence of living, and on the other it is the free
expression of the normal qualities of natural man and woman.
These two motifs are fused, for the burden of the drama is that
natural man cannot survive in a corrupt world. A treacherous
servant must reveal the lovers' secret; the jealous frustration of
Monsieur must vent itself in a drive for the most inhuman
retribution, and the demands of society's code of honour must
provoke the injured husband to a vehement animal fury, reflected
32 Jacobean Tragedy
in the stabbing of Tamyra and her torture upon the rack: c the
course I must run for mine honour's sake' (V, i, 25), as her hus-
band explains it.
The summoning of the spirits, Behemoth and Cartophylax, at
the end of the fourth act provided the Jacobean audience with the
kind of sensationalism it relished, and we must not forget that
Chapman, in spite of his philosophical bent and of the strong vein
of poetic symbolism in his plays, knew well how to please the
cruder tastes of his audience. But this episode serves other func-
tions as well. With the knowledge of the plot against him which
the spirits provide, Bussy is able to embrace his end knowingly
and bravely and by his last heroic gestures affirm the dignity of
man in spite of the world's evil which he has come to share. By
providing Bussy with this knowledge Chapman is able also to
illuminate another facet of his hero's corruption; Bussy now vows
to meet his enemies with that very 'policy' which has been the
mark of Monsieur, and to which at the beginning of the play
Bussy had been so strongly opposed:
I'll soothe his plots, and strow my hate with smiles,
Till all at once the close mines of my heart
Rise at full date, and rush into his blood:
I'll bind his arm in silk, and rub his flesh,
To make the vein swell, that his soul may gush
Into some kennel where it longs to lie,
And policy shall be flank'd with policy.
Yet shall the feeling centre where we meet
Groan with the weight of my approaching feet:
I'll make th'inspired thresholds of his court
Sweat with the weather of my horrid steps,
Before I enter, yet will I appear
Like calm security before a ruin:
A politician must like lightning melt
The very marrow, and not taint the skin:
His ways must not be seen; the superficies
Of the green centre must not taste his feet:
When hell is plow'd up with his wounding tracts :
And aH his harvest reap'd by hellish facts.
(IV, ii, 175-93)
Bussy has accepted the values of Monsieur. He is at the end the
George Chapman 33
corrupt anti-social force which Ennis Rees describes, but what
Rees ignores is that this has been a gradual corruption from an
initial virtue, that it has been the inevitable result of an involve-
ment in living which no man can evade, and that in the larger
symbolism of the play it reflects the general fate of man. Bussy is
never the 'cautionary example' which the audience can hold up to
scorn and in whose end it can feel the execution of poetic justice.
Bussy is a figure with whom the audience must instinctively
sympathize, for he stands also for the dignity of man which he
upholds to the very end and in which it is the audience's pro-
foundest urge to believe. In Chapman's careful delineation of
Bussy as the natural man, moreover, the audience is directed not
so much to an awareness of Ms own sin as to a sense of the
corruption of the society which must destroy him. In lamenting
the fall of Bussy we lament also the fall of man, and this is a tragic
emotion such as an audience can never feel in witnessing the
simple punishment of an ignorant sinner.
The Guise and Monsieur, who throughout the play have served
as symbols of a corrupt society while also serving as choral com-
mentators, in the fifth act are described as ministers of fate
(V, iii, 63-64). They stand now for the necessity which will
destroy Bussy, and in a short but significant choral scene they
also show the audience how it must regard the ensuing death of
the hero. Bussy's nobility and grandeur are affirmed, but such
greatness nature must destroy just as it destroys less perfect men:
Now shall we see that Nature hath no end
In her great works responsive to their worths.
(V, ii, 1-2)
here will be one
Young, learned, valiant, virtuous, and full mann'd;
One on whom Nature spent so rich a hand
That with an ominous eye she wept to see
So much consumed her virtuous treasury
Yet as the winds sing through a hollow tree
And (since it lets them pass through) let it stand;
But a tree solid (since it gives no way
To their wild rage) they rend up by the root:
So this whole man
34 Jacobean Tragedy
(That will not wind with every crooked way,
Trod by the servile world) shall reel and fall
Before the frantic puffs of blind-born chance
That pipes through empty men, and makes them dance.
(3^-45)
Here is no spectacle of just retribution for sin within a Christian
moral order. Bussy's death will reflect rather the inevitable end
of man at the hands of a vitiated nature which pays no regard to
the magnificent traits with which she created him. This common
fate of man Bussy can only accept with a heroism fitting his
nobility. He goes bravely to his death, sparing the life of Mont-
surry in an act of magnanimity, and when he has been treacher-
ously shot from behind, speaking chorally for Chapman on the
meaning of his life and death:
'tis enough for me
That Guise and Monsieur, Death and Destiny,
Come behind D'Ambois. Is my body, then,
But penetrable flesh? And must my mind
Follow my blood? Can my divine part add
No aid to the earthly in extremity?
Then these divines are but for form, not fact:
Man is of two sweet courtly friends compact,
A mistress and a servant: let my death
Define life nothing but a courtier's breath.
(V, iv, 76-85)
The c two sweet courtly friends' are, as Parrott points out (p. 560),
the body and soul of man who are related to one another as the
lover to his mistress. It is the tragedy of human life that man's
immortal parts cannot preserve his mortal. This fact Bussy accepts,
and he will put his faith in the soul which remains :
I'll not complain to earth yet, but to heaven,
And, like a man, look upwards even in death.
(V, iv, 88-89)
He celebrates the immortality of his fame and he offers Ms fate
as a symbol of the universal human frailty, in lines which Chap-
man translated loosely from the Hercules Oetaeus of Seneca:
Oh my fame,
Live in despite of murther. Take thy wings
George Chapman 35
And haste thee where the grey ey'd Morn perfumes
Her rosy chariot with Sabaean spices I
Fly, where the Evening from the Iberian vales
Takes on her swarthy shoulders Hecate
Crowned with a grove of oaks; fly where men feel
The burning axletree, and those that suffer
Beneath the chariot of the snowy Bear:
And tell them all that D'Ambois is hasting
To the eternal dwellers; that a thunder
Of all their sighs together (for their frailties
Beheld in me) may quit my worthless fall
With a fit volley for my funeral.
(V, iv, 98-111)
The frailties of mankind, past and present, are beheld in Mm.
The audience leaves the theatre with a sense of the heroic mag-
nificence of the natural man, and at the same time with a renewed
awareness of the common plight of humanity in a world in
which this magnificence cannot survive, in which even man's
immortal parts cannot preserve him from the evil of a corrupted
nature in which he is destined to live. It is to this sombre view of
human life that Chapman designed Bttssy iyA.mbois to give poetic
expression.
in
That The Tragedy ofChabot, Admiral of France has been among the
most neglected of Chapman's plays may derive in part from the
vein of historical allegory in the play and the consequent tendency
of critics to regard its characters merely as transparent masks for
specific personalities in the court of King James with no larger
significance, and generally to dismiss the play as a propagandists
attempt by an aging dramatist to curry favour for his im-
prisoned patron. The name of James Shirley which appeared with
Chapman's upon the title page of the 1639 quarto has further led
most commentators to place it outside the main stream of Chap-
man's work. I would suggest, however, that in this play Chapman
attains an emotional intensity through which, he is able to transmit
a vision of man's relation to his universe in a manner that is
equalled in no other of his later tragedies.
That Chabot represents Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset; that
36 Jacobean Tragedy
Poyet stands for Sir Francis Bacon; and that the play represents
their separate trials before the courts of James I, has been accepted
generally since the notion was first proposed in I928. 1 It has been
agreed also that Shirley merely revised an existing play by the
elder dramatist and did little to change its basic form and content.
The allegorical reading raises questions, moreover, which cannot
be answered within the allegorical framework. If the play holds
up Chabot, as most commentators maintain, as an exemplary
portrait of the truly virtuous man and in this way argues for the
exoneration of the Somerset he represents, how are we to explain
the death of Chabot? Both Jacquot and Rees are disturbed by this,
and following Mrs Solve, they try to explain it as Chapman's sug-
gestion that if King James does not pardon Somerset he will die
of a broken heart like Chabot. But Chabot dies after he has been
fully exonerated by King Francis and restored to all of his former
dignities. A strict allegorical reading would suggest Chapman's
argument that Somerset would die if pardoned. A real allegorist
would have had Chabot live, as Somerset actually lived, several
years longer than Chapman himself.
The death of Chabot suggests that the design of the tragedy-
which derives not from contemporary events, but from Etienne
Pasquier's Les &echerches de la France (1607, 1611, and 1621) - was
conceived without regard to the affaks of Somerset or Bacon and
probably is anterior to them, the contemporary allegorical sig-
nificance having been added in a later revision which did not alter
the play's basic structure. I would reconstruct the history of
Chabot in somewhat the following fashion: the play probably was
written first in 1614, at the very end of the period when Chapman
was writing for the stage and was most concerned with French
history. It was based upon the 161 1 edition of Pasquier, where die
trials of Chabot and Poyet are presented in the same relation to one
1 Norma Dobie Solve, Stuart Politics in Chapmarfs Tragedy of Chabot (Ann Arbor,
Mich., 1928). Mrs Solve further identified Montmorency as George Villiers, Duke of
Buckingham, and the Proctor-General as Sic Edward Coke. Parrott endorsed these
views in JEGP, XXIX (1930), 300-4. More recent critics are in accord, and of
these only Wider and Omstein (pp. 76-79) are willing to examine the play inde-
pendently of the historical allegory. For Ornstein Cbabot is concerned with the con-
flict between law and royal prerogative with the absolutism of King James I reflected
in Chapman's King Francis and Chabot representing the kind of medieval view of
the supremacy of law associated with the position of Coke.
George Chapman 37
another as in Chapman's play. The work may never have been
staged, for the relation of ruler to subject was dangerous matter
for the stage, and Chapman had already been in difficulty over the
Byron plays and his share in Eastward Ho. At this time, imme-
diately after the loss of Ms patron, Prince Henry, the dramatist
could ill afford further risks.
As Parrott suggests (p. 633), Chapman probably handed the
play to the Queen's Revels company then under the management
of his friend, Nathan Field. When this company joined with
Princess Elizabeth's Men in 1613, the playbook went with it.
Some time after 1621, Shirley, a member of Princess Elizabeth's
Men, probably decided to revise Chapman's old play because of
its topicality, and Chapman, who had not written a pky in a
decade, joined with him in revamping the play so that it might
reflect more closely upon the Somerset affair, but in no way
changing the basic tragic design. Most of the revision must have
been by Chapman himself, for Parrott's careful evaluation of their
respective shares in the final product shows that Shirley must
have been responsible only for toning down some of Chapman's
sententious speeches, adding a feminine interest in the relations
between the Queen and Chabot's wife, and making the dialogue
more natural. Parrott concludes (p. 633) that the original design
and groundwork of the pky as it now stands is Chapman's'. But
these are matters about which we never can know anything with
teal certainty. The important fact is that Chabot is a complex and
interesting play, and we will have no adequate understanding of
the tragic vision it unfolds while we limit our reading of it by
what relevance it may have had to the immediate affairs of King
James and his court.
The moralist Pasquier had indicated the two lessons to be
gleaned from his brief account: (i) that a judge must always base
his actions upon principles of justice and not upon the passions
or desires of the king who appointed him, and (2) that a great
lord who falls into disfavour with his king should, if possible,
avoid being tried in a court of justice, for then his least faults
will be magnified into the most monstrous crimes. Both of these
precepts are carried into Chapman's play. The first is stated by
King Francis :
38 Jacobean Tragedy
of me learning
This one more lesson out of the events
Of these affairs now past: that whatsoever
Charge or commission judges have from us.
They ever make their aim ingenuous justice,
Not partial for reward or swelling favour;
To which if your king steer you, spare to obey,
For when his troubled blood is clear and calm,
He will repent that he pursued his rage,
Before his pious law, and hold that judge
Unworthy of his place that lets his censure
Float in the waves of an imagined favour:
This shipwrecks in the haven, and but wounds
Their consciences that soothe the soon-ebb'd humours
Of their incensed king.
(IV, i, 440-54)
I would suggest, however, that the second lesson may have had an
even greater share in shaping Chapman's tragic vision, 1 for im-
plicit in it is the notion of the imperfection of a human justice
dependent upon a king. Chapman's play is concerned with this
imperfection and the human frailty from which it stems.
The theme of human frailty is introduced in the first scene when
Allegre speaks of those qualities in men
That which in Nature hath excuse, and in
Themselves is privileg'd by name of frailty.
(I, i, 27-28)
1 This latter moral is ignored by most critics. For Rees (p. 157) the play is a simple
account of *a just man destroyed by unjust treatment, as an appeal to deal mercifully
with Somerset*. Rees wisely recognizes that Chapman is 'primarily concerned with
uniyersal moral significance' (p. 158), and he seeks to determine how Chapman's
pky goes beyond the contemporary significance of Somerset's fall, but what moral
statement is there in the view of a completely just and good man who suffers
momentarily through the evil of others, but who is then entirely vindicated and
restored to his former station, only to die of a broken heart? Rees does not answer
the crucial question of what in the total tragic design makes it necessary that Chabot
die after his virtue has been vindicated so thoroughly. Ornstein (p. 79) sees it as
evidence of Chapman's melancholy. Wieler's notion (pp. 117-35) that the
play celebrates the triumph of justice and the *Senecal Man', with Chabot
as a mirror of the stoic ideal of justice, suffers from the same weakness, for stoics
are not often crushed by temporary reversals of fortune, and they do not commonly
die of broken hearts. Wieler's reading of the play leads him, as it inevitably must, to
the conclusion that Chabot is not a tragedy at all: 'The death of a stoic protagonist
simply affirms a devotion to ethical motives in which tragic meaning is never
present" (p. 133).
George Chapman 39
In defending Chabot's devotion to justice, Allegre stresses the
admiral's fear that this weakness which man derives from nature
should ever guide his actions :
For, as a fever held him, he will shake
When he is signing any thing of weight.
Lest human frailty should misguide his justice.
& i, 55-57)
Chabot's death is not a triumph of justice. It is Chapman's tragic
acknowledgment of that c frail condition of strength, valour,
virtue 3 which an earlier Bussy D'Ambois had lamented in his own
demise (V, iv, 141). Chabot will learn through his bitter experi-
ence
how vain is too much faith
And flattery of yourself, as if your breast
Were proof against all invasions; 'tis so slight,
You see, it lets in death.
(IV, i, 215-8)
Chabot would live by a principle of perfect, unwavering justice.
His tragedy is also his education, for he comes to learn that such
an ideal is impossible in an imperfect world. Human justice, Chap-
man is saying, can only reflect the justice of the cosmos, and this
has been corrupted by the fall of man.
There are fewer characters in Chabot than in any of Chapman's
other plays, and although these may have been revised to resemble
figures in the court of James, they were shaped primarily as sym-
bols of various moral positions. The world in which they move is
the chance-ridden, transitory world of Bussy D'Ambois, where
true greatness is an illusion, for the powerful of one day may be
the fallen of another, and all are subservient to the power of the
king whose whim or passion may control the destiny of men. To
be virtuous is to earn the hatred of society, as Allegre also makes
clear at the beginning:
ask a ground or reason
Of men bred in this vile, degenerate age!
The most men are not good, and it agrees not
With impious natures to allow what's honest;
'Tis an offence enough to be exalted
40 Jacobean Tragedy
To regal favours; great men are not safe
In their own vice where good men by the hand
Of kings are pknted to survey their workings.
(I,i, 15-")
Allegre's function is to comment on the action of the play, as well
as by his physical suffering to parallel the mental anguish of
Chabot. To make clear the nature of the world in which his hero
will fall. Chapman also introduces the father of Chabofs wife. He
scorns the world, as Chabot explains to the king:
because the extreme of height
Makes a man less seem to the imperfect eye
Then he is truly, his acts envied more;
And though he nothing cares for seeming, so
His being just stand firm 'twixt heaven and him,
Yet since in his soul's jealousy he fears
That he himself advanc'd would under-value
Men plac'd beneath him and their business with him
Since height of place oft dazzles height of judgment,
He takes his top-sail down in such rough storms,
And apts his sails to airs more temperate.
(I, i, 141-51)
The imagery of the ship at sea, subject to the chance of winds and
waves, runs through the play, emphasizing the frailty of the
human condition, at the mercy always of fortune and an imperfect
world. The old man affirms that to be great and to be just at the
same time is impossible. Through him Chapman is saying that to
be truly just one must retire from the world and not presume to
greatness or the power to judge others. The king is always the
symbol of human justice, and in a corrupted world the king will
be swayed by passions which negate justice at its very source. But
man cannot retire from the world like Chabot's father-in-law.
He must live in society no matter how corrupt, and it is in his very
nature to strive for high pkce. His involvement in living must be
an involvement in sin. Chabot, Montmorency and Poyet represent
three different moral positions which man may take in a corrupt
world.
Poyet is the man of policy, the object of Chapman's hatred and
scorn throughout his career as a dramatist. Poyet willingly em-
George Chapman 41
braces the corruption of society and uses this very evil as Ms
means to advancement. He denies all the altruistic emotions of
man. Friendship is merely 'fashionable and privileged policy*
(I, i, 1 66). It is
but a visor, beneath which
A wise man laughs to see whole families
Ruin'd, upon whose miserable pile
He mounts to glory.
(I, i, 234-7)
He stands for the complete negation of justice. The courts can
never be more than the instruments of a pernicious royal will, and
the art of the advocate is to give to injustice the seeming mask of
its opposite. He speaks with the voice of the Machiavel:
even in nature
A man is animal politicum,
So that when he informs his actions simply,
He does it both gainst policy and nature.
(I, i, 184-7)
But his most complete perversion of justice in the fall of Chabot
is no more than an execution of the will of the king.
There is some ambiguity in the portrait of Montmorency,
perhaps because the original character was expanded and developed
to correspond to the actual George Villiers whom Chapman
could not afford to offend. He probably had a smaller role in the
earlier version of the play. He seems to have been conceived to
stand for a via media between Chabot and Poyet. He has all of the
virtues and the vices of ordinary man, and he fully accepts his role
in the social order. He is reluctant to use base means against his
rival, for he has a sense of justice:
In seeking this way to confirm myself
I undermine the columns that support
My hopeful, glorious fortune, and at once
Provoke the tempest, though did drown my envy.
With what assurance shall the King expect
My faith to him that break it for another.
(I, i, 206-11)
The image of the tempest links his human frailty to that of the
42 Jacobean Tragedy
other characters. Behind his sense of justice is his concern for
his own fortunes, and when he is convinced that he must break
faith in order to advance in the world, he does so, but not without
reluctance :
Misery
Of rising statesmen! I must on; I see
That gainst the politic and privileged fashion
All justice tastes but affectation,
(I, i, 238-41)
Montmorency is a creature of the world whose injustice and
treachery he accepts. He becomes a vacillating figure, moving
from one side to the other, until he comes finally to plead for
Chabot whom he has helped to ruin. He is not committed to evil
like Poyet : c Good man he would be, would the bad not spoil him'
(El, ii, 27), but his striving after high place corrupts him as
inevitably it must corrupt any man. If there is some inconsistency
in his characterization, this may be the fault of the historical
allegory super-imposed upon it. There is little warrant for his role
in Pasquier.
Chabot cannot learn to live with the world's evil like Mont-
morency. He is committed to a code of unwavering and exact
justice. He prides himself upon his ability to overcome his human
frailty and to mete out perfect justice, looking to his own inno-
cence to shield him from a hostile world:
I walk no desert, yet go arm'd with that
That would give wildest beasts instinct to rescue
Rather then offer any force to hurt me
My innocence, which is a conquering justice
And wears a shield that both defends and fights.
(II, ii, 5 3-5 7)
But no man is truly innocent, for to live is to share in the general
corruption of mankind, and Chabot's fall is Chapman's ironic
commentary upon the power of such belief in innocence to
preserve him.
There is a paradox in Chabot which is similar to that which
Shakespeare had posed in Corio/ams. There the hero by unswerving
devotion to the aristocratic ideal comes to deny his kinship to his
George Chapman 43
fellow men and thus Ms own nature as a human child of God,
falling through his pursuit of an absolute virtue into the sin of
pride. Chabot, in the same manner, by his pursuit of an absolute
justice, must deny those qualities of human frailty which are the
property of fallen man and which make perfect justice impossible.
Chabofs very devotion to justice becomes the source of pride, and
it is also a source of delusion, for it leads him to place his faith in
those human instruments of justice whose lamentable imperfec-
tion his tragedy will reveal.
Both the pride and the delusion of Chabot are implicit in his
first conflict with the king over his destruction of Montmorency's
'unlawful' bill. 1 The king maintains that he alone has raised Chabot
to his position of wealth and power; Chabot argues that his own
virtue has made him what he is, and that God will maintain him
in his high station even if the king will not:
But, if the innocence and right that rais'd me
And means for mine, can find no friend hereafter
Of Him that ever lives, and ever seconds
All king's just bounties with defence and refuge
In just men's races, let my fabric ruin,
My stock want sap, my branches by the root
Be torn to death, and swept with whirlwinds out.
(II, iii, 29-35)
This is foreshadowing of Chabot's end, for his final knowledge
that his supposed innocence cannot protect him, that the king's
whim may have power to destroy him, for C A great man, I see,
may be / As soon dispatch'd as a common subject* (IV, i, 80-8 1)
will kill in him the will to live. Chapman then will use this very
symbol of the tree to remind the audience that the fate which
Chabot here thinks impossible has in fact come upon him.
What Chabot cannot yet perceive is that his very worldly
station is a reflection of the pervasive injustice of the natural
order, for it was a commonplace of medieval and Renaissance theo-
logians that all human inequality, the very existence of kingship
1 The legal merits of the case at issue are presented in so ambiguous a fashion that
the audience is left with some doubts as to the absolute justice of Chabot's point of
view (I, ii, 124-45). Whether or not the French merchant was justified in seizing the
Spanish ship might well be debated. Chapman might easily have chosen a more
clear-cut example of injustice had he wished to avoid all ambiguity.
44 Jacobean Tragedy
and degree became necessary only after the fall of man, and
that these reflected the disharmony into which the entire universe
then was thrown, a concept, as we have noted, which runs
through Bussy D'Ambois. No man, the king believes, can achieve
riches and power and remain free from worldly taint:
And who sees you not in the broad highway,
The common dust up in your own eyes beating,
In quest of riches, honours, offices,
As heartily in show as most believe?
And he that can use actions with the vulgar,
Must needs embrace the same effects, and cannot (inform Mm)
Whatsoever he pretends, use them with such
Free equity, as fits one just and real,
Even in the eyes of men, nor stand in all parts
So truly circular, so sound, and solid,
But have his swellings-out, his cracks and crannies;
And therefore, in this, reason, before law
Take you to her, lest you affect and flatter
Yourself with mad opinions.
(H, Hi, 129-42)
Chabot, the king is saying, cannot escape that sinfulness which is
a part of his very being as a man. His very insistence upon his
unsullied virtue is a challenge to the king's authority, who asks
that Poyet by finding Chabot guilty free him 'from forth a sub-
ject's fetters, /The worst of servitudes' (II, iii, 186-7). If man
can be as virtuous as Chabot claims to be, the necessity for king-
ship disappears. This very challenge to the king's authority makes
necessary Chabot's destruction. His affirmation of complete inno-
cence is a denial of the fall of man, and thus of the necessity of
kingship and of all human institutions which proceed from king-
ship, including the courts of law themselves. This is the paradox of
Chabot's moral position. There can be no doubt, of course, of his
innocence of crime in terms of the world's morality, but he lacks
the virtue of humility, and out of his very freedom from guilt
springs the pride which must destroy him. At the end of the play
Chabot will learn a new humility. He will recognize the king's
authority as the source of all worldly station, pkce his faith in
mercy rather than justice, and plead for the exoneration of Poyet.
Chabot's trial is a monstrous travesty of justice in which Chap-
George Chapman 45
man uses all his powers of ridicule, centring upon the irrelevant
garrulity and pomposity of the Proctor-General, who even as
early as 1614 might have been modelled after the hated Sk Edward
Coke. The lack of evidence against Chabot is patently obvious.
The judges are forced to condemn him against their own wills by
the threat of the king's displeasure, reminding the audience again
that the final executor of the law is always the king.
Chabot enters his ordeal firm in his faith in the king's justice.
On this he stakes his life:
No more; the King is just; and by exposing
Me to this trial, means to render me
More happy to Ms subjects and himself.
His sacred will be obey'd; take thy own spirit,
And let no thought infringe thy peace for me;
I go to have my honours all confirmed.
(m, i, 12-17)
He does not bother to answer the absurd charges against him, but
trusts only in his faith that human law will see their speciousness
and thus vindicate him:
I will not wrong my right and innocence
With any serious plea in my reply,
To frustrate breath and fight with terrible shadows,
That have been forg'd and forc'd against my state,
But leave all, with my life, to your free censures,
Only beseeching all your learned judgments,
Equal and pious conscience, to weigh -
(in, ii, 140-6)
But Chabot is condemned in spite of Ms faith, and a stage direction
tells us that the people show their approval of his sentence.
When the king offers to pardon Chabot he is asserting that the
salvation of man depends not upon justice but mercy. This pardon
Chabot refuses, for to accept pardon is to deny his innocence:
I were malicious to myself and desperate
To force untruths upon my soul, and, when
*Tis dear, to confess a shame to exercise
Your pardon, sir. Were I so foul and monstrous
As I am given to you, you would commit
46 Jacobean Tragedy
A sin next mine by wronging your own mercy
To let me draw out impious breath.
(IV, i, 266-72)
This reminds the audience of Chabot's innocence of worldly
crime, but also of the pride which causes him to reject the mercy
all men need, no matter how virtuous. He appears to be victorious,
for the king is forced to examine the circumstances of the trial,
and he finds that the judges have been subjected to unlawful
pressure. But in Chabot's very victory is also his defeat, for the
open corruption of the court to whom he had willingly entrusted
his life is now revealed, and the faith in justice by which he had
lived is shattered. In the moment of seeming victory he feels the
approach of death:
I never had a fear of the King's justice.
And yet I know not what creeps o'er my heart
And leaves an ice beneath it.
(IV, i, 382-4)
Chabot has been saved for the moment, but the faith by which he
has lived has been destroyed. The king has merely 'dressed his
wounds, I must confess, but made / No cure; they bleed afresh'
(V, ii, 75-76).
The collapse of justice is as fully illustrated by the second trial.
Poyet is as guilty as Chabot had been innocent, but the attitude of
the court remains the same. We have the same pompous garrulity
of the Proctor-General and the same abuse heaped upon the
victim's head. The two trial scenes the only prose scenes in the
play - were designed obviously to parallel one another, the abuse
of the guilty Poyet to recall to the audience that of the innocent
Chabot and to remind that there is little real difference in the two
situations. The king orders the condemnation of Poyet just as he
had ordered that of Chabot; that the trial will be as gross a
travesty of justice is implicit in the Advocate's reply to the Icing's
charge:
He shall be guilty of what you please. I am studied
In him, sir; I will squeeze his villanies,
And urge his acts so home into his bowels,
George Chapman 47
The force of It shall make him hang himself,
And save the law a labour.
(IV, I, 401-5)
Chabot is innocent, Poyet guilty, but the law will find only what
the king pleases, for the king is the supreme executor of the law,
and he shares in the general corruption of an imperfect world. It
is this realization which destroys Chabot.
The death scene is entirely Chapman's invention, for there is no
warrant for it in Pasquier, and it certainly is not required by the
historical allegory. It is a dramatic symbol of the collapse of the
ideal of justice for which Chabot had stood. His death is the climax
of Chabot* s education, for he has learned that perfect justice is a
mere illusion in an imperfect world. The meeting with Allegre is
introduced to show the cost in physical suffering which Chabot's
test of justice has occasioned:
Good my lord, let not
The thought of what I suffered dwell upon
Your memory; they could not punish more
Than what my duty did oblige to bear
For you and justice.
(V, iii, 22-26)
There is a pathetic irony in the reward Allegre will receive for
his services; he will serve a new master more difficult than the
master for whom he has suffered. He now asks the crucial question
in the minds of the audience:
but there's something in
Your looks presents more fear than all the malice
Of my tormentors could affect my soul with:
That paleness, and other forms you wear,
Would weE become a guilty admiral, and one
Lost to his hopes and honour, not the man
Upon whose life the fury of injustice,
Amfd with fierce lightning, and the power of thunder,
Can make no breach. I was not rack'd till now:
There's more death in that falling eye then all
Rage ever yet brought forth. What accident, sir, can bkst,
Can be so black and fatal, to distract
The calm, the triumph, that should sit upon
Your noble brow?
(V, iii, 26-39)
48 Jacobean Tragedy
Chabot's reply is not that of a victorious conqueror of injustice.
It is the reply of one who has been struck the mortal blow which is
the loss of the faith by which he has lived:
Ailegre, thou dost bear thy wounds upon thee
In wide and spacious characters; but in
The volume of my sadness, thou dost want
An eye to read; an open force hath torn
Thy manly sinews, which some time may cure;
The engine is not seen that wounds thy master
Past all the remedy of art or time,
The flatteries of court, of fame or honours.
(V, in, 44-51)
To describe this inner wound Chabot now uses the very symbol of
the tree which in an earlier time (II, iii, 29-35) he had used to
boast of the innocence which would preserve him in spite of all:
Thus in the summer a tall flourishing tree,
Transpknted by strong hand, with all her leaves
And blooming pride upon her, makes a show
Of Spring, tempting the eye with wanton blossom;
But not the sun, with all her amorous smiles,
The dews of morning, or the tears of night,
Can root her fibres in the earth again,
Or make her bosom kind to growth and bearing:
But the tree withers; and those very beams
That once were natural warmth to her soft verdure,
Dry up her sap, and shoot a fever through
The bark and rind, till she becomes a burthen
To all which gave her life; so Chabot, Chabot -
(V, Hi, 52-64)
That the death of Chabot is the collapse of the ideal of justice is
affirmed by the king himself:
I see it fall;
For justice being the prop of every kingdom,
And mine broke, violating him that was
The knot and contract of it all in him.
(V, iii, 174-7)
For this destruction of justice the king would blame Poyet, but
the audience knows that Poyet is not to blame, for the inadequacy
of human justice is in the very nature of things, The final plea of
Chabot is that Poyet be granted mercy:
George Chapman 49
I observe
A fierce and killing wrath engender'd in you;
For my sake, as you wish me strength to serve you,
Forgive your Chancellor; let not the story
Of Phillip Chabot, read hereafter, draw
A tear from any family. I beseech
Your royal mercy on his life and free
Remission of all seizure upon his state;
I have no comfort else.
(V,iii, 189-97)
And lie dies not with an expression of pride in his own innocence,
but kneeling rather in a final gesture of obedience to the king:
Sir, I must kneel to thank you,
It is not seal'd else; your blest hand; live happy.
May all you trust have no less faith than Chabot!
(V, iii, 199-201)
This final 'faith' is not the pride by which once he had stood, but
rather the simple trusting fidelity to Ms king with which he dies.
Chabot had sought to live by a code of perfect justice. He had put
Ms faith in such justice to the trial, and through its bitter outcome
he has come to see that justice depends upon human instruments,
and that these share in the general imperfection of the world.
Man's only hope in a fallen world is the love and mercy of Ms
king and Ms fellow men. The play is not, as most critics have
supposed, Chapman's plea for a perfect human justice. It is rather
Ms tragic statement of its inevitable imperfection.
CHAPTER THREE
Thomas Hey wood
The most prolific dramatist by far of the entire
Elizabethan and Jacobean period was Thomas
Heywood, having had a hand, by his own account, in
some two hundred and twenty plays. His career, like that of
George Chapman, spans the final years of Elizabeth's reign, all of
that of James, and extends in fact through most of the Caroline
era., for Heywood lived until 1641, surviving into an age when the
pkys he had written at the beginning of his career were already
an anachronism. The greatest of his achievements, A. Woman
'Killed with "Kindness, was written probably in the same year as
Chapman's Bussy D 9 Af%bois 9 but here the parallel between the
two men ends, for Heywood remained the apostle of a Renaissance
cosmic optimism throughout his long career. He is still, however,
entirely a product of his times, for while his writings show a
constant reaffirmation of order and degree, of traditional moral
values in traditional terms, into his greatest plays there sometimes
creeps, perhaps in spite of his avowed didactic purposes, a reflec-
tion of the contradictions and ambiguities of his time.
It is probably because his outlook is so different from those of
his greater Jacobean contemporaries that Professor EUis-Fermor
omitted Heywood from her classic study of the Jacobean drama.
He stands indeed apart from the dramatists we are considering,
but if we would have a proper estimate of the moral climate of
Jacobean tragedy he cannot be ignored. Although he left no
monuments like those of Webster or Middleton, he probably
enjoyed a greater popularity than either of them, and he con-
tinued to write for the stage after both were dead. Heywood is
important because he may illuminate for us a facet of the moral
and intellectual milieu of Jacobean tragedy of which we can have
50
Thomas Heywood 5 1
no awareness wMle we restrict our vision to the greater artistic
achievements of his contemporaries. Heywood is one who dog-
gedly continued to assert the moral values of an earlier age in a
new world in which they no longer had great meaning.
Charles Lamb may have most perfectly summed up the signi-
ficance of Heywood when he called him a prose Shakespeare. He
has been celebrated for the realism of Ms scenes of Elizabethan
life and for the gentle sentimentality of his romantic plots; he
may be even more important as one whose imitation of Shake-
speare led him to reflect in more prosaic terms a moral viewpoint
which we associate with the greatest pkys of his master. Like
Shakespeare, Heywood was conservative. He saw the universe as
the ordered creation of a loving God, every part of which was
rekted to every other, and all joined together in a great cosmic
harmony. His tragedies, like Shakespeare's, are concerned with
evil as a violation of this order, and they end with the restoration
of order by the working out of evil itself in accord with a divine
providence. What in Shakespeare emerges, however, as the poet's
comprehensive vision of human destiny, conveyed in striking
emotional terms, appears in Heywood in the terms of the Eliza-
bethan devotional and homiletic tract.
ii
A Woman 'Killed with Kindness has not generally been admired for
its moral content; indeed this has appeared to most critics as
bordering close to the absurd. T. S. Eliot has held that the interest
of the play is sentimental rather than moral, for 'there is no reality
of moral synthesis; to inform the verse there is no vision'. 1 If the
play achieves any greatness, it is in the few moments of dramatic
realism which enable us to feel the sorrow and regret of Frankford
and his wife with an immediate emotional intensity, in the delicacy
and refinement of the play's sentiment, and in some passages of
poetry where Heywood reaches an aesthetic range he never else-
where approached. Although it is as deliberately didactic as any
pky of Chapman's, the morality this play preaches is that of the
pulpit, and in its circumscribed domestic setting it fails to rekte
this morality to any krger cosmic design. There is, as Eliot again
1 Selected Ess<&s, p. 176.
52 Jacobean Tragedy
has put It, 'no supernatural music from behind the wings'. We
are shown a portrait of sin and repentance, and the way to heaven
is indicated to us in conventional terms, but we are afforded no
real insight into the relation of man to his universe. That it is
tragedy at all has been denied frequently, for if Frankf ord Is the
hero, he never loses anything but his domestic content; even as
domestic tragedy we need only compare it to Othello to see how
barren It is of real cosmic scope. 1
That the play in its specific thematic statement reflects the
commonplaces of Elizabethan popular theology has been demon-
started in some detail. 2 The basic situation of the main plot
Involves the traditional conflict between good and evil; Mistress
Frankford and Wendoll succumb to the attractions of lust, are
punished and made to see the folly of their fall from virtue and
the threat of damnation which It has involved. There has been
much useless debate about the credibility of the seduction of
Mistress Frankford. T. S. Eliot has held it perfectly reasonable in
terms of ordinary life situation, while others have sought to
explain it in terms of the "Renaissance attitude' towards women
which relegated them to a lower intellectual plane than men as
creatures more subject to animal passion. 3 But Heywood is con-
cerned here with portraying the kind of fall from virtue of which
It was axiomatic in Christian doctrine that all men were capable.
In terms of the tradition of moral exemplum which conditions the
play, no further explanation is necessary.
As Heywood's answer to the fact of evil in the world, we have
Master Frankford, a model of the Christian gentleman held up for
the audience as an example of how one must act if evil Is to be
thwarted. As a gentleman he thinks of his honour which must be
protected, but his primary concern is for the salvation of his wife's
soul. When he kills her with kindness, he is acting entirely out of
love for her; In opposition to the code which demanded blood
revenge, he asserts the contrary Christian doctrine of forgiveness
1 See Moody E. Prior, The Language of Tragedy, pp. 95-96.
2 H. H. Adams, English Domestic Or, Homiktic Tragedy 1575 to 1642 (New York,
I943)> PP- 144-59-
* See Hallett D. Smith, *A Woman Killed with Kindness,' PMLA, LIU (1938),
138-47. Smith relates Mistress Frankford to such sinful women as Elstred, Rosa-
mund Clifford and Jane Shore.
Thomas Heywood 5 3
and reconciliation. Frankford acts to bring Ms wife to a state of
sincere repentance, and only upon her death bed, when he is
assured of her soul's salvation, does he at last forgive her. If he
appears as priggish, rigid, and mechanical, it is again because
Heywood is concerned primarily with making his simple theolo-
gical point. What greatness the play achieves is in spite of the
author's theological purpose and not because of it. This again is
an index of its inadequacy as tragedy.
The sub-plot has been dismissed usually as irrelevant matter
which Heywood used merely to fill in his five act structure, and
whose general inadequacy almost succeeds in destroying the play.
But Eliot, I believe, is wrong on both counts when he writes
(p. 177) that 'Middleton's The Channeling . . . must share with
A. Woman 'Killed with Kindness the discredit of having the weakest
underplot of any important play in the whole Elizabethan reper-
tory*. Melodramatic, gauche and often ridiculous as Heywood's
story of the unfortunate Sir Charles Mountford and his sister may
be, it is nevertheless joined thematically to the main plot, 1 for its
subject also is the preservation of honour and the destruction of
evil through kindness and love. Middleton's two plots in The
Changeling are also closely joined, as we shall see, and although
Heywood was a lesser dramatist, he was at least experienced
enough in the theatre to recognize that such thematic linking
was a principal element in the greater multi-plot plays of his time.
He had the example of his master Shakespeare always before
him.
We must recognize at once that Heywood's sub-plot represents
the kind of sentimental romance for which this author had a
particular affection, and which was particularly cherished by the
lower middle class audiences who frequented the Red Bull
theatre. It is of the same generic stock as the Jane Shore story
which Heywood permitted to distort his earlier Edward IV plays
out of all proportion. The familiar story of the ever-loving
virtuous sister brought to the point where to save her brother she
must sacrifice her chastity to the villain is a perfect example of folk
romance, and it is in keeping not only with such romance but with
1 See Freda L. Townsend, 'The Artistry of Heywood's Double Plots,* Pj2, XXV
(1946), 97-119.
54 Jacobean Tragedy
Heywood's particular moral attitudes that she should be saved at
last by the miraculous power of her virtue to work a transforma-
tion in her oppressor and assure the final happiness of all. The
moral premisses upon which the story is based are rigid and old-
fashioned, but they represent ideas as dear to a lower class audi-
ence as are the theological principles of Master Frankford. As a
man of honour Sir Charles cannot accept a kindness from his
enemy. He must repay Sir Francis with the chastity of his sister,
the only good he possesses, and when he has delivered his sister in
payment of his debt he must slay himself, just as his sister must
kill herself before the actual loss of her chastity: c Her honour she
will hazard, though not lose: To bring me out of debt, her
rigorous hand / Will pierce her heart' (V, i).
Heywood is not concerned with the contradictions and am-
biguities in the situation - that in surrendering his sister Charles
may actually be forfeiting the honour he seeks to preserve, or that
by killing herself Susan will actually forfeit the family honour by
cheating her brother's creditor. Such fine considerations are alien
to the spirit of folk romance, and the audience caught up in the
sentiment of the action does not stop to consider them. Like the
courtesy of Arveragus in Chaucer's Franklin* s Tale, that of Sir
Charles is intended as an example of the highest type of honour
and magnanimity. It belongs to the same romantic tradition as the
offer of Arveragus, and it has the same effect : to shock thedemand-
ing adversary so profoundly that he must respond with a similar
act of magnanimity:
Stern heart, relent;
Thy former cruelty at length repent.
Was ever known, in any former age,
Such honourable wrested courtesy?
Lands, honours, life, and all the world forego,
Rather than stand engaged to such a foe.
Thus in the sub-plot as well as in the main-plot the practice of a
consistent Christian virtue has the power to destroy evil in the
world. In the main plot this is shown primarily in terms of a
conventional Christianity which upholds the salvation of the soul
Thomas Heymod 5 5
as the greatest good, and counsels love and forgiveness as the
instruments with which man must oppose evil; in the sub-plot it
is shown in terms of a conventional notion of honour and
gentility which in the rapidly changing England of Heywood's
day belonged already to the past.
Evil in Heywood appears as a temporary disruption of the
natural goodness of the world. Even Wendoll, who comes as
close to a villain as any character in Heywood's works, is pursued
by remorse. Heywood is incapable of creating an lago to sym-
bolize an unalterable demonic force forever confronting mankind,
although in the temptation of Mistress Frankford by WendoH
he is able to suggest the eternal temptation by Satan to which
mankind is subject. Mrs Frankford is a model of virtue until she
commits her single sin, and then the rest of her life must be
devoted to sincere Christian repentance. In The "English Traveller
Mistress Wincott also is guilty only of a momentary departure
from virtue for which she must atone with her life as soon as her
sin has been revealed. Delavil, the false friend and seducer, must
flee in remorse like Wendoll, and the injured Young Geraldine,
like Frankford, never once thinks of taking any action against the
woman and the friend who have betrayed him. He is confident
always that heaven wiU be his avenger. In the sub-plot of that play
also, the ease with which Old Lionel pardons the son who has
tricked and defrauded him again illustrates the typical Heywood
motif of love and Christian charity destroying evil and restoring
harmony on earth.
Yet the very need which Heywood felt to reassert these tradi-
tional beliefs may be an indication of the particular confusion and
uncertainty of the age in which he lived, and the persistency of his
affirmation may suggest the wide-spread dissent against which it
was directed. We may, in fact, find in Heywood, particularly in
A Woman Killed with Kindness and The English Traveller, alongside
the optimistic Christian moralizing, signs of the uncertainty
against which Heywood asserts his optimistic vision. Woven into
the structure of his greatest pkys there is that theme of the con-
fusion of appearance with reality which is a constant theme in the
Jacobean Shakespeare, the inability of man so often to distinguish
virtue from its opposite, and out of this inability his tragedy pro-
56 Jacobean Tragedy
ceeding, 1 This in itself is a traditional Christian motif, springing
from, the notion that man chooses evil through the inadequacy of
Ms reason which permits him to mistake it for the good. The fall
of Eve in the garden of Eden traditionally had been explained in
these terms. Yet its emphasis in Heywood and in his Jacobean
contemporaries is an index of the particular pessimism of their age.
The ease with which a virtuous wife may become an unfaithful
one, while it may cause Frankford to question the reliability of his
own perception and judgment, is not to be taken as evidence that
the initial virtue of Mistress Frankford is any the less real. When
she is described in the very first speech of the play as
the chief
Of all the sweet felicities on earth,
... a fair, a chaste, and loving wife;
Perfection all, all truth, all ornament.
CU)
Heywood intends no irony. This is important dramatic exposition,
to emphasize the perfection of the heroine which we have no
reason to doubt before her fall. The tragedy is not that the hus-
band is deceived by any falsehood in her initial virtuous appear-
ance, but rather that such virtue may so easily undergo corruption.
When Frankford beholds the fall of his wife he is brought to an
awareness of evil's reality in the world and of the weakness of
human judgment as a defence against it. When first he is given
reason to suspect his wife, he questions the fallibility of his
judgment:
Though I durst pawn my life, and on their faith
Hazard the dear salvation of my soul,
Yet in my trust I may be too secure.
May this be true? O, may it, can it be?
Is it by any wonder possible?
Man, woman, what thing mortal can we trust,
1 THs theme has been emphasized in particular by Patrick Meyer Spacks, 'Honor
and Perception in "A Woman Killed "with Kindness",* MLQ t XX (1959), 321-32,
but I believe that Mrs Spacks distorts the play in extending this theme to conclude
that *the play presents a -unified, if sombre, vision of a world governed by con-
siderations other than honour*, finding in Heywood a kind of cynicism which runs
contrary to the dominant impression not only of this pky but of every other of his
extant works.
Thomas Heywood 5 7
When friends and bosom wives prove so unjust?
(Ill, H)
The answer to his question will be in the confirmation of Ms
suspicions. The awareness to which it will bring him is necessary,
however, to his performance of his Christian duties; he must
recognize his own human fallibility and the ever present power of
evil.
Where Frankford is truly deceived is in his judgment of
Wendoll, for here what he perceives at first to be virtue is only
the outward mask of virtue which hides an inner evil. This is
made clear by the suspicions of the servant, Nicholas, who sees
from the first what Wendoll truly is, and who finally brings about
his unmasking. Wendoll seems to stand, as I have suggested, for
the tempter Satan who brought Eve to disaster in the Garden of
Eden, for he tempts Mrs Frankford in the same manner. If we
are to find in the play a larger allegorical overtone relating the
fall and salvation of one wife to the fall and salvation of all man-
kind, certainly Frankford has many elements of the Christ-figure.
The Satanic aspect of Wendoll appears in the speech with which
he leaves the play:
She's gone to death; I live to want and woe;
Her life, her sins, and all upon my head.
And I must now go wander, like a Cain,
In foreign countries and remoted climes,
Where the report of my ingratitude
Cannot be heard. I'll over first to France,
And so to Germany and Italy;
Where when I have recovered, and by travel
Gotten those perfect tongues, and that these rumours
May in their height abate, I will return:
And I divine (however now dejected)
My worth and parts being by some great man praised,
At my return I may in court be raised.
(V,iii)
Heywood, of course, is reflecting upon the court corruption of
his own day, but while Wendoll must suffer for his sin, and he
is 'Pursued with horror of a guilty soul / And with the sharp
scourge of repentance lashed', Heywood is suggesting also tiiat
Wendoll will rise again because he stands for a kind of evil
5 8 Jacobean Tragedy
which finally cannot be destroyed. This Is but the merest hint,
and I would not emphasize it very strongly, but Wendoll does rise
again, in fact, in the Deiavil of The English Traveller, modelled
closely upon the earlier figure. When we read the two plays in
dose succession we feel the existence of a tempter of mankind
constantly reappearing with a different name but otherwise un-
changed. In The English Traveller the themes of virtue's corruption
and the failure of human perception are repeated in very similar
terms in the seduction of Mistress Wincott by Deiavil, and the
inability of man to rely upon his own judgment and senses is par-
ticularly illustrated by the deception practised upon Old Lionel.
In the inability of Sir Charles in the sub-plot of A Woman Killed
with "Kindness to recognize the malice of his liberator from prison,
and particularly in his inability to perceive the treachery of Shafton
who lends him money, we have again the theme of the deception
in outward appearances, and in this instance it is combined with
protest against some of the most socially destructive practices of
Heywood's age, the corruption in the courts, and the widespread
depredation wrought by usury. The rejection of Susan's pleas for
help by those whom the Mountfords had most befriended in the
past is a familiar folk-tale motif but, it emphasizes also the cor-
roding forces of greed and ingratitude in society, just as Sir
Charles' determination to hold on to his meagre remnant of land
calls attention to the gradual passing of the great country estates
into the hands of the London merchant classes, which con-
servatives like Heywood witnessed with a particular horror. It is
not to be taken as a suggestion that Sk Charles values his land
more than he does his sister's life and chastity. Heywood never
ceases to proclaim his traditional Christian morality, to preach
the power of love and honour to work a reformation in the world,
but he is more keenly aware of the evils of his age - perhaps of the
contradictions inherent in its very code of morality and honour -
than most critics have been willing to allow. In this he shows that
in Ms own peculiar way he is very much a part of his Jacobean
milieu.
in
A Woman Killed with Kindness and The English Traveller are
"I bo mas Hey wood 59
probably Heywood' s two best plays, but It is not because either
of them fully attains the dimension of tragedy. They are both
genuinely Christian in their point of view, and they are imme-
diately and obviously concerned with stating an explicit moral
position. They remain, in spite of this, domestic pkys in which the
dramatist makes little attempt to relate Ms morality to any larger
cosmic scheme. Only the immediate family is concerned, never,
as in Shakespeare, the state and the physical universe as well. In
only one play did Heywood attempt to write tragedy of real cosmic
range, and although this play has remained among the least
respected works in his canon, it seems to be the play which he
himself regarded most seriously as his contribution to the highest
realm of English drama. Heywood refers to his Rape oflMcrece as
*A True Roman Tragedy*, placing it thus in the company of what
Renaissance neo-classicism saw as the highest type of drama; it is
the type to which Ben Jonson himself, literary arbiter of the age,
aspired. Heywood's Roman tragedy is a far lesser work than
either of Jonson's, but it does attempt a cosmic range of which
Jonson was incapable.
The many printings of The Rape of "Lucrece suggest that it was
far more popular in its own day than it has been in ours. 1 By recent
critics it has been dismissed usually as a parody of the classics or
as a crude attempt to cater to tie lower tastes of Heywood's
plebeian audience. A. M. Clark, a very lukewarm defender, con-
demns it as tragedy, but argues that it must be read as a 'chronicle
history'. 2 The many songs of the comical Valerius -which must
have catered to a popular demand in Heywood's day - have been
censured in particular as inappropriate to the seriousness of the
play's subject. Of their poor taste there can be no doubt, but we
must do Heywood the justice of observing that the songs are later
additions to the play, and that when they were insetted they were
concentrated in those central scenes where the dramatist wishes
to stress the escape of the Roman lords into wanton amusement
1 Allan Hokday, ed. The "Rape of iMcrece (Urbana, HI., 1950), has suggested that
this play was revised by Heywood in 1607 from a play he had written at the very
beginning of his career, around 1594. If this be so-and Hokday's evidence is very
tenuous indeed - the strong influence of Shakespeare's Macbeth (1606) in the pky
would suggest that the 1607 revision was a very thorough one.
* Thomas Heywood, Playwright and Miscellomst (Oxford, 1951), pp. 220-1.
60 Jacobean Tragedy
and self-indulgence in the face of Tarquin's tyranny. The change
of Valerius himself from statesman into singing fool is one of the
reflections in the life of individual man of the corruption in the
universal order which springs from Tarquin's tyranny. The
transformation of the Roman lords, as I shall try to show, is an
essential element in the total moral vision of the play. The most
offensive song of all, the three part catch in which Pompey the
clown informs Valerius and Horatius of the rape (2296-343) is
a means of exposition which, in spite of its crudity and abominable
taste, is not entirely alien to the dramatic tradition in which Hey-
wood worked. 1 That the play is marred by many and obvious
artistic defects does not alter the fact that in its totality it repre-
sents Heywood's effort to embody in drama a more compre-
hensive view of man's relation to his universe than he ever else-
where attempted.
Certainly Heywood is no Shakespeare. But we must note that
in spite of the many irrelevancies in the work, its often sentimental
and ineffectual verse, the play nevertheless has a central unifying
theme. It is not, as Holaday calls it, merely a loosely connected
series of scenes which follow Livy's account of the reign and fall
of the Tarquins, the political events having little connection with
the central episode which gives the tragedy its title. We must do
Heywood the justice of observing that the political and private
affairs of his play are not haphazardly thrown together. They are
closely related to one another by a distinct moral vision to which
each contributes. This is established in the opening scene of the
play when Tullia says, *A kingdom's quest, makes sons and
fathers foes* (112), linking the unlawful act of political usurpation
to the severance of the natural bond between father and son, just
as Shakespeare links his political and personal themes in King
Lear. Corruption in the state must be reflected in corruption in
the family, in the destruction of the normal impulses of man, and
finally in the rape of Lucrece.
The text of 1608, whether or not it be a revision of an earlier
play, shows the strong influence of Shakespeare's Macbeth. This
involves more than a matter of phraseology, or of Heywood's
basing his Tarquin-Tullia relation upon that of Macbeth and his
1 See M. C Bradbrook, Themes and Cansmtkw of "EMyabeiban Tragedy, p. 1 10.
Thomas Hey wood 61
wife, as most commentators have observed. Heywood attempted
also to embody in Ms tragedy the moral viewpoint of Shake-
speare's masterpiece. The Rape of 'Lucrece^ like Macbeth., is con-
cerned with the destruction of order and its restitution through
the working out of evil, on the personal, the political and the
cosmic levels. When Tullia treads upon the skull of her father
and drives her chariot over his body, Heywood is not merely
catering to the sordid tastes of a depraved audience. He is creating
in terms of his own theatrical tradition a symbol of human sacrilege
which will culminate in war and tyranny for Rome, will destroy
the manhood of the Roman lords, and will violate the sanctity of
the family in the rape of Lucrece. The visit to the Delphic oracle
is not brought in primarily to satisfy the Jacobean fondness for
stage magic. The oracle sounds the motif of divine retribution and
the purging of sin : 'Then Rome her ancient honours wins, / When
she is purg'd from Tullia's sins' (711-12). The oracle heralds a
universal restitution of order which has been destroyed by
hatred's triumph over love, and it prepares for the significant
couplet which ends the play:
March on to Rome, Jove be our guard and guide,
That hath in us, veng'd rape, and punished pride.
(2888-9)
The play ends on the note of divine providence bringing about
the restitution of order, deriving good out of evil itself, meting
out rewards and punishments in accord with the justice of a
perfect heavenly plan.
In the opening scene of the pky Heywood makes clear the
leading motifs of his work, and he uses the commentary of the
feigned madman, Brutus Junior, to drive them home. When
Tarquin and Tullia unlawfully seek the throne, they are striving
like Shakespeare's Lord and Lady Macbeth, to rise above the
station which in the divine plan it is their lot to occupy, and such
striving can only shatter the harmony of all creation. As they plot
the usurpation, they make clear to the audience that this act must
also involve a severance of the natural human feelings. The aged
king Servius is Tullia's father, but 'who aspires, / Mounts by the
6z Jacobean Tragedy
lives of fathers, sons and sires' (116-17). They must 'despise a
father for a crown 3 (119). Unlike the murder of Duncan, that of
Servius is not undertaken merely as a means to kingship, to be
executed reluctantly and in spite of strong opposing feelings.
Heywood is cruder than Shakespeare in emphasizing his point:
Tullia exults in the desecration of her father as fully as she exults
in being queen, for the two acts are inseparably linked. She urges
her husband to
let his mangled body He,
And with Ms base confederates strew the streets,
That in disgrace of his usurped pride,
We o'er Ms trunk may in our chariot ride:
For mounted like a queen 'twould do me good
To wash my coach-naves in my father's blood.
(346-51)
Tullia is a mechanical and lifeless figure beside Lady Macbeth,
but Heywood is deeply concerned with her dramatic symbolism.
Usurpation and patricide, the public and the private sin, in her
are closely linked, the one dependent upon the other.
The rest of the play may be summed up as an exploration of the
implications of this initial act, with its public and its private conse-
quences portrayed always in close relation to one another. There
will be treachery and tyranny on the level of the state, issuing in
treachery and human desecration on the level of personal human
relations. We are reminded by Brutus that in this initial sin is also
implicit the destruction of the Tarquins, for evil set in motion
must work out its course, and when it has done so order will be
restored, for a just and benevolent God will punish sinners and
preserve the harmony of creation:
Jove art thou just; hast thou reward for piety?
And for offence no vengeance? or canst punish
Felons and pardon traitors? chastise murderers,
And wink at parricides? if thou be worthy,
As well we know thou art, to fill the throne
Of all eternity, then with that hand
That flings die trisulk thunder, let the pride
Of these our irreligious monarchizers
Be crown'd in "blood.
(378-86)
Thomas Heywood 63
The sin of Tarquin and Tullia Is compared to that of c those giants
that wag'd war against the Gods' (363), an equally unnatural act,
and Heywood dweEs upon all of die gruesome details so as to
stress the horror of the crime, and the particular violation of nature
which can permit a woman to be Its author:
but the queen,
A woman, fie fie: did not this she-parricide
Add to her father's wounds? and when his body
Lay all besmeared and stained in the blood royal,
Did not this monster, this infernal hag.
Make her unwilling charioteer drive on,
And with his shod wheels crush her father's bones ?
Break his craz'd skull, and dash his sparkled brains
Upon the pavements, whilst she held the reins?
The affrighted sun at this abhorred object,
Put on a mask of blood, and yet she blushed not.
(367-77)
The redness of the terrified sun shows nature itself recoiling,
and this is Heywood's way of relating the corruption of the
physical universe itself to that of the individual, the family and
the state. Shakespeare, in the same manner, had dwelled upon the
unnatural phenomena which accompanied the murder of Duncan,
the clouds hanging over Scotland, blotting out the sun, and the
horses devouring one another. The justice of God upon which
Brutus calls will be vindicated in the destruction of the Tarquins,
but until heaven Is ready to act the entire universe will suffer
corruption. The madness of Brutus Is a symbol of this general
corruption which persists while the Tarquins rule, for when the
final sacrilege has been enacted and heaven Is ready for vengeance,
Brutus throws off his madness and, like Shakespeare's Macduff,
becomes the instrument which heaven uses to destroy the tyrants
and restore the universe to order.
The civil uprising against the Tarquins springs directly from
the personal crime against Lucrece, while her rape Is merely the
reflection upon the personal level of the Initial political crime:
*Oh who but Sextus could commit such waste? / On one so fair,
so kind, so truly chaste?' (1954-5 5). Only the creature of Tarquin's
tyranny and usurpation can commit the personal outrage, and
this crime, In turn, becomes the spur which leads finally to the
64 Jacobean Tragedy
restoration of political order. By this pattern of cause and effect
Heywood relates the diverse elements of Ms play as surely as
Shakespeare relates the murder of Duncan to the wanton slaughter
of Macduff *s children.
After the opening scene, with its symbolic statement of the
unifying theme, the play falls naturally into two movements. First
we are shown the issue of the initial act in a corruption both of
Rome and of the private virtue of her citizens. The statesman
Valerius becomes a fool, 'from a toward hopeful gentleman, /
Transhaped to a mere ballater' (540-1), as the misguided strength
of Tarquin becomes the weakness of all Rome:
Tarquin's ability will in the weal,
Beget a weak unable impotence:
His strength, make Rome and our dominions weak,
His soaring high make us to flag our wings,
And fly close by the earth: his golden feathers
Are of such vastness, that they spread like sails,
And so becalm us that we have not air
Able to raise our plumes, to taste the pleasures
of our own elements.
(473-So)
The careful antitheses in this speech reflect the perversion of
order which continues to be emphasized until its most horrible
expression in the rape of Lucrece. Then begins a second move-
ment which details the restitution of order through God's provi-
dence. Brutus throws off the madness which has been the symbol
of Ms impotence, and the heroic feats of Horatius and Mutius
Scevok, which in Livy occur much later and have no relation to
the rape of Lucrece, are drawn into the play to emphasize the re-
assertion of human dignity and the heroic stature of ancient
Romans which must accompany the restoration of order to the
state. Through both of these movements there is a constant em-
phasis upon the dose relation between the public and the private
spheres of action.
The visit of Brutus, Sextus and Aruns to the Delphic oracle
serves an important function. The orade not only stresses the fall
of Tarquin as the price of Rome's redemption, but he places the
succession to the throne in terms of personal human affection :
Thomas Heywood 65
c He that first shall kiss Ms mother, / Shall be powerful/ Only
Brutus perceives the meaning of the oracle and he kisses his mother
earth, assuring to the audience the eventual restitution of order to
Rome. He emphasizes also the symbolic implications of the
orade s for love of mother is seen as closely related both to love
of country and love of the physical earth, all three aspects of love
being tied together in a harmonious cosmic unity. For Aruns and
Sextus, children of disorder, the orade leads only to the desecra-
tion of maternal love, for brother struggles against brother for
the mother's kiss which each values only as the means to kingship.
Sextus vows revenge upon Ms brother who bests him in tMs, and
he, in fact, refuses Ms mother's kiss when it is offered only as a
symbol of maternal love and not as assurance of the crown. TMs
desecration of human value repeats the motif of the opening
scene. The hatred of Aruns and Sextus is 'unnatural enmity*
(890); it is *Hate, born from love' (891). In its general statement
about human love and its relation to the love of Ms people wMch
is the cardinal requirement of the virtuous king, tMs scene shows
a surer capacity for symbolic statement than critics usually have
been willing to allow to Heywood.
The sins of Tarquin and Tuliia spread through tie common-
wealth, infusing Rome with corruption. The defection of Sextus
to the Gabines is the first fruit of Ms quarrel with Ms brother.
It represents rebellion against the homeland as well as the unnatural
turning of the son against the father, as the father must turn
against the son:
Does the proud boy confederate with our foes?
Attend us lords, we must new batde wage,
And with bright arms confront the proud boy's rage.
(944-6)
When Sextus betrays Ms newfound allies and is welcomed back
by Tarquin with new honours as the reward for Ms treachery, we
see the moral corruption wMch has replaced the ancient ideal of
Roman honour.
To emphasize tMs all-pervasive corruption, Heywood in the
central scenes of Ms play stresses the idleness and dalliance of the
great men of Rome. They neglect their ancient offices and spend
their time in idle amusement away from court. Scevola, who later
66 Jacobean Tragedy
is to reassert his nobility, under Tarquin's rule laments that 'The
time that should have been seriously spent in the state-house, I
have learned securely to spend in a wenching house, and now I
profess myself anything but a statesman* (1003-5). This willing
neglect of civil duty, which springs from Tarquin's initial crime,
is what makes possible the rape of Lucrece, completing the chain
of cause and effect. There is a mood of dalliance and amusement-
seeking among the Roman generals in the camp before Ardea
when die fateful wager is made, through which Sextus gains his
first admittance to the house of Lucrece. The very treachery of
Sextus against the Gabines has led to the siege of Ardea in the
first pkce, for his treachery has been rewarded with a generalship,
and his reconciliation with his father has led to the campaign
against the neighbour nations. Tarquin boasts to Porsenna of the
exploits of the Roman army which his son commands, but the
generals of this army have abandoned the soldier's virtues, and
the issue of their campaign will be only the rape of Lucrece.
That the Roman generals have been infused with the corruption
out of which their very campaign has issued is made clear by the
dialogue between two common soldiers with which Heywood
prefaces the crucial banquet scene. While the generals revel, only
the common soldier stands guard against the enemy:
there's no commander
Of any note, but revels with the prince.
(1377-8)
thus must poor soldiers do,
WhiTst their commanders are with dainties fed,
And sleep on down, the earth must be our bed.
(1386-8)
This episode is inserted not merely to offer a plea for the common
soldier, as is usually supposed, but to throw into sharper focus the
negligent unmanlike activity of the generals which will make
possible the rape of Lucrece.
The personal effects of Tarquin's tyranny and the military cam-
paign which results from it are made clear by Lucrece herself.
They separate the husband from the wife and make possible the
desecration of the home:
Thomas Hejmod 67
With no unkindtiess we should our lords upbraid.
Husbands and kings must always be obeyed.
Nothing save the high business of the state,
And the charge given him at Ardea's siege,
Could have made Collatine so much digress,
From the affection that he bears his wife.
But subjects must excuse when kings claim power.
(1691-7)
She indicates here the dose relation of her coming disaster to the
power exerted by an illicit kingship. If this soliloquy lias any
function, it is to make clear how public power impinges upon
private life, how an evil king and Ms evE son pervert the hus-
band's role as his wife's protector and leave open the way to
sacrilegious outrage. There may be some symbolic implication in
the fact that it is Collatine's ring which enables Sextus to gain
entrance to Lucrece. 'Without that key you had not entered here'
(1792), she says, indicating that the tyrant has usurped the hus-
band's natural role: 'without this from his hand. Sextos this night
could not have entered here: no not the king himself' (1162-4).
Coliatine himself, by the dissipation and dereliction of duty he
has shared with the other lords, has prepared the way for his wife's
disaster, but his abandonment of duty has been the result of
Tarquin's initial crime.
Lucrece from the very beginning of the play has stood as a
symbol of the virtue to which the rule of the Tarquins stands
opposed. If she seems priggish in her lecturing of her servants on
chastity, it is simply that Heywood is trying to stress the ordered
regularity of the household she rules, as opposed to the patent
disorder in the Rome of the Tarquins. She is as consistent in her
moral position as Master Frankford is in his, and Heywood is
more interested in making clear this moral position than he is in
creating a realistic character. It is the destruction of the chastity of
Lucrece and the virtue for which it stands which finally causes
Brutus to abandon his pose of madness and with the other
Roman lords to throw off the slothful neglect of duty which had
been the symbol of the infusion of Tarquin's sin into the body
politic. He at kst is able to arouse his compatriots to action:
As you are Romans, and esteem your fame
68 Jacobean Tragedy
More than your lives, all humorous toys set off.
Of madding, singing, smiling and what else,
Receive your native valours, be your selves,
And join with Brutus in the just revenge
Of this chaste ravished lady, swear.
(2473-8)
The rape of Lucrece is the spark which revives the ancient valour
of the Romans; at is the culmination of evil which gives birth at
last to good. In asserting their valour the Roman lords execute
the vengeance not of private citizens, but of divine providence.
'Leave all to Heaven* (1221) had been Collatine's answer to the
tyranny of Tarquin, in accord with the traditional Tudor doctrine
of passive obedience which Heywood always espouses. 1 When the
Roman lords now march against Tarquin, it is as heaven's instru-
ments destroying the usurper, not as private citizens opposing
their king. Brutus and Collatine assert divine purpose as surely as
do Shakespeare's Macduff and Malcolm when they march against
the usurper Macbeth. Brutus is heaven's answer to sacrilege and
disorder: e We'E murder murder, and base rape shall bleed' (2544).
The horror of rebellion is a common theme in Heywood, as we
might expect from his intense loyalty to the ideals of Tudor
absolutism. To make his position clear in The Rape of Tuner ece, he
deliberately raises the issue of the exact nature of the insurrection
against the Tarquins when he has Sextus accuse the Roman lords
of treason in conventional Tudor terms, linking rebellion against
the king to rebellion against God:
Traitors to heaven: to Tarquin, Rome and us,
Treason to kings doth stretch even to the Gods,
And those high Gods shall take Rome in charge,
Shall punish your rebellion.
(2557-60)
This is the charge which Brutus and Collatine must answer if
their campaign against the Tarquins is to be vindicated. To justify
their position Heywood must make clear that Tarquin is not the
1 There is dear statement of Heywood's scrupulously orthodox political position
that prayer is man's only recourse against tyranny and that rebellion is the worst of
all possible evils in his historical plays, Edward IV and If You Know Nof Me, You
Know Nobody. See The English "History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, 1957),
pp. 273-8, 218-23.
Thomas Heywood 69
lawful king which Sextos claims him to be, but rather a usurper
who has ruled only through God's sufferance and not as the agent
on earth of a benevolent divine will. The rape of Lucrece is now
the symbol which exposes the falsehood of Sextus's protestation;
it is the sacrilege which defeats the claim of the tyrant to divine
protection:
Oh devil Sextus, speak not thou of Gods,
Nor cast those false and feigned eyes to heaven,
Whose rape the furies must torment in hell,
Of Lucrece, Lucrece.
(2561-4)
Brutus now invokes the prophecy of the oracle. In destroying the
Tarquins he is fulfilling the decree of fate, acting as the agent of
divine providence, rather than opposing the will of God, of which
a rebel against a lawful king in Tudor terms would be guilty:
Now Sextus where's the orade, when I kissed
My mother earth it plainly did foretell,
My noble virtues did thy sin exceed,
Brutus should sway, and lust burned Tarquin bleed.
(2585-8)
That the destruction of the Tarquins represents God's vengeance
for the initial murder of Servius with which the play began is now
made dear by the choral speeches of Valerius and Horatius:
Now shall the blood of Servius fall as heavy
As a huge mountain on your tyrant heads, o'erwhelming
all your glory.
(2589-90)
**
Tullia's guilt, shall be by us revenged that in her pride
In blood paternal, her rough coach-wheels dyed.
(2591-2)
The image of the mountain crushing the sinner recalls the begin-
ning of the play where the murder of Servius had been compared
to the sin of
Those giants that waged war against the Gods,
For which the o'erwhelmed mountains hurled by Jove
To scatter them, and give them timeless graves
yo Jacobean Tragedy
Was not more cruel than this butcher}".
(363-6)
The Gods now have executed a like revenge. The play's conclusion
represents the final working out of the evil with which it began.
To show also that the Romans fight in the service of divine
justice and order, Heywood now works into his play the episode
so often censured as an extraneous intrusion, the heroic defence of
Rome by Horatius at the bridge. The feat is semi-miraculous, and
Horatius is acting in answer to the prayer of Brutus :
Thou Jovial hand hold up thy sceptre high,
And let not justice be oppressed with pride,
Oh you penates leave not Rome and us,
Grasped in the purple hand of death and ruin.
(2616-9)
The self-mutilation of Mutius Scevola is used also to affirm the
new heroic valour which now infuses the Roman lords in their
desire to avenge the rape of Lucrece. Scevola's heroic act so im-
presses Porsenna that he spares his life, and moved by the spirit
he sees in his opponents, he Is prepared for the final reconciliation
which will assure peace and stability to the new Rome freed from
the tyranny of the Tarquins.
There are extraneous elements in The Rape of Lucrece. The
mutual destruction of Sextus and Brutus, for instance, while it
serves the needs of stage spectacle and adds a moment of dramatic
tension at the end, does not further the theme, for it would have
been more suitable in this respect had the play ended with Brutus
still alive. In spite of such lapses, we can see that the principal
events of the play are related to one another by a basic design.
The rape of Lucrece is not merely one of a series of sensational
episodes; it is the central element of the play which serves to
unite the public and the private spheres of action, to tie a private
crime to the larger questions of the destiny of Rome and the
providence of God. Heywood, like Shakespeare, sees the affairs of
men and the affairs of the state as inter-related in a harmonious
total order, and the central theme of The Rape of Lucrece is the
violation of order by the perverted will of man and the restitution
of order by a divine providence working through human action.
Thomas Heywood 71
If The Rape ofLucrece Is a pedestrian imitation Macbeth, it does
nevertheless attempt to give dramatic form to a vision of man's
relation to the forces of evil in the world which is distinctly
Shakespearian and which, in this respect, sets Heywood apart
from his major Jacobean contemporaries.
CHAPTER FOUR
Cyril Tourneur
To form an estimate of Cyril Tourneur's contribution to
English tragedy has been very difficult, for we know
almost nothing about Ms literary career, and of the two
plays usually attributed to him his authorship of one has often
been denied. His name appeared on the title page of The Atheisfs
Tragedy when it was printed in 161 i, but The Revenger's Tragedy was
printed anonymously in 1607, and it was not until 1656 that the
pky was attributed to Tourneur in Edward Archer's play list. 1
Between the two plays there is also a wide diversity in artistic
achievement. That The Atheist* $ Tragedy is an inferior work, how-
ever, is not necessary evidence of separate authorship. What is
perhaps even more striking about these two plays is that each in
its own way is a highly moralistic and didactic work, and that they
share a crusading missionary tone and a common point of view
which renders them more like one another than either is like any
of the plays of Tourneur's contemporaries. 2 Taken together the
Tourneur plays represent a particular attitude towards the moral
issues of their age which renders them virtually unique. Tourneur's
answer to social corruption and human debasement is in a return
to a primitive Christianity.
1 On the authorship question see Samuel Sdbioenbaum, Middletotfs Tragedies^
A. Critical Study (New York, 1955), pp. 156-82. Schoenbaum would attribute the
pky to Middleton, as would R. H. Barker, Thomas Middleton (New York, 1958)
pp. 64-75, both following E. H. C. Oliphant, Shakespeare and bis Fellow Dramatists
(New York, 1929), n, 95.
2 Toumeur's authorship of both plays has been argued effectively by Harold
Jenkins, *Cyril Tourneur,' RES', XVH (1941), 21-56; U. M. Ellis-Fermor, 'The
Imagery of "The Revenger's Tragedie" and "The Atheist's Tragedie",' MLR,
XLVHI (1953), 129-38; Inga-Stina Ekeblad, *On the Authorship of "The Revenger's
Tragedy**,* English Studies* XII (1960), 225-40. In *An Approach to Toumeur*s
Imagery*, MLR, LIV (1959), 489-98, Miss Ekeblad has argued that in both pkys
imagery is used in the same manner to support a moral theme.
7*
Cyril Tonmeur 75
This is not the optimistic Qiristkn religion of Shakespeare
or Heywood, with its emphasis upon order and degree and upon
the dignity of man and his commanding position in an ordered
purposive universe. Tourneur's is the pessimistic Christianity
inherent in a krge segment of medieval thought, implicit in
Augustine and Aquinas, which had its most characteristic expres-
sion in the De Contemptu Mmidi of Pope Innocent III. It shares the
same premisses, themselves medieval in origin, of a decaying
universe and a degenerate humanity which we have noted in the
pkys of Chapman, but with none of the characteristic seventeenth-
century scepticism. Tourneur ? s emphasis is upon the baseness and
corruption of man as the inheritor of original sin. He stresses
man's smaliness in the universe, his slavery to the ravages of time,
and hence his need to look to the other world as his only hope of
felicity. Of this other world there is no doubt. Tourneur's plays
employ the traditional devices of hortatory and homiletic literature
to argue a Christian point of view which was receiving renewed
emphasis as Christian humanism began to decline in the early
years of the seventeenth century, but which had always been a
part of orthodox Christian belief. In their moral fervour Tour-
neur's plays have been rekted to a tradition of complaint and
satire extending back to the Middle Ages. 1
If the earlier of the pkys is the greater artistic achievement, it
may be in part because of a fresher poetic inspiration which
enabled the author to forge his total pky as a symbol of his moral
point of view, whereas in the kter pky lie fell back upon a method
of explicit moralising, allowing such characters as Charlemont and
Castiza to preach his moral doctrine directly to th.e audience. In
The ~&vengefs Tragedy Tourneur uses the devices of poetry to
make his audience feel the insignificance of the present world in
the light of eternity. He carries his moral theme in his poetic
imagery and in the cadence of his lines. The Aiheisfs Tragedy is
somewhat weaker in poetic imagery; the author seems to rely
rather upon narrative and argument. He uses the devices of moral
1 See John Peter, Complaint and Satire m Early 'English Ut&rature (Oxford, 1956),
pp. 255-87, which argues strongly for Toumeur as a conscious moralist availing
himself of a long established literary tradition, and not as the nihilistic cynic he
usually has been called. On contemptus mwdi and Renaissance pessimism see Herschel
Baker, The Wars of Truth, pp. 43-50.
74 Jacobean Tragedy
exemplum to teach doctrines corollary to a belief in heaven: divine
justice, retribution for sinners, the futility of earthly vengeance^
and above all the fallacy of any system of human reason which may
lead a man to place his faith in physical nature rather than in God. 1
In Tourneur's tragedies the evil characters outnumber by far
the virtuous ones, and their evil is so complete and all-embracing
as to leave no room for compensating virtues of any kind; they
are shocking in the absoluteness of their depravity. In the same
manner such virtuous characters as Castiza or Charlemont are
so completely free from sin that they lose all illusion of humanity.
It has been suggested 2 that Tourneur was so influenced by current
Calvinistic doctrine that he came to see the vast majority of man-
kind as utterly depraved, with only a few saints who could aspire
to heaven. It is obvious that he stresses the world's evil in terms
of the gluttony and sexuality for which Puritans had a particular
horror, and he does dwell upon the terrors of death which were
their constant concern.
But the horror of the body and its pleasures, coupled with a
constant concern with death in its most terrible forms, need not
be confined to Jacobean Puritanism. These were common features
also of medieval asceticism, closely associated with the tradition of
contempius mundi. The bitterly satirical portrait of Langebeau
Snuffe in The Atheisfs Tragedy certainly makes it difficult to believe
that Tourneur himself could have belonged to any Puritan sect.
The rigid division of the characters into good and evil, rather than
furnishing evidence of a doctrine of the damned and elect, may
simply reflect the rigidity of an allegorical method. Tourneur's
characters are never meant to convey the illusion of reality. One
like Lussurioso is simply a symbol of lechery, and he contains little
which is not a part of this symbol. Castiza or Castabella are sym-
bols of chastity, and they cannot be anything but absolutely
virtuous. To find Calvinistic doctrine in Tourneur may also be to
1 Or, as Miss Ekebkd (MLR, LTV (1959), p. 496), sums up the difference between
the two pkys: In "The Atheist's Tragedy" we are asked to follow an argument
which eventually proves D'Amville to be wrong and damned; in "The Revengers
Tragedy" we are asked for immediate responses to the evils that are being demon-
strated, through the swiftly moving intrigue which hurries us from one striking
situation to another, and through out-of~plot speeches.*
2 Michael H. Higgins, *The Influence of Calvinistic Thought in Tourneur's
"Atheist's Tragedy"/ 'SUES, XIX (1943), 255-62.
Cyril Toumeur 75
find in his characters a degree of verisimilitude and psychological
development which simply is not in them. The enormity of their
evil may reflect not a doctrine of man's total depravity so much
as the dramatist's desire to shock Ms audience into belief. He may
be relying upon a type of exaggeration which is a common
feature of moral exemphm. Sin must be writ large.
ii
The 'B^wnger's Tragedy is not, as it has so often been regarded,
a savage melodrama in which a cynical, embittered adolescent
expresses the omnipresence of evil and his own hatred for
humanity. 1 The play embodies a distinct moral vision, and this
involves more than a belief in the inevitability of divine retribu-
tion or in the futility of human vengeance. 2 If the play's action is
an ingeniously related series of ironic reversals, these are meaning-
ful only in terms of the krger religious principle which governs
the total play: the self-destructive quality of evil and the final
insignificance in the light of eternity of man's very life on earth.
The scorn for the world which Eliot has called mere adolescent
cynicism reflects a profoundly religious view of life, for The
Revenger's Tragedy is a dramatic statement de contemptu mmdi which
uses the very symbols by which this philosophy of worldly with-
drawal and heavenly contemplation had expressed itself in the
Middle Ages. 3
1 See, for instance, A. H. Thorndike, Tragedy (Boston, 1905), p. 212; William
Archer, The Old Drama and the New (London, 1923), p. 74; Una M. Ellls-Fermor,
The Jacobean Drama, pp. 153-69. For T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 189, the play
expresses *an intense and unique and horrible vision of life; but it is such a vision
as might come as the result of few or slender experiences, to a highly sensitive adole-
scent with a gift for words'* Moody Prior, The Laftguage of Tragedy, pp. 135-6, sees
the plays as reworkings of the revenge pky formula by *a writer of real poetic gifts
who found the most direct release of his talents through the acceptance of a ready-
made popular dramatic convention*. For a useful survey of recent criticism, see T. M.
Tomlinson, 'The Morality of Revenge: Tourneur*s Critics,* Essays m Criticism, X
(1960), 134-47-
2 See M. C, Bradbrook, Theme and Conventions* pp. 165-74; H. H. Adams, 'Cyril
Tourneur on Revenge/ JEGP, XLVm (1949), 7*-7; Robert Omstein, "The
Ethical Design of "The Revenger's Tragedy",* BLH, XXI (1954), 81-93, and
The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, pp. 107-18.
8 The medievalism of the play has been stressed by L. G. Salingar, e "The
Revenger's Tragedy" and the Morality Tradition,' Scrutiny, VI (1938), 402-22;
Omstein, The Moral Vision, p. 117; Schoenbaum, Mfddletotfs Tragedies, pp. 28-31.
j6 Jacobean Tragedy
The medievalism of the play is implicit in its studied artificiality.
The characters, with their allegorical names, move across the
stage like figures in a medieval dance of death, their actions
patterned and ritualistic, until in the final masque scene even the
pretence of reality is abandoned. We cannot speak of The Revenger's
Tragedy in terms of mere survival of an earlier morality play tradi-
tion; the play itself is one large dramatic symbol of which the
morality play features are an appropriate part, and this total
dramatic symbol is medieval both in its grotesqueness and in the
view of life for which it provides the emotional equivalent. The
unmitigated viciousness of the characters and the unrelieved sin-
fulness of the action become merely ludicrous when viewed in a
naturalistic perspective. Action and character in this play are
deliberately unreal, with the exaggerated quality of all symbol, and
the theme they emphasize is one of impermanence, change and
mutability, the futility of life on earth which renders so urgent a
hope in the life beyond. We feel no sorrow at the destruction of
Vindice because Tourneur's emphasis is not upon the plight of an
individual, or even upon the sorrows of this world s but upon
our need to look to the next one.
Such a philosophy of worldly withdrawal does not involve an
acquiescence in the face of evil or even an unwilling acceptance of
it. It was axiomatic that to merit heaven man must abjure sin in
the present world, and thus to preach a doctrine of contemptu
mundi is implicitly to urge one's fellow men to a life of moral
virtue, and this, in effect, is what Tourneur is doing. John Peter
has shown that Vindice's speeches draw upon a traditional body
of expression whose motive was moral reform, and he has argued
that there is in the second half of The Revenger's Tragedy a restora-
tion of morality in the world, with a reformation of Gratiana, with
Vindice and Hippolito willingly paying the penalty for their own
transgressions, and with Castiza and Antonio earning the final
victory. The paradox of Tourneur's moral position is that a
doctrine of worldly withdrawal may lead at last to social regen-
eration.
The contrast between a futile earthly vengeance and an effective
heavenly justice - heralded by the sound of thunder which answers
Vindice's plea (W, ii) and implicit in the blazing star which hovers
Cyril Tourneur 77
over the final banquet scene (V, HI) - Is but part of a larger theme
by which the pky is shaped into a unified and consistent work of
art. To this central theme of the impermanence and imperfection
of all human institutions in the light of eternity, aH of the parts
of the play contribute. It calls for characters who are symbols of
vanity and waste; it infuses the action with an irony which under-
scores the futility of all worldly aspirations, 1 and it runs as a leading
motif through the poetic imagery, with its constant playing upon
impermanence, time and change. This central theme is supported
by the unique quality of Tourneur's dramatic verse, whose
rapidity of movement T. S. Eliot has noted (pp. 191-2): 'His
phrases seem to contract the images in his effort to say everything
in the least space, the shortest time.' The total play provides the
emotional equivalent of the statement that life is brief and fleeting,
full of the evil of a corrupt and decaying world, hastening always
towards inevitable death. To seek the things of the world is only
to involve one's self in the evils of the world, to sin, to suffer its
consequences and to die, for man's most careful pkns may be
frustrated by fate with a gruesome irony. The only reality worth
man's efforts is the heaven which lies always ahead and which may
be attained by the kind of withdrawal from life and cultivation of
one's own piety which is mirrored in Castiza and Antonio. From
the conviction of heaven's reality springs the sense of reconcilia-
tion at the end.
Among the most revealing lines in the play are those with
which Vindice cheerfully accepts his death:
This murder might have slept in tongueless brass,
But for ourselves, and the world died an ass;
Now I remember too, here was Piato
Brought forth a knavish sentence once;
No doubt (said he), but time
Will make the murderer bring forth himself.
(V, Hi, 157-61)
The impermanence of human life is contrasted with the perma-
nence of brass, its traditional symbol. Heaven is responsible for
1 On the importance of irony as an instrument of the play's moral argument, see
Peter lisca, * "The Revenger's Tragedy": A Study in Irony,' Pj2, XXXVIEI (1959),
242-51.
7 8 Jacobean Tragedy
Vindice*s fall, but heaven's instrument is time, which changes all,
reveals all, and reduces life to death: *Great men were Gods, if
beggars could not kill 'em* (H, ii, 105). This emphasis upon time
and change as the destroyers of life unites the various frustrations
and ironic reversals which constitute the action. It creates a total
impression of the impermanence and futility of earthly existence*
that 'there is nothing sure in mortality, but mortality* (HI, vi,
118-19).
The leading motifs of the play are set in Vindice's opening
speech (I, i, 1-52). The skull he holds in his hand is the memento
mori which points to the other world, and the evil doers who pass
before him in the torch light are impermanent fragile creatures, of
small significance in the light of eternity. Their very movement
lends them a shadowlike quality and reminds the audience of the
evanescence of human life. In Vindice's words as he watches these
symbols of a debased humanity are the images of time, transmuta-
tion, eternal change. The skull is a
terror to fat folks
To have their costly three-piled flesh worn oF
As bare as this.
He calls it a 'sallow picture of my poisoned love', the relic of a
beauty that once was. Toisoned love' has a double sense, referring
both to the physical poisoning of Gloriana and to the destruction
of his own love which has been changed by poison into hatred and
a lust for revenge. The motif of change is in the thought that
'turns my abused heart-strings into fret*. There is emphasis upon
the passing of time, the instability of nature which kindles fires in
ancient bodies, with the implication also that these are the fires
of hell to which lust leads :
O that marrowless age,
Should stuff the hollow bones with damned desires,
And 'stead of heat kindle infernal fires,
Within the spendthrift veins of a dry duke,
A parched and juicdess luxur.
The idea of the transitoriness of life is in 'spendthrift veins', and
even in the image with which Vindice describes the power of his
Cyril Toumeur 79
dead mistress's now vanished beauty there is stress upon change
and transformation, the destruction of human wealth:
Oh she was able to have made a usurer's son
Melt all his patrimony in a kiss.
And what his father fifty years told
To have consumed.
He calls upon revenge to keep thy day, hour, minute' as later he
is to apostrophize, *O hour of incest!' (I, iii, 70), punctuating the
idea of time and its ravages.
In the imagery of this very speech the audience is reminded also
of heaven, for the eyes of the dead Gloriana, although now trans-
formed to * those unsightly rings ', were once 'two heaven-pointed
diamonds'. The diamond, or crystal, is used throughout the play
as a symbol of heaven and a harmonious cosmic order. When
Vindice would celebrate the virtue of Castiza he calls upon the
angels to give her 'crystal plaudites' (ET, i, 267), and she herself
says that *A virgin honour is a crystal tower' (IV, iv, 165). Castiza
stands for heaven's alternative to the world's corruption and dis-
order. The diamond is again used as the symbol of a proper moral
order (as opposed to Spurio's bastardy), and the ring as the relic
left when life departs, as the Duchess tries to justify her own
incest:
thy injury is the more,
For had he cut thee a right diamond,
Thou hadst been next set in the dukedom's ring,
When his worn self like age's easy slave,
Had dropped out of the collet into th' grave.
(I, ii, 168-72)
The diamond or crystal of the empyrean was, of course, a tradi-
tional symbol for heaven, and the idea of heaven is kept by this
undercurrent of poetic imagery present always in the minds of the
audience. Heaven is in the sound of thunder and in the blazing
star at die end, and it looks down always upon the action:
Who can perceive this? save that eternal eye
That sees through flesh and alL
(I, iii, 74-75)
The action involves not one revenger, but a whole society of
8o Jacobean Tragedy
revengers. 1 Spurio would avenge Moaself for Ms bastardy, the
Duchess for her husband's failure to free her youngest son;
Ambltioso and Supervacuo seek revenge for their younger
brother's death, Lussurloso for his own betrayal. All of these
characters are evil, and that they seek revenge makes it inevitable
that they be so, for to seek earthly vengeance is implicitly to deny
the power and justice of God; it is to involve oneself in the evil
of the world. The tragedy of the revenger springs from the failure
of his faith in heaven.
Vindice stands somewhat apart from the other avengers be-
cause at the beginning of the play the audience is invited to share
in the indignation provoked by the wrongs against him, and thus
he has their sympathy. He dies, however, as corrupted by sin as
the others. He represents the inevitable fate of man who would
take upon himself the justice of God, embracing evil in a vain
attempt to destroy evil. Vindice is used also to comment on the
action, as he does in his opening soliloquy. Once this speech is
over he steps directly into the action, assuming three distinct
disguises as he manipulates plot and counter plot, his very
disguises enforcing the symbolism of impermanence and change. 2
'What brother/ he asks as he assumes his first disguise, c am I
far enough from myself?* (I, iii, i) The man who must serve
Lussurioso is one 'either disgraced / In former times, or by new
grooms displaced' (I, i, 85-86). The human condition is subject to
constant flux, and life itself is only 'this luxurious day wherein we
breathe' (I, iii, 124). Vindice is described by HippoHto as a symbol
of time, the destroyer itself:
and if time
Had so much hair, I should take him for time,
He is so near kin to this present minute.
(I, iii, 27-29)
Vindice becomes the personification of time itself as he catalogues
its devastations:
1 H. H. Adams, op. cit., lists nine distinct situations which involve revenge and
holds that the play properly should be called The Revengers* Tragedy.
z On the relation of Vindice's disguises to the morality tradition, see Salingar,
op. cit., pp. 409-11.
Cyril Toummr 8 1
I have been witness
To the surrenders of a thousand virgins,
And not so little,
I have seen patrimonies washed a-pieces
Fruitfields turned into bastards.
And in a world of acres.
Not so much dust due to the heir 'twas left to
As would well gravel a petition!
(I, Hi, 54-61)
His rapid changes of person keep pace with the rapid tempo of
the action and the verse; they emphasize the relentless passing of
time, the instability of the human form, as the things of the world
degenerate into dust. Vindice is one c whose brain time hath
seasoned 7 (El, ii, 8).
The trial of the Duchess's youngest son reveals the inadequacy
of human justice, much as Chapman was to dwell upon it in
Cbabot^ and through this scene run also the themes of life's im-
permanence and time's ravages. The Duke in Ms opening speech
calls attention to the power of death to alter the seeming certainties
of life:
Duchess it is your youngest son, we're sorry;
His violent act has e'en drawn blood of honour
And stained our honours,
Thrown ink upon the forehead of our state
Which envious spirits will dip their pens into
After our death, and blot us in our tombs.
For that which would seem treason in our lives
Is laughter when we're dead.
ft ii, 1-8)
Blood has not even the durability and power of ink, which at
least can survive to destroy reputation and honour after death has
triumphed. The theme of transmutation is echoed by Spurio:
* Would all the court were turned into a corpse* ft ii, 40), and the
bizarre metaphor of blood and ink is kter recalled in c The pen of
his bastard writes him cuckold* (IE, ii, 121), with its additional
sexual connotation, the reputation of the Duke himself being
destroyed by the very power of ink he now decries.
Throughout the pky the human body is described as a building,
82 Jacobean Tragedy
subject to ruin and decay. The murdered wife of Antonio is
called *a fair comely building new fallen, / Being falsely under-
mined* (I, iv, 72). This building imagery is used also to emphasize
the impermanence of life and the futility of all worldly aspirations,
and this motif is given an ironic emphasis when the evil Lussurioso
uses this very imagery to boast of his power to make the fortunes
of men :
For thy sake we'll advance Mm, and build fair
His meanest fortunes; for it is in us
To rear up towers from cottages.
(IV, i, 61-63)
When the condemned Junior speaks of the beauty of Antonio's
wife as 'ordained to be my scaffold' (I, ii, 71), there may be a
double implication in 'scaffold', a temporary building as well as
the gallows, but whether this be intentional or not, the line
focuses upon the relation of beauty to death which is so integral
to the theme of the play.
This theme appears most markedly on Vindice's second appear-
ance with the skull of Gloriana. His speech is a virtual catalogue
of the medieval commonplaces de contempfu mundi. There is scorn
for the love of woman as futile worship of what must inevitably
degenerate into dust:
And now metMnks I could e'en chide myself,
For doting on her beauty.
(in, v, 72-73)
The impermanence of physical beauty and the futility of its
worship are expressed in perhaps the best known lines in the play :
Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee? for thee does she undo herself?
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor benefit of a bewitching minute?
(75-78)
As the silkworm gives his body, man gives his soul to glorify
lechery and whoredom. 'Ladyship' was sometimes used for bawd,
and the soul was often called the lord of the body. Life is only a
'bewitching minute' and beauty leads only to damnation. The very
Cyril Tourneur 83
act of preserving beauty is identified poetically with the destruc-
tion of human life:
Does every proud and self-affecting dame
Camphor her face for this? and grieve her Maker
In sinful baths of mi lie, when many an infant starves,
For her superfluous outside, all for this?
(87-90)
The skull is the only reality. It is the medieval memento mori whose
presence at the feast would banish thoughts of worldly vanity and
turn man to contemplation of die world to come:
it were fine metMnks,
To have thee seen at revels, forgetful feasts.
And unclean brothels; sure 'twould fright the sinner
And make him a good coward, put a reveller
Out of his antic amble
And cloy an epicure with empty dishes.
Here might a scornful and ambitious woman
Look through and through herself, see ladies, with
false forms
You deceive men, but cannot deceive worms.
(93-101)
Vindice turns to the audience with his 'see ladies*, the author
speaking directly. In the symbol of the skull are all of its tradi-
tional associations. 1
Castiza, the symbol of a heavenly order whose mark is chastity,
stands apart from the other characters. She represents the perma-
nence of heavenly virtue as opposed to the transitory ever-
changing life of sin which the otter characters exemplify. She is
*a rare phoenix 3 (I, iii, in), for virtue alone is eternal, and her
very first speech underscores the motifs of constancy and poverty
which are the signs of virtue. Her poverty is an implicit rejection
of the evanescent things of the world:
How hardly shall that maiden be beset,
Whose only fortunes are her constant thoughts,
That has no other child's part but her honour,
That keeps her low and empty in estate.
(H, i, 1-4)
1 On the traditional nature of VIndice*s speech and its relation to the religious
complaint, see Peter, Complaint and Satire, pp. 262-4.
84 Jacobean Tragedy
This symbol of constancy Is necessary to the total design of the
play, for It reminds the audience of the heaven where alone this
constancy can exist. By her rejection of the world Castiza stands
for heaven, and It is the reality of heaven which makes meaningful
the scorn for the world which the total play espouses. Castiza
provides a frame of reference for the moral argument of the play.
The constancy of Castiza throws Into relief the Inconstancy of
her mother, the sudden collapse of a seeming virtue:
I cry you mercy. Lady, I mistook you.
Pray did you see my mother; which way went you?
Pray God I have not lost her.
(JI,i, 180-3)
This wavering of Gratiana, departure from herself, repeats tike
motif of the rapid changes in the person of VIndice. Castiza
drives home the theme:
The world's so changed, one shape Into another,
It is a wise child now that knows her mother.
(H, I, 187-8)
In urging her daughter to sin Gratiana dwells on the theme of
time. She urges Castiza to 'understand your time* (H, i, 193),
echoing Vindice's earlier placing of sin in terms of the clock:
If anything be damned,
It will be twelve a dock at night; that twelve
Will never 'scape;
It is the Judas of the hours, wherein,
Honest salvation is betrayed to sin.
Ct Hi> 75-79)
His fee for pandering will be c all the farthingales that fall plump
about twelve a clock at night upon the rushes' (II, ii, 91-92). The
Duke will meet his death when he goes to indulge his lust *in this
unsunned lodge, / Wherein 'tis night at noon' (HI, v, zo-2i).
Each of the play's sub-plots involves an ironic reversal which
illustrates the fiitility of worldly plans. These are united to one
another and to the main plot not only by this common irony, but
by a similar poetic idiom which In the undercurrent of its imagery
emphasizes always the destructive power of an ever hastening
Cyril Tourneur 8 5
time. As Vindice tempts Castiza with the worldly pleasures of the
court, the tempo of his lines quickens, conveying the sense of
rapid movement and perpetual change :
O think upon the pleasure of the palace,
Secured ease and state; the stirring meats,
Ready to move out of the dishes, that e'en now
Quicken when they're eaten,
Banquets abroad by torchlight, music, sports,
Bareheaded vassals, that had ne'er the fortune
To keep on thek own hats, but let horns wear 'em.
Nine coaches waiting hurry, hurry, hurry.
(H, i, 223-9)
The way of the world is symbolized by movement, haste, speeding
minutes, perpetual change. To tempt Castiza, Vindice must c set
spurs to the mother' (H, ii, 53), for c a right good woman in these
days is changed / Into white money with less labour far 7 (H, ii,
31-32). But the way of Castka is not that of perishing mortality,
but of heaven's permanence. Even with his c golden spurs' Vindice
cannot put her to a false gallop in a trice* (n, ii, 53-54).
Similarly, in the Junior sub-plot, Tourneur creates the feeling
of furious haste as Junior is led to his execution, with the First
Officer's e So suddenly" (HI, iii, 1 1), the Second Officer's 'Already ?'
(HI, iii, 15), its repetition by Supervacuo, 'Already i' faith, O sir,
destruction hies' (HI, iii, 116), and his final reflection that his
brother must die c ere next dock' (HI, iii, 36). There's no delaying
time' (HI, iv, 49), says the Third Officer as he leads Junior to his
death, repeating a major theme of the play. It is implicit in the
ironic predicament of Vindice when he is commissioned to kill
himself, for to live is to kill one's self with the passing of time,
and this Vindice does.
*Now nine years' vengeance crowd into a minute' (EH, v, 126),
cries Vindice as he prepares with Hippolito for the Duke's murder.
The grim irony by which they bring about thek own destructions
is paralleled by the lesser ironies of the play: those of Spurio's
incestuous relations with the Duchess, Lussurioso's attempt to
thwart this affair, the counter plots of Ambitioso and Supervacuo,
with the resulting death of thek younger brother. Through all this
action run the motifs of time and change. Spurio will disinherit
86 Jacobean Tragedy
Lussurioso in 'as short time, / As I was when I was begot in
haste 5 (II, ii, 141-2). *This night, this hour - this minute* now"
(H, ii, 183)5 cr i es Vindice as he rushes Lussurioso to his father's
bedchamber, and this is echoed in the Duke's plea for his life;
*I must have days, / Nay months dear son' (II, ii, 215-16). Spurio
runs into his father's chamber with *is the day out at socket, / That
it is noon at midnight'? (H, it, 257-8).
Tourneur designed the world of The Reveager's Tragedy to repre-
sent the ordinary world of sinful man which is merely a brief inter-
val before eternity. This sense of ordinary life is borne out also by
the poetic imagery, particularly that drawn from the common occu-
pations of everyday life, from building and business exchange,
from domestic life, farming and gardening. The feeling that this
world is hasting to its end is conveyed not only by the constant
stress on time, change and speed but also by the metaphors of fire
which are so common in the play. The macabre grotesqueness of
the action contributes to a larger moral vision which cannot be per-
ceived in naturalistic terms, for the play is a symbolic work of art
in the medieval mode, and to enforce its symbolism it uses a kind
of exaggeration and distortion which is alien to a naturalistic
dramatic method. The horrors of the action cannot be viewed
outside their context as part of a larger religious symbol. Tour-
neur's audience would leave the theatre not so much with a sense
of cynicism or despair as with that particular sense of the imper-
fection and impermanence of worldly things which leads naturally
to contemplation of the perfect life to come.
in
There are two parallel movements in The A.theisfs Tragedy, the
one devoted to a systematic refutation of the reason of D'Amville
which has led him to atheism, and the other designed to demon-
strate the power of the true believer to overcome evil by Christian
patience and, with the help of God, to triumph over the forces
which oppress him. These two movements are skilfully united in
the opposition between D'Amville and Charlemont, the evil
persecutor and his seemingly helpless victim, and both of Tour-
neur's main points are made by the final axe stroke which knocks
out D'Amville's brains, not to be regarded as a ludicrous accident
Cyril Toumeur 87
by which a child-like dramatist resolves Ms plot, but rather as a
miracle, deliberately chosen for its apparent impossibility, by
which Tonrneur emphasizes the intervention of God to destroy
the wicked and protect the innocent.
D'Amvilie is not merely a disbeliever in God. Atheism in the
Renaissance had a positive as well as a negative aspect. He is a
worshipper of nature, which he considers as a self-sufficient
entity, governed by laws which man can understand by the power
of reason, and subject to no supernatural control. He believes that
by his own human will and the power of his mind he can mani-
pulate the world and other men to his own advantage. He stands,
like Shakespeare's Edmund, for Renaissance scepticism, and his
creation reflects the fear and horror with which conservative minds
viewed the growth of a new empirical science and the challenging
of traditional values of order and degree. It has been shown that
D'Amville is a perfect example of what the Renaissance called
atheism, that he was systematically created from notions about
atheism which appeared in contemporary writings, and that a
cardinal feature of such atheistic belief was to regard nature's laws
as running contrary to the laws of God. 1
Since he recognizes no supernatural power in the universe, the
atheist can know none of those feelings of love, loyalty, kindness,
gratitude and the like which Renaissance moralists held to be
emanations on the human plane of the love of God which rules
the universe. The atheist must by virtual definition be an absolute
villain, knowing no restrictions to the gratification of his own
sensual appetite. The goal of man he sees not as salvation, but
only as pleasure, profit, and power. D'Atnville's philosophy is
made clear in the opening scene of the play in his conversation
with Borachio* It begins with an equation of man and beast, for to
deny the presence of heaven is implicitly to deny also that spiritual
quality which man derives from heaven and which separates him
from the beast:
1 Robert Omstein, * "The Atheist's Tragedy" and Renaissance Naturalism/ SP,
U (1954), 194-207. Ornstein holds that D*Amville*s view of nature is never refuted
in the play, and that Toumeur therefore accepts a dichotomy between natural law
and moral law. But the point of the entire play is to refute D*Amville*s position. See
also The Moral Visiw* pp. 118-27.
88 Jacobean Tragedy
. Borachio, thou art read
In nature and her large philosophy.
Observ'st thou not the very selfsame course
Of revolution both In man and beast?
Bor. The same. For birth, growth, state, decay
and death:
Only a man's beholding to his nature
For th'better composition of the two.
(I, i, 4-10)
It is only the quality of his own physical composition which
renders man superior to the beasts in this view, and when this
'nature' is defective in any way man. becomes like any beast:
But where the favour of his nature is
Not full and free; you see a man becomes
A fool, as little knowing as a beast.
(1,1, 11-13)
This self sufficiency of the human animal is an implicit denial of
God's existence:
That shows there's nothing in a man, above
His nature; if there were, considering 'tis
His being's excellency, 'twould not yield
To nature's weakness.
(I, i, 14-17)
And if there is no God or afterlife, man must spend his little time
on earth in pursuit of pleasure:
Then if death casts up
Our total sum of joy and happiness;
Let me have all my senses feasted in
Th'abundant fullness of delight at once,
And with a sweet insensible increase
Of pleasing surfeit melt into my dust.
ft i, 18-25)
D'Amville even deludes himself that the man of reason can escape
the final fact of human mortality, that through his children he can
Eve forever, and thus retain the wealth which has been the sole
mark of his felicity, and to whose pursuit his life has been
devoted:
Cyril Tonmeur 89
Yet even in that sufficiency of state,
A man has reason to provide and add.
For what is he hath such a present eye 3
And so prepared a strength, that can foresee,
And fortify his substance and himself,
Against those accidents, the least whereof
May rob Mm of an age's husbandry?
And for my children; they are as near to me y
As branches to the tree whereon they grow,
And may as numerously be multiplied.
As they increase, so should my providence;
For from my substance they receive the sap,
Whereby they live and flourish.
(I, i, 5*-6 4 )
In this expectation the audience sees already the extent of the
atheist's delusion, for tie has placed his hope in sons whose
mortality is as fragile as Ms own, the one subject to physical disease
and tie other to lechery which will destroy him.
In its forthright didacticism the play carries on many features
of the medieval debat. D'Amville proclaims his nature philosophy
directly to tie audience, both in soliloquies and in discussions
with Borachio which show also the influence of the Senecan
dialogue. Charlemont and Castabella proclaim in the same manner
the virtues of Christian patience, chastity and submission to
divine will. By these beliefs they are preserved, whereas all of
D'Amville's plots rebound upon himself. By ironic reversals
similar to those of The Revenger** Tragedy, we are reminded that as
the atheist tries to destroy the virtuous he succeeds only in
destroying himself. D'Amville and Borachio pride themselves
always upon their cunning; they gloat over their machinations,
so that the final disaster which overtakes them may demonstrate
also that their ginning has, in fact, been gross stupidity, and that
the 'reason 5 by which D'Amville has lived and which has led him
to embrace atheism has been only a self-deception and not reason
at all. He has relied upon his 'strength of natural understanding',
but he learns at the end that ^Nature is a fool. There is a power /
Above her that hath overthrown the pride / Of all my projects
and posterity' (V, ii, 282-6).
We have thus in the conflict between the good and evil
90 Jacobean Tragedy
characters a debate between two opposing systems of value, with
orthodox Christianity triumphant at the end and D'Amvllle
learning the lesson of his defeat. One facet of this debate Is the
conflict between chastity and lust which runs through the play
and Is reflected largely in the opposition of Castabella to Lev!-
dulcia. For Castabella, as her name Implies, love is chastity:
O love! thou chaste affection of the soul.
Without th'adulterate mixture of the blood;
That virtue which to goodness addeth good,
The minion of heaven's heart.
(II, HI, 1-4)
Levidulcla, like D'Amville, denies the difference between man
and beast; she is the skve of an animal passion over which she can
have no control :
My strange affection to this man! 'Tis like that natural sympathy
which e'en among the senseless creatures of the earth commands a
mutual inclination and consent: For though It seems to be the free
effect of mine own voluntary love; yet I can neither restrain It, nor
give reason for't.
(IV, v, 15-19)
Those who accept the animalism of man see him as controlled by
the mechanical laws of nature; he is the pawn of a fate uncon-
trolled by divine providence, as D'AmviUe states It:
And I am of a confident belief,
That even the time, place, manner of our deaths,
Do follow fate with that necessity
That makes us sure to die. And In a thing
Ordained so certainly unalterable,
What can the use of providence prevail?
(1,11,48-53)
D'Amville, in his defence of incest, envies the brute animals
who know no restrictions in their pleasures :
Nature allows a general liberty
Of generation to all creatures else.
Shall man to whose command and use all creatures
Cyril Tonrneur 91
Were made subject be less free than they?
(IV, iii, 143-6)
To this argument CastabeUa offers Tourneur's answer:
O God! Is thy unlimited and infinite
Omnipotence less free because thou doest
No ill? or if you argue merely out
Of nature, do you not degenerate
From that; and are you not unworthy the
Prerogative of nature's masterpiece,
When basely you prescribe yourself
Authority and kw from thek examples
Whom you should command.
(IV, iii, 147-55)
Just as D'Amville sees man as an animal governed only by the
laws of an impersonal nature, with worldly pleasure and power
his only goals in life, Charlemont sees man as a creature of spirit,
controlled by a just and omnipotent deity to whom he is always
subject. Charlemont is the *Senecal Man' 1 who is always master
of his own passions :
But now I am an emperor of a world.
This little world of man. My passions are
My subjects; and I can command them kugh;
Whilst thou dost tickle 'em to death with misery.
(EH, iii, 46-49)
His universe is a divinely ordered one where heaven 'doth
command / Our punishments : but yet no further than / The
measure of our sins' (in, iii, 1-3). He is, in short, a model of
Christian patience who submits freely to the pain and misery of
life, confident always in the perfection of God's plan, ready to
accept whatever misfortune comes his way in the assurance that
good must at kst triumph. He reflects the kind of virtue which
the horrors of The ULevenger's Tragedy were designed to teach. His
eyes are always on the afterworld, and he even thanks heaven for
his misfortunes when out of them he sees his final happiness
emerging:
1 See Michael HIggins, 'The Development of the Senecal Man/ RET, XXHI
(1947), 24-33 ; Clifford Leech, * "The Atheist's Tragedy** as a Dramatic Comment on
Chapman's Bossy plays,' JEGP, LIE (1953), 525-30.
92 Jacobean Tragedy
For all my wrongs I thank thee gracious heaven;
Th'ast made satisfaction, to reserve
Me for this blessed purpose. Now sweet death,
I'll bid thee welcome.
(TV, iii, 198-201)
In his readiness for death he expresses directly the attitude
de contemptu mundi which The Revenger's Tragedy had in its totality
espoused:
That man, with so much labour should aspire
To worldly height; when in the humble earth,
The world's condition's at the best! Or scorn
Inferior men; since to be lower than
A worm is to be higher than a king.
(IV, Hi, 19-23)
Charlemont's Christian patience appears particularly in his
attitude towards revenge which is a major theme of the play.
When the ghost of his father appears to tell Charlemont of Ms
murder, he counsels Christian submission :
Attend with patience the success of things;
But leave revenge unto the king of kings.
(H, vi, 26-27)
And again, when Charlemont has stabbed Sebastian, his father's
ghost appears to warn him:
Hold, Charlemont.
Let him revenge my murder, and thy wrongs
To whom the justice of revenge belongs.
(Ill, ii, 43-45)
Charlemont is torn 'between the passions of / My blood and the
religion of my soul' (in, ii, 46-47), but he nevertheless accepts his
father's injunction and never wavers from it. He never seeks to
raise his hand against his persecutor, and he patiently places his
head upon the block, unafraid to die because his faith in heavenly
justice has never wavered. When heaven acts at last and intervenes
to destroy D'Amville and to spare Charlemonfs life, he speaks
the moral for the audience:
Cyril Toummr 93
Only to heaven I attribute the work*
Whose gracious motives made me still forbear
To be mine own revenger. Now I see.
That, Patience is the honest waifs revenge.
(V, ii, 300-04)
Because he Is an atheist the destruction of D'Amville is inevi-
table, but we must note that in spite of his damnation he is no
longer an atheist when he dies. He learns the lesson of his own
destruction and comes to recognize the power of divine provi-
dence at last. As his plans begin to backfire we note a wavering in
his confidence in nature, a gradual questioning of his once strongly
held beliefs, until at the end he is ready to renounce them entirely.
There is a gross macabre humour in the graveyard scenes, but
these scenes mark also the beginning of D'Amville's conversion.
He is terrified by the signs of death and begins c to feel the loath-
some horror of my sin* (IV, iii, 5 2-5 3). Contrasted with his terror
of death is Chariemont's fearless acceptance of it, and the realiza-
tion of his own weakness in this respect causes the atheist to doubt
the validity of his own beliefs. When he sees Charlemont and
Castabella sleeping peacefully upon their death's head pillows, he
has a vision of a kind of felicity to which his own 'reason' is
incapable of leading him:
Asleep? so soundly ? and so sweetly upon death's heads? and in
a place so full of fear and horror? Sure there is some other happiness
within the freedom of the conscience, than my knowledge e'er
attained to.
(TV, iii, 316-19)
When he sees his own hope of immortality finally destroyed in the
deaths of his two sons, D'Amville recognizes the inadequacy of
his faith in nature, and for the first time he acknowledges a super-
natural power: c Sure there is some power above her that controls
her force" (V, i, 126-7). The doctor is left to affirm for D'Amville
and the audience the play's refutation of the atheist position:
A power above Nature?
Doubt you that my lord? Consider but
Whence man receives his body and his form.
94 Jacobean Tragedy
Not from corruption like some worms and flies;
But only from the generation of
A man. For nature never did bring forth
A man without a man; nor could the first
Man being but the passive subject not
The active mover, be the maker of
Himself; So of necessity there must
Be a superior power to nature.
(V, i, 128-38)
Such straightforward statement of the play's moral argument was
hardly necessary in The Revenger's Tragedy 3 where it was conveyed
instead by the total complex of the dramatic action.
The court scene with which the play ends serves as a symbolic
reaffirmation of order. D'Amville's position is systematically
refuted, and the joyful rescue of Chariemont and Castabella is
offered as evidence of the heavenly power which the atheist had
denied. Cataplasma, Soquette and Fresco receive the punishment
their vice has merited, and the Puritan whose religious hypocrisy
D'Amville had used as an argument against all religion (X, ii,
218-23) is unmasked as Snuffe the tallow chandler and sent on his
way. Then the judge is ready to 'resolve your question 5 (V, il,
108)., teach D'Amviile what it is which enables Chariemont to face
death without fear. The atheist now must 'find out / The efficient
cause of a contented mind' (V, ii, 184).
Chariemont and Castabella can die bravely because they have
their virtue to sustain them:
Our lives cut off,
In our young prime of years, are like green herbs,
Wherewith we strow the hearses of our friends.
For as their virtue gather'd when th'are green,
Before they wither or corrupt, is best;
So we in virtue are the best for death,
While yet we have not lived to such an age,
That the increasing canker of our sins,
Hath spread too far upon us.
(7,11,145-53)
Castabella is welcoming death as a means of escape from that
involvement in sin which is the inevitable consequence of living,
Cyril Tonrneur 95
and which the fate of Vindice in The 'Revenger's Tragedy had so well
illustrated. To die young is to die with the maximum of virtue,
and such virtue is a greater good than life, for through it maa may
attain heaven. These chaste lovers can die bravely because of a
contempt for the world and all its impermanent and corrupting
values. They reveal to the atheist the final worthlessness of the
worldly pleasure, wealth, and power which have been the goals of
his existence.
D'Amville receives a further answer to his own question with
the very blow with which he strikes out Ms brains, for this miracu-
lous accident is evidence of the divine providence in which Charle-
mont and Castabella have placed thek faith and which also has
given them courage in the face of death. In the justice of his own
death through divine intervention D'Amville recognizes the
power of providence:
But yond* power that struck me knew
The judgment I deserved; and gave it.
(V, 2, 290-1)
Again the point is emphasized for the audience by the judge as he
points to the new felicity of Charlemont and Castabella:
With the hands
Of joy and justice I thus set you free.
The power of that eternal providence.
Which overthrew his projects in their pride,
Hath made your griefs the instruments to raise
Your blessings to a greater height than ever.
(V, ii, 294-9)
Out of man's very ability to suffer the world's evil with Christian
patience must emerge his final blessings, and it is significant that
the consistent virtue of Charlemont and Castabella assures their
happiness not only in heaven but in the present world as well.
Charlemont is Tourneur's answer to the question of how a good
man may live in a world corrupted by the reality of sin and death.
It is an answer in terms of a traditional Christianity, and it is
essentially the same answer which Tourneur had offered in a
somewhat different poetic medium in The Revenger's Tragedy. The
96 Jacobean Tragedy
second of Tourneur's tragedies exhibits little progress in aesthetic
range, but It Is remarkably like the earlier one in its moral and
religious point of view.
CHAPTER FIVE
John Webster
When we consider John Webster's achievement as a
dramatist we are struck by a general mediocrity ^
suddenly relieved in the middle of his career by two
plays, written in quick succession, of a brilliance and power virtu-
ally unequalled in his age. The White Devil and The Duchess ofMalfi
were composed in 1612 and 1613, following a period of unin-
spired collaboration with Dekker, Heywood and others; they
were followed by some further independent work and by renewed
collaboration with Middleton, Heywood and Rowley, but never
again, working either alone or with others, did Webster approach
the aesthetic range of his two Italian tragedies. They seem to
represent the artist's concentrated attempt to express a tragic vision
which he imperfectly perceived in The White Devil, and realized
fully in The Duchess of Malfi> after which his career could only
culminate in anticlimax. He had nothing more to say.
Webster's plays often have been compared to Toumeur's,
largely because both dramatists avail themselves of the neo-
Senecan horror devices made popular by John Marston, but there
is a difference between the two men which is far greater than any
similarity. Tourneur, as we have seen, is the explicit moralist,
preaching in effect an orthodox Christianity to which he is firmly
committed. Webster is no less the moralist, but he does not
preach. His plays are an agonized search for moral order in the
uncertain and chaotic world of Jacobean scepticism by a dramatist
who can no longer accept without question the postulates of order
and degree so dear to the Elizabethans. In The White Devil
Webster creates a poetic impression of this world with its inherent
contradictions, but he can find in his story no pattern to relate
good and evil and provide a basis for morality. In the heroic
97
9 8 Jacobean Tragedj
death of his heroine, her preservation even in evil of her c integrity
of life*, however, he is able to excite admiration and thus to leave
his audience with the impression that there is at least one certain
value, if attainable only in death, in a world seemingly without
valne. In The Duchess of Malfi Webster goes on to explore the im-
plications of this value. If death may reveal an inherent nobility in
human life, such nobility is real, and it may be the basis of a moral
order. In The Duchess of Malfi we see a new morality emerging in
the final act out of evils more chilling in their horror than those of
the earlier play. This search for moral order links Webster to
Shakespeare in the highest range of tragedy, and to fully perceive
Webster's achievement we must see his later play as the explora-
tion of a value postulated in the earlier one and as the final
resolution of the problem with which both plays are con-
cerned.
The Italian tragedies have been celebrated for their unity of
tone and temper, for their realism of characterization in spite of a
glaring weakness in psychological motivation, and for the brilli-
ance of thek dramatic verse. They have been criticized for their
plot construction, with its gross improbabilities, and for a concern
with 'perfection of detail rather than general design' 1 which has
made it difficult for most critics to find even in these greatest of
Webster's plays such thematic unity as may be found, for instance,
in the tragedies of Chapman or Tourneur. T. S. Eliot has called
Webster c a very great literary and dramatic genius directed toward
chaos*, 2 and Clifford Leech expresses a common judgment when
he writes that The Duchess of Malfi 'is blurred in its total meaning.
It is a collection of brilliant scenes, whose statements do not
ultimately cohere'. 3 The final act of this play has been called an
unnecessary and anti-climactic extension of what should have
ended with the death of the heroine. 4
*M. C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of "Elizabethan Tragedy, p. 186 ff.
a Selected Effajs, p. 117.
8 John Webster (London, 1951), p. 65, So also, Travis Bogard, The Tragic Satire of
John Webster (Berkeley, GaBf., 1955), p. 117, writes that Webster was 'apparently
unable to discover an acceptable system for the evaluation of good and evil*, and
concludes that * "The White Devil" is a tragedy of disillusion, "The Duchess of Malfi"
a tragedy of despair* (p. 141).
* F. L. Lucas, ed. The Duchess of Malfi (London, 1958), pp. 28-35.
John Webster 99
We do no justice to Webster's achievement in these plays while,
like Lucas, we regard the dramatist as a naturalistic artist, follow-
ing sordid historical narratives for their own sake, the sum of his
greatness being in 'atmosphere, its poetry, and two or three
supreme scenes'. 1 These plays, like the greatest tragedies of their
age, have an ethical and an allegorical dimension. They are sym-
bolic works, and if their poetry is great it is because of its perfec-
tion as the instrument by which the artist reveals a vision of man's
relation to the forces of evil in the world and affords a basis for
renewed acceptance of life which is tragic reconciliation. The most
serious error that critics of Webster have committed has been to
regard him as a dramatist lacking in moral vision, and therefore
incapable of more than a partial view of human experience, con-
tent to limit his genius within the bounds of a philosophically
barren tradition of revenge tragedy. 2
In The White Demi Webster is concerned with the deception of
appearances, the unreality of the world in which man must live,
and with the shallowness of the conventional moral order. The
play is a dramatic symbol of moral confusion, the impossibility of
distinguishing appearance from reality in a world in which evil
wears always the mask of virtue and virtue the mask of evil. 3
1 The Duchess of Malfi, p. 31. "Webster's -weakness in structure is stressed also by
Ornstein, The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, pp. 128-31.
a lan Jack, "The Case of John Webster/ Scrutiny, XVI (1949), 38-43, has found
Webster's art deficient because "There is no correspondence between the axioms and
the life represented in the drama*. Essentially the same point is made by Ornstein,
The Moral Vision, pp. 128-50, although he sees in The Duchess of Malfi a movement
away from c the lack of moral discriminations in "The White Devil" towatds a more
consistent moral view of life, a celebration of the power of illusion to assure some
victory for mankind in an evil world. That Webster is a dramatist without moral
vision, capable of only a meaningless sensationalism, has been argued also by W. R.
Edwards, *John Webster/ in Determinations^ ed. R R. Leavis (London, 1934),
pp. 155-78. The morality of Webster's art, on the contrary, has been argued by
Lord David Cecil, Poets and Storytellers (London, 1949), pp. 27-43. Cecil tries to find
Webster's morality in terms of a Calvinistic Christianity.
8 See Hereward T. Price, *The Function of Imagery in Webster/ PMLA, LXX
(1955), 717-39; John Russell Brown, ed., The White Devil (London, 1960), pp. 1-
Iviii. It has been argued also that in The White Devil Vittoria achieves nobility by her
ability to assume the mask of a virtue she does not possess, and that in this she is
offered as contrast to the open villainy of Flarnineo, the two positions balancing one
another in a kind of equilibrium out of which no moral certainty can emerge. See
B. J. Laymon, *The Equilibrium of Opposites in "The White Devil" : A Reinter-
pretation/ PMLA, LXXIV (i959>> 33^47-
ioo Jacobean Tragedy
In this world morality seems impossible, but in The Duchess of
Malfi Webster reveals how it may be possible in spite of this
world. Webster's cosmic view is not the optimistic one of Hooker,
Shakespeare or Heywood. His is the decaying universe of Chap-
man and Tourneur, hastening towards destruction. Although
there are references to heaven and hell in his plays, Webster's
wodd is c a mist' without order or design, and with no certainty
of a divine providence directing the affairs of men. The two plays
taken together, however, do not reveal a philosophy of negation
or despair, 1 for Webster's concern is with the ability of man to
survive in such a world without direction, to maintain his human
worth in spite of all. This is a profoundly moral concern, for
morality need not be based upon faith in divine order. Webster
bases his faith upon human integrity and in the nobility to which
human life can aspire in spite of the disorder which surrounds it.
ii
Deception and false appearance are accented both in the dramatic
action and the poetic imagery of The White Devil. Evil wears
always the mask of good, and good disguises itself as evil, so that
at kst the two are indistinguishable. This moral ambiguity is im-
plicit in the play's title, and it is maintained by an imagery
comprised of polar opposites: 'Sweet-meats which rot the eater
. . . Poison'd perfumes . . . Shipwrecks in calmest weather*
(HI, ii, 80-82). False appearance is introduced in the first speech
of the play : 'Your wolf no longer seems to be a wolf / Than when
she's hungry' (I, i, 8-9). The garden where the lovers meet
becomes a graveyard:
O that this fair garden
Had with all poisoned herbs of Thessaly
At first been planted, made a nursery
For witchcraft; rather than a burial plot,
For both your honours.
(I, ii, 274-8)
1 Thus, for Una M. EUis-Fermor, The Jacobean Drama, pp. 172-3, Webster's chief
concern is to stress the unreality of a bleak and meaningless universe: this negation,
the quality of nothingness, this empty, boundless, indefinable grey mist is the final
horror, the symbol of ignorance, of the infinite empty space in which man hovers,
the material and the spiritual world both in different terms unreal.*
John Webster 101
The dovehouse Is haunted by polecats (El, I, 3-5). Vittoria herself,
the symbol of this confusion, Is compared to the apples of Sodom
which turn to soot and ashes when they are tasted (EH, II, 63-67).
A recurring symbol is that of the yew tree, whose beauty and fair
height are rooted in corruption:
Or like the black, and melancholic yew tree,
Dost think to root thyself in dead men's graves,
And yet to prosper?
(IV, iii, 120-2)
Vittoria's dream of the yew tree (I, II, 231 ff.) leads Bracciano to
the murders of Isabella and Camiilo. Beauty is the product of
disease and decay, and this beauty is in turn the destroyer of life,
the creator of new disease in an endless cycle. Vittoria's beauty,
shining through her evil, Is the symbol of this meaningless, uncer-
tain condition of humanity.
When she is guilty of her greatest sins, she Is most able to
arouse the admiration of the audience by her defiance and heroic
grandeur:
Humbly thus,
Thus low, to the most worthy and respected
lieger Ambassadors, my modesty
And womanhood I tender; but withal
So entangled in a cursed accusation
That my defence of force like Perseus,
Must personate masculine virtue to the point!
Find me but guilty, sever head from body:
We'll part good friends: I scorn to hold my life
At yours or any man's entreaty, Sir.
CHI, II, 130-9)
We do not doubt her 'modesty and womanhood' here; Webster
uses the English ambassador to guide the sentiments of his audi-
ence: c She hath a brave spirit' (HI, il, 140), But while we admire
Vittoria we know that she lies, and the Cardinal in pointing to her
falsehood, underlines the confusion of appearance with reality for
which she stands : 'Well, well, such counterfeit jewels / Make true
ones oft suspected' (TO, ii, 141-2).
Vittoria's defiance is a dramatic symbol of this moral confusion,
for in the vehemence of her speech she turns her own evil back
102 Jacobean Tragedy
upon her judges, so that there is no difference between accusers
and accused:
You are deceived;
For know that all your strict-combined heads,
Which strike against this mine of diamonds,
ShaE prove but glassen hammers, they shall break, -
These are but feigned shadows of my evils.
Terrify babes, my lord, with painted devils,
I am past such needless palsy, for your names
Of whore and rnurd'ress, they proceed from you,
As if a man should spit against the wind,
The filth returns in's face.
(Ill, ii, 142-51)
The audience has seen Vittoria's evil made explicit in action. Now
it is caught up in the splendour and vehemence of her passionate
denial, and it is left in a state of ambivalence. If the morality she
opposes is represented by the Cardinal Monticelso, this morality
is indeed a 'glassen hammer' and she a 'mine of diamonds 5 ; she
may be a whore, but the Cardinal has 'ravish'd justice, / Forc'd
her to do your pleasure* (HI, ii, 274-5). She leaves the scene
condemned but triumphant, and her final words reflect the paradox
of the play: 'Through darkness diamonds spread their richest
light' (El, ii, 294).
Our sense of moral ambivalence is reinforced when we find the
Cardinal, Vittoria's judge, as the author of the Machiavellian
deception by which Francesco de Medici will accomplish Ms
revenge (IV, i, 14 ff.). In the Cardinal's book lurk all the evils of
the world, a catalogue of villainies robed in seeming virtue:
Their number rises strangely,
And some of them
You'd take for honest men.
Next are pandars.
These are your pirates : and these following leaves
For base rogues that undo young gentlemen
By taking up commodities:
For politic bankrupts:
For fellows that are bawds to their own wives,
Only to put off horses and slight jewels,
Clocks, defac'd plate, and such commodities,
John Webster 103
At birth of their first children . . .
These are for Impudent bawds,
That go in men's apparel: for usurers
That share with scriveners for their good reportage;
For lawyers that will antedate their writs:
And some divines you might find folded there,
But that I slip them o'er for conscience' sake.
Here Is a general catalogue of knaves.
A man might study all the prisons o'er,
Yet never attain this knowledge.
(IV, ii, 45-64)
Religion is the source of policy, and this policy Francesco will
use to destroy Vittoria. The Cardinal's judging of Vittoria becomes
a mockery of justice, his very existence an implicit denial of the
traditional morality of which his title makes Mm the symbol.
There are virtuous characters in The White Devil, Cornelia,
Isabella, Marcello, but real as their virtue may be, it appears to
the world cloaked in evil. Isabella's love for Bracciano must
express itself in her pretence that she is the evil destroyer of their
marriage:
let the fault
Remain with my supposed jealousy, -
And think with what a piteous and rent heart,
I shall perform this sad ensuing part.
(n, i, 222-5)
Her 'piteous and rent heart* will appear to the world as evil; her
brother will call her c a foolish, mad, / And jealous woman* (II, i,
264-5). I* 1 tkc same manner, the maternal love of Cornelia
expresses itself in her lies to protect the murderer of the very son
she mourns. Marcello sees his death as just punishment for the
evils of his family:
There are some sins which heaven doth duly punish
In a whole family. This it is to rise
By all dishonest means. Let all men know
That tree shall long time keep a steady foot
Whose branches spread no wider than the root.
(V, ii, 20-24)
He cannot escape the evil from which he springs. Even the young
Giovanni, attempting to restore order at the end of the play, is
104 Jacobean Tragedy
closely related to the very evils lie seeks to destroy, for lie is the
son of Bracciano, and when he asks, 'You bloody villains, / By
what authority have you committed / This massacre?' the answer
is By thine . . . Yes, thy uncle, / Which is a part of thee, enjoin'd
us to Y (V, vi, 283-6). Even the child shares in the general cor-
ruption of humanity, in a world in which truth seems impossible,
where good and evil cannot be distinguished, and where the
only moral law appears to be a nemesis punishing sin with new sin
in a never ending cycle. Vittoria represents this disorder with its
constant confusion of opposites ; she is the beauty which destroys :
Your beauty! O, ten thousand curses on't.
How long have I beheld the devil in crystal?
Thou hast led me, like an heathen sacrifice,
With music, and with fatal yokes of flowers
To my eternal ruin.
(IV, ii, 87-91)
So speaks Bracciano, reflecting the plight of man who cannot
distinguish appearance from reality, who is destroyed by evil in
his vain pursuit of what seems to be good and bears the outward
signs of beauty -music, yokes of flowers.
Bracciano's fate reminds the audience that in this world of
uncertainty and false appearance human aspirations are fruitless
and empty. Man's strivings can earn him only frustration, and
deeds come always to recoil upon the doer. The action of the play,
like that of The Revenger* s Tragedy,, is a structure of linked ironies.
While Camillo uses Hamineo, as he thinks, to win his duchess
back to him, Fiamineo is, in fact, wooing her for Bracciano. The
symbol of the silkworm is used to express the human condition:
*Ha ha ha, thou entanglest thyself in thine own work like a silk-
worm' (I, ii, 196-7). All man's efforts lead to his own destruction,
and even pleasure is its own extinction; c But all delight doth itself
soonest devour' (I, ii, 204).
Francesco, lamenting the fate of his sister, cries out:
would I had given
Both her white hands to death, bound and lock'd fast
In her last mnding-sheet, when I gave thee
But one.
(n, i, 64-67)
Jo An Webster 105
The action will reveal that in giving her hand to Bracciano he
has, in fact, given her to death. All greatness is a vain illusion in
the world of The White Demi: 'Glories, like glow-worms, afar
off shine bright, / But looked to near, have neither heat nor light*
(V, i, 41-42). Religion is a mask for evil. The elaborate election of
the pope is followed by a linking of opposites : 'You have ta'en
the sacrament to prosecute / Th* intended murder !' (TV, iii, 72-73)
Even the act of devotion becomes the source of hatred and
murder. The doctor knows how to 'poison a kiss' (H, i, 301), and
Isabella dies kissing the poisoned portrait of her husband in a
nightly ritual of love, just as Camillo has his neck broken in an
act of friendly sport and fellowship. Bracciano is strangled with a
'true-love knot' (V, iii, 174), and his murderers are disguised as
holy friars, supposedly working the salvation of his soul, while
they remind him that he wiH 'die like a poor rogue . . . And stink
like a dead fly-blown dog And be forgotten before thy funeral
sermon' (V, iii, 165-7). When he has been strangled, his murderers
leave with holy words upon their lips : 'for charity, / For Christian
charity, avoid the chamber* (V, iii, 172-3). We do not know
whether the dying Bracciano's 'Vittork? VittoriaF (V, iii, 167)
is a cry of horror or of all-consuming love.
Vittoria has been as beautiful as she has been evil; the dramatist
has maintained towards her a moral ambivalence, and when she
dies with courage and defiance, preserving her 'integrity of life'
to the very end, we share imaginatively in a sense of heroism, of
pride in the human condition, be it what it may. This sense of the
heroic partially counteracts the feeling of despair created by the
vision of an uncertain and chaotic world which we have beheld;
it generates a pride in life itself. Delio, speaking for the author,
offers a key to both plays in the final words of The Duchess of
Mai/:
Integrity of life is feme's best friend,
Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end.
(V, v, 145-6)
Vittoria's 'integrity of life* is the source of pride, and this pride
growing out of evil is a reflection of the paradox in the play's title,
that there may be good implicit in the darkest evil. This suggestion
106 Jacobean Tragedy
Webster is to develop further in The Duchess of Malfi, that while
we exalt the fact of life itself we escape the chaos of a disordered
world. In The Whits Devil we see an evil woman attaining some
victory by her 'integrity of life*, but we do not see the social
consequences which such integrity may have, its power to afford
a basis for morality. In his next play Webster goes on to show the
power of a pride in life to destroy some of the world's evils and
thus to justify the fact of human existence in a world seemingly
without other value. By this celebration of 'integrity of life',
Webster is not glorifying the ability of man to persevere in evil
as well as good, as some have supposed. He is celebrating a heroic
pride in the human condition which can win some victory even
to an evil Vittoria, but which when embodied in a virtuous
Duchess of Malfi may have power to effect a regeneration of the
social order.
Vittoria in her defiance stands for life, as her brother, Flamineo,
stands for death. 'You are, I take it, the grave maker' (V, iv, 80),
his mother says to him. His role is to deliver death directly to
others as he does to Camillo and Marcello, to instigate action
which will lead to death as he does for Bracciano, and to show the
others how to die when his own turn comes. For him death is
the only certainty in a world full of deception and uncertainty, the
only truth of which mankind is capable:
Prosperity doth bewitch men seeming clear,
But seas do laugh, show white, when rocks are near.
We cease to grieve, cease to be Fortune's slaves,
Nay, cease to die by dying.
(V, vi, 250-3)
Unlike Bracciano, who strives for the goodness he sees in the love
of Vittoria and is led instead into desecration and death, Flamineo
accepts the world as a place of horror where felicity is never more
than sorrow in disguise, and he welcomes death as the final
certainty which ends man's slavery to such a world. Too many
commentators have equated Flamineo's view of the world with
Webster's tragic vision, but Flamineo stands only for the negation
from which Webster seeks to escape. Flamineo represents the
death force which Webster will oppose with a force of life,
sketched faintly in Vittoria and more surely in the Duchess of
John Webstsr 107
Malfi. In the contrast between Vittoria and Flamineo, two figures
of evil, Webster foreshadows what he Is more folly to develop in
the later play where the Duchess will oppose the principle of life
to the death world represented by her brothers, with the imagery
of their speeches underlining these symbolic functions, and with
Bosola moving from the one side to the other, as Flamineo now
is incapable of moving.
Flamineo is a Bosola incapable of growth. In a world in which
he sees morality as impossible he seeks to prosper by a deliberate
cultivation of the immoral. Like Shakespeare's lago and Edmund
he stands for the negation of order and harmony in the universe,
for man without links either to God or his fellow men :
I do not look
Who went before, nor who shall follow me;
No, at myself I will begin and end.
(V, vi, 256-8)
He assumes the traditional role of the malcontent, exposing the
evils of the world while he offers them as justification for his own
^Machiavellian policy'. Like Bosola, he comes upon the stage as
one who has suffered through the world's evil, who has never
prospered, but who now seeks to better his position by accepting
the values of a universe without direction or moral law. He will
live by 'policy*, denying all human ties as he rejects his own
mother and vaunts his immorality before her:
Pray what means have you
To keep me from the galleys, or the gallows?
My father prov'd himself a gentleman,
Sold all's land, and like a fortunate fellow,
Died ere the money was spent. You brought me up
At Padua I confess, where I protest
For want of means, the university judge me,
I have been fain to heel my tutor's stockings
At least seven years: conspiring with a beard
Made me a graduate, - then to this duke's service:
I visited the court, whence I return'd
More courteous, more lecherous by far,
But not a suit the richer, and shall I
Having a path so open and so free
To my preferment, still retain your milk
io8 Jacobean Tragedy
In my pale forehead? no this face of mine
I'll arm and fortify with lusty wine
'Gainst shame and blushing.
(1,11,315-32)
The 'MachiaveF by Webster's day had become a conventional
stage figure, a symbol for opposition to the moral order which
cloaked itself in a mask of virtue. It stood for dissimulation. This
is the code by which Flamineo lives, but it leads him to the same
death which awaits Ms virtuous brother., Marcello.
There is no heroic quality in Flamineo's world. His speeches
are full of cynicism, dwelling always on the base and sordid in
human life; it is fitting that he be a pander. In his evil there is no
"integrity of life', for the 'MachiaveP to attain his ends must
practise policy, seem to be what he is not, striking always under
the guise of friendship, as when he betrays Camillo and his own
sister. He is a mirror of the very indirection and confusion of the
world he excoriates and which at last destroys him, but he never
deceives himself. He accepts the world as he sees it, and we feel
that could he have seen it otherwise, he might have lived other-
wise. He is even made to feel remorse:
I have liv'd
Riotously ill, like some that live in court;
And sometimes, when my face was full of smiles,
Have felt the maze of conscience in my breast.
(V, iv, 118-21)
His acceptance of death, paralleling the brave defiance of his
sister, lends some note of grandeur to his end also, and the audi-
ence regrets the human waste for which he stands. In the later
play Webster is to exhibit in Bosola the kind of redemption which
was always possible in Flamineo, but which he could not achieve.
Bosola enters The Duchess ofMalfi proclaiming the same values as
Flamineo, but before his death he learns from the Duchess what
Flamineo never learns, that life itself can afford a basis for morality
in a chaotic world.
in
In The Duchess ofMalfi Webster returns to the 'mist* which is the
world of The White Devil, but there is an immediate difference, for
John Webster 109
the kter pky opens with Antonio's description of the emergence
of order and justice in France., and this conditions what follows,
for the audience has seen at the beginning the possibility of a
moral order, and nothing in the play can convince it of its im-
possibility. The two pkys are linked by common motifs. Bosok
too calls the world 'a mist 5 (V, v, 1 18). Vittoria in The White Demi
dies lamenting the corruption of the court: *O happy they that
never saw the court' (V, vi, 261), and dying Antonio at the
end of The Dmhess of Malfi prays 'And let my son fly the courts
of princes' (V, iv, 84). The difference is that Vittoria could not
escape the evils of the world, whereas the son of Antonio will
have learned how to do so.
The moral statement of The Dmhess of Ma/ft is not implicit in
the stock apothegms of such virtuous characters as Delio and
Pescara which 3 as has been observed, sometimes bear but slight
relation to the action and read though, by no means, always
like later additions. 1 It is implicit in the total imaginative im-
pression of the pky, for The Duchess is a unified work, with mood,
action, characterization and poetry all carefully shaped together
as an assertion of the inherent dignity of man. As part of this total
thematic statement the final act is of crucial importance, for its
function is to exhibit the effect upon the debased world of the
human spirit's triumph in spite of the body's destruction. The
particular effect of this tragedy is in its power to generate a tension
between our terror of a corrupt, disordered and chaotic universe
and our pride in the nobility of the human spirit which enables
man to survive and triumph in spite of such a world. In this
tension is Webster's moral vision, for the dignity of the human
spirit separates man from the baseness of the world, and the need
to preserve this dignity affords the true basis of morality. The
ultimate tragedy of Webster's world,' writes Travis Bogard
(p. 147), *is not the death of any individual but the presence of evil
and decay which drags all mankind to death . . . the tragic story
is the story of a few who find courage to defy such revektion.
In their defiance there is a glory for mankind, and in their struggle
and assertion lies the brilliance of Websterian tragedy.' But this
1 See Ian Jack, Scr&tmj, XVI (1949), 38-45; M. E. Prior, The Language ofTrageaj,
pp. 32-33.
no Jacobean Tragedy
very sense of glory postulates a value which the evils of the world
cannot destroy and which makes man superior to his world. It
provides a frame of reference in which the relation of man to the
forces of evil becomes apparent, and it leads not to a sense of
despair but to one of tragic reconciliation.
When Webster's characters are considered in terms of psycho-
logical verisimilitude, glaring inconsistencies emerge. The venom
of Ferdinand is poorly motivated. We rightly wonder why the
brave soldier, Antonio, does not kill Ferdinand when he has ample
opportunity in his wife's closet; or why Bosola should strangle
the Duchess when he feels his greatest identity with her, and why
he should later suffer remorse and reverse his allegiances. It is
difficult to see why the cunning and self-assured Cardinal should
continue to trust Bosola after the death of Julia has been revealed.
None of this is explainable in terms of psychology or logical
probability. The feeling of realism which Webster creates in spite
of such improbabilities is the product of poetic illusion. His
characters live in a world of imaginative symbol, 1 and they are
shaped by the specific functions they are designed to perform as
parts of the total dramatic unity.
The most important unifying element in The Duchess ofMalfi is
Bosola, a character whom critics have found particularly difficult
to explain in terms of human psychology. The different roles he
assumes as the play progresses may be reconciled to one another
only in terms of the play's total thematic design. In the traditional
pose of the malcontent he recapitulates the function of Flamineo
in The White Devil, for he illuminates the evils of the world which
will destroy the Duchess. As the instrument of the Arragonian
brothers he shows this evil made explicit in action. In the death
scene of the Duchess he serves a new and more complex function,
for here he plays several roles, each designed to further the sym-
bolism of the total scene. Primarily he is used to help the Duchess
overcome her womanly fears and to arouse the spirit of greatness
in her; he stands here for the nobility of the human spirit which
he had opposed in his role as malcontent. Bosola must resolve the
question posed by Cariola at the end of the first act : c Whether the
1 See F. P. Wilson, Elizabethan and Jacobean (Oxford, 1945), pp. 104-6; Edwards,
pp. 157-8; Cecil, pp. 40-41.
John Webster in
spkit of greatness or of woman / Reign most In her, I know not'
(I, i, 576-7). Come 5 you must live* (IV, i, 81), says Bosola when
the Duchess Is almost overcome with the horror of life and looks
to death for escape. When she has cursed the stars, vainly defying
an Impersonal nature, rather than asserting her own Integrity of
spirit, Bosola points out her folly: 'Look you, the stars shine still'
(IV, I, 120). 'In this climax/ writes Lucas (p. 187), c Bosola's
cynicism rises to the sublime, as in four monosyllables he ex-
presses the insignificance of human agony before the impassive
universe/ That the lines affirm the Impassivity of the universe
and the insignificance of human suffering Is, of course, true, but
to call them cynical is to ignore Bosola' s role in the Duchess's
spiritual triumph and the traditional poetic associations of shining
stars. Man's awareness of the insignificance of his pain may help
him to rise above it. That c the stars shine still' Is a crucial state-
ment of the play, for it is an assertion of the permanence and
indestructibility of nature. While the stars shine there is certainty,
for we cannot doubt the reality of the universe and of an illu-
minating beauty which persists in spite of all. The stars are a
symbol of hope which defeats the feeling of despair which the
horrors of the play may generate. Through the office of Bosola
the Duchess Is able to assert the dignity of human life and meet
her death with the readiness and courage which are her triumph. 1
To know the insignificance of human pain and the certainty of an
unextinguishable heavenly light is a means of escape from the
horrors of the world.
To view the death scene of the Duchess in a naturalistic per-
spective Is to render It almost ludicrous. The ghastly horrors of
1 See the fine discussion of Bosok's role in Bogard, pp. 67 ff. This very perceptive
study suffers from an over-emphasis upon the satiric in Webster which tends to
negate the value of the plays as tragedy. Webster, says Bogard (p. 5), 'made the
satiric voice coequal with the tragic, and in doing so brought together and steadily
controlled two all-but-incompatible attitudes towards human experience/ There is
an inherent contradiction in Bogard's thesis, for the two aspects he sees in Webster's
tragic vision are indeed incompatible. If Webster as a social satirist 'hoped his work
would arouse men to a concern for their world* (pp. 1 1 819), he could not well have
written the tragedies of negation and despair which Bogard finds. We cannot at the
same time have despair and a hope for social improvement. The satiric in Webster
is emphasized also by Rupert Brooke, ]obn Webster and "Elizabethan Drama. (New
York, 1916), still valuable for some brilliant flashes of insight, and in Henry W.
Wells, HK^abetban and Jacobean Playivrigbts (New York, 1939), p. 46.
H2 Jacobean Tragedy
her torture are a symbolic portrait of the pain of the whole
human condition., emphasizing as Flamineo had in The White Devil
(V, vi, 252-3), that the process of living is itself a preparation for
death. Before his sister in her final hours Ferdinand parades the
ordinary condition of debased humanity: courtesans, bawds,
ruffians and madmen. The various forms of madness represent the
ordinary occupations of life:
There's a mad lawyer and a secular priest,
A doctor that hath forfeited his wits
By jealousy: an astrologian,
That in his works, said such a day o'th' month
Should be the day of doom; and failing of 't
Ran mad: an English tailor, crazed iW brain
With the study of new fashions: a gentleman usher
Quite beside himself with care to keep in mind
like number of his lady's salutations,
Or *how do you', she employed him in each morning:
A farmer too, an excellent knave in grain,
Mad 'cause he was hindered transportation,
And let one broker that's mad loose to these,
Yould think the devil were among them.
(IV, ii, 49-62)
Doctor, lawyer, tailor, farmer and broker; these represent the
ordinary affairs of the world, joined in a universal pageant of
madness. This mad world is the world of Cariola, who will lie
and beg, even plead pregnancy to spare her life; it is the world
above which Bosola will help the Duchess to rise: 'When you
send me next, / The business shall be comfort' (TV, i, 163-4).
In this symbolic portrait of a mad world decaying into death,
Bosola, like Vindice in The }Levengefs Tragedy, assumes several
disguises, each indicating a different symbolic role. As the old
maker of tombs he is a symbol of time and mutability, the
destroyers of life, and he points to the impermanence and fragility
of the human condition in words which recall those of Hamlet in
the graveyard or Vindice with the skull of Gloriana:
Thou art a box of worm seed, at best but a salvatory of green
mummy. What's this flesh? a little curded milk, fantastical puff paste:
our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep
flies in; more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earthworms.
John Webster 113
Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body:
this world is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o'er our
heads, like her looking glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of
the small compass of our prison.
(IV, H, 123-51)
Bosola, like Hamlet and Vindice, is here speaking the common-
places de contemptu rnmdi^ a system of belief which, as we have seen,
emphasized the insignificance of the human body in order to make
dear the contrasting eternity of the soul. The lark in its cage
provides an image of striking power, stressing the ability of the
soul to soar towards heaven when the fragile cage of the body is
broken, just as the lark at daybreak flies straight towards the sun.
The heavens remind man of the smallness of his human body in
the light of eternity, just as the looking gkss in the lark's cage
emphasizes the smallness of her prison. Bosok in this speech is
preparing the Duchess in conventional terms for a Christian stoic
acceptance of death as the liberation of the soul. 1
Disguised as the bellman-whose traditional function was to
drive away evil spirits and to invite the faithful to pray for their
souls before death -Bosok stands for faith, penance, and the
hope of heaven which death affords. As the executioner with his
cord, he is the moment of death itself with its attendant pain.
When the Duchess awakens briefly before she dies, Bosok be-
comes a symbol of the comfort and mercy she will merit in
heaven. He tells her what she most longs to hear, that her loved
ones are still alive, and because of this the last word she utters is
'Mercy' (TV, ii, 381).
In the final act Bosok becomes the agent through which the
spirit of the Duchess is made to permeate the world. While Bosok
had accepted the values of Ferdinand and the Cardinal he had been
like them a symbol of death, the destroyer of life and beauty. The
final act is designed to show that the way of the Arragonian
brothers is that of madness and damnation, the complete descent
of man into beast symbolized by the lycanthropia of Ferdinand; it
1 So also, John Donne in The Second Ajmtversaty^ while he celebrates the eternity
of the soul dwells upon the contrasting insignificance and physical loathsomeness of
the body, 'This curded milk, this poor unlittered whelpe/My body ... a poore
Inne,/A Province pack'd up in two yards of skinne.*
ii4 Jacobean Tragedy
shows also that the horrors for which they stand may be defeated
and rendered insignificant by a triumph of the indestructible
human spkit. This spirit forever separates man from the beast,
and it justifies human life in spite of the disorder which surrounds
it. Man need not fear to live so long as he can preserve his
'integrity of life' and die true to himself, with courage and accept-
ance; and while life itself has value we have a basis for morality.
This Bosola had learned from the death of the Duchess ; now he
assumes her way and carries her values into the final act, becoming
an instrument of justice which affirms a moral order. His trans-
formation may defy logical probability, but it is a symbol of
Webster's moral argument. When Bosola recognizes the value of
the Duchess's "integrity of life', it is no longer possible for him to
live by the code which had linked him to the Arragonian brothers.
While good is possible, he must seek for values in life, and thus he
comes to stand for justice and the restoration of order. He now
can see the fate of Ferdinand not as an arbitrary reversal of fortune
in an uncertain and valueless world, but as a punishment for sin in
a world in which divine justice operates:
Mercy upon me, what a fatal judgement
Hath fallen upon this Ferdinand!
(V, ii, 83-84)
This note of heavenly justice is in the nameless terror which comes
to haunt the Cardinal:
When I look into the fishponds in my garden,
Methinks I see a thing arm'd with a rake
That seems to strike at me.
(V, v, 5-7)
The guilty must be punished for their sins, and in the death of her
oppressors Bosola proclaims the victory of the Duchess :
Revenge, for the Duchess of Malfi, murdered
By th' Arragonian brethren; for Antonio,
Slain by this hand; for lustful Julia,
Poisoned by this man; and lastly, for myself
(V, v, 102-5)
He executes vengeance even for the destruction of his own soul,
John Webster 115
and he willingly accepts the death and damnation which in the
just moral order he now envisages are his due;
It may be pain, but no harm to me to die
In so good a quarrel. Oh this gloomy world,
In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness.
Doth womanish and fearfei mankind live!
Let worthy minds ne'er stagger in distrust
To suffer death or shame for what is just.
Mine is another voyage.
(V, v, 123-9)
He dies *in so good a quarrel', and in his death there is an affirma-
tion of justice. The new moral order is made visible in Antonio's
young son who comes upon die stage as a symbol of rebirth.
The theme of an emerging justice had been carried also in the
death of Julia: *I forgive you / This equal piece of justice you
have done' (V, ii, 307-8). It had been prepared for also in Bosola's
decision to aid the cause of Antonio:
The weakest arm is strong enough, that strikes
With the sword of justice. Still methinks the Duchess
Haunts me.
(V, ii, 379-8!)
Bosola dies like the Duchess of Malfi, although he had lived
most of his life in the service of those who would destroy her.
Her death had been his regeneration:
What would I do, were this to do again?
I would not change my peace of conscience
For all the wealth of Europe. She stirs; here's life;
Return fair soul from darkness, and lead mine
Out of this sensible hell.
(IV, ii, 365-9)
Her 'fair soul', bright and unchanging like the shining stars, leads
Mm out of the darkness of a world without value to an affirmation
of the dignity of life for which she had stood and for which he
now comes to stand. If the world is an abysmal chaos without
guiding plan, in which good and evil must at last be made equal
by the death which comes to all, man may still create his moral
order, Webster in effect is saying, by upholding and preserving the
u6 Jacobean Tragedy
dignity of human life. Death may destroy the body, but it cannot
destroy the spirit. On one level, we may regard the play as the
education of Bosola by the Duchess. He carries her values into the
final act, where evil destroys itself and leaves behind only Delio,
Pescara and Antonio's son, characters whose virtue is untainted.
While he dwells on the blackness and pervasiveness of evil,
Webster never allows us to forget the possibility of good; even
in The White Devil, we have Isabella, Cornelia and Marcello whose
virtue though sometimes hidden is always real.
The Duchess in her heroic opposition to her brothers is the
symbol of life, as they are the symbols of death, and the play main-
tains a tension between the opposing forces of life and death, with
the values of life at kst triumphant. These symbolic functions of
the Duchess and her brothers are carried in the poetic imagery of
their lines, 1 Her only crime is 'that first good deed begun i'th'
world, / After man's creation, the Sacrament of Marriage' (I, i,
437-8), and the generation of life to which it leads. Webster's
source in William Painter's Palace of Pleasure had censured the
Duchess for her lust, her neglect of the responsibilities of her
station, and her avoidance of the rites of the church; of this
censure there is no hint in Webster's play. Her courtship of
Antonio is cast as a charming idyll with which we are meant to
sympathize, and it is contrasted to the lustful Julia's attachment to
the Cardinal. The Duchess asserts her ordinary human nature:
This is flesh, and blood, Sir,
'Tis not the figure cut in alabaster
Kneels at my husband's tomb. Awake, awake man;
I do here put off all vain ceremony,
And only do appear to you a yoiong widow,
That daims you for her husband.
She stands for the life of the flesh as opposed to the cold dead
statue at the tomb, and her call is one of awakening. Her right to
marry Antonio is an assertion of the basic claims of life, stripped
of all ceremony. As she dies her thought is only of her children:
1 The integral relation of imagery to action in Webster has been demonstrated
ably by H. T. Price, PMLA, LXX (1955), 717-39- <* also Prior > The LO&U& of
Tragedy, pp. 120-35.
John Webster
I pray thee look thou giv'st my little boy.
Some syrup for Ms cold, and let the girl
Say her prayers, ere she sleep,
(IV, 11, 207-9)
The inconsistency here, since she believes her children to be dead,
has bothered critics, but Webster abandons logic for this striking
emphasis upon his dying heroine as the creator and preserver of
life. She has the power to 'raise one to a galliard / That lay in a
dead palsy' (I, i, 200-1).
Her speeches are full of references to nature: birds, trees, the
heavens, symbols of life and continuity. Bosola tells her, as we
have seen, that the soul in the body is c a lark in a cage 5 , and she
is identified with this soul by the image with which she describes
herself:
The robin redbreast and the nightingale,
Never live long in cages.
(IV, ii, 15-16)
She compares herself and Antonio in their banishment to The
bkds that live i W field / On the wild benefit of nature' (III, v,
25-26), and she comes to see herself as such a bird fattened only
for destruction: 'With such a pity men preserve alive / Pheasants
and quails, when they are not fat enough / To be eaten* (HI, v,
129-31). As she and Antonio celebrate their marriage they chor-
ally relate their union to the life giving movement of the heavens :
Ant. And may our sweet affections, Eke the spheres,
Be still in motion.
D%cb* Quickening, and make
The like soft music.
Ant* That we may imitate the loving palms
(Best emblem of a peaceful marriage)
That never bore fruit divided.
(M, 551-7)
Webster uses a ritual technique to emphasize that the lovers stand
for harmony, life and generation. Childbearing is a constant motif,
and the speeches of Antonio and the Duchess are full of references
to children:
n8 Jacobean Tragedy
I have seen children oft eat sweatmeats thus.
(U> 533)
.
To see the little wanton ride a cock-horse
Upon a painted stick, or hear him chatter
Like a starling.
(1,1,459-61)
The union of the bird and child images here makes clear their
thematic function.
Ferdinand, the Cardinal, and Bosok while he serves them, stand
in opposition as the destroyers of life, and the imagery of their
speeches draws upon the destructive forces of nature. Ferdinand
would
Root up her goodly forests, blast her meads,
And lay her general territory as waste,
As she hath done her honours.
(II, v, 27-29)
He will give her 'bastard' a handkerchief c to make soft lint for his
mother's wounds, when I have hewed her to pieces' (XI, v, 39-42),
and he will
boil their bastard to a cullis,
And giv't his lecherous father, to renew
The sin of his back.
(II, v, 92-94)
He stands for the desecration of parenthood, opposed to the
generation of life.
The destructive, predatory animals are called up in the speeches
of the Arragonian brothers. The Cardinal describes his mistress,
Julia, as a hawk:
I have taken you off your melancholy perch,
Bore you upon my fist, and showed you game.
And let you fly at it.
(II, iv, 39-4i)
They are bloodhounds, vipers, a tiger. The spring in the Cardinal's
face is "nothing but the engendering of toads' (I, i, 159-60). He
and his brother are fed on by 'crows, pyes and catterpillers*
(I, i, 5 2). The law to Ferdinand is c a foul black cobweb to a spider*
John Webster 1x9
(I, i, 181). He Is *a foul porpoise before / A storm* (HI, HI, 64-65)
... "A very salamander Jives in's eyes' (HI, iii, 59). References to
wolves continue to run through Ms lines until he emerges on the
stage a wolf himself. Bosola refers to himself as a blackbird, a
horse leech; he sees man as "eaten up of lice, and worms' (n, i,
57); he is called a dormouse, an undermining mole, an impudent
snake.
The Cardinal stands for the guile and hypocrisy which render
religion but a shallow pretence. He carries on the traditional pose
of the 'MachiaveF, a symbol of evil wearing the mask of a seeming
virtue. The function of his liaison with Julia is in part to emphasize
this. If to display the death world of the Arragonian brothers were
Webster's final purpose, as has so often been supposed, the tragedy
would indeed be one of total despair, and as such it could not
arouse those feelings of final acceptance and reconciliation upon
which great tragedy depends. But this world is not the total
picture. Into it comes the Duchess of Malfi who stands for the
values of life, and Webster's final statement is that life may have
nobility in spite of all. The Duchess, not her brothers, stands for
ordinary humanity, love and the continuity of life through
children. Her brothers stand only for death and decay em-
phasized also by the disease imagery with which their speeches
abound - and by Bosola's striking image:
Your brother and yourself are worthy men!
You have a pair of hearts and hollow graves,
Rotten and rotting others.
(HI, ii, 344-6)
But the play asserts the final triumph of life over death. When
all of the horrors of the world have been paraded before the
Duchess and she faces the inevitable end in its most horrible form,
she can still proclaim that *! am Duchess of Malfi still' (IV, ii,
139). The body may be subject to death and decay, but in these
words the Duchess affirms the permanence of the spirit which is
the really vital part of man. The line in its simple syntax echoes
Bosola's c the stars shine still' (TV, i, 120), and equates the perma-
nence of the human spirit with that of nature. This is Webster's
answer to the pain of living and the fragility of the human
condition.
i2o Jacobean Tragedy
Antonio Is more central to the design of the play than usually
has been recognized. Although deeply involved in the action, he
is also a kind of choral commentator on it, for the audience is
invited to view the play through his eyes. He stands between the
death-world of the Arragonian brothers and the world of life
represented by the Duchess. He chooses life in spite of pain and
suffering, and like all who live he must suffer and die, his death
coming by a cruel accident of fate, as death so often does. But his
choice of the values of life enables him to accept death calmly and
to conquer the lust for revenge which might have accompanied
his injuries were he like Ferdinand. In spite of his suffering he
seeks at last for reconciliation. This is the first note sounded at
the opening of the final act:
What think you of my hope of reconcilement
To the Arragonian brethren?
(V.i.I-2)
There was no break between acts on the Jacobean stage, and the
word 'reconcilement', following hard upon the remorse of Bosola
which the audience has just beheld at the end of Act IV, would
give meaning to that remorse and show how it will dramatically
express itself. The initial note of 'reconcilement* conditions all
which is to follow in the final act. Antonio will go to the Cardinal's
chamber by the same means Ferdinand had used to enter that of
the Duchess, the parallel here being very deliberate, but he will go
to work good rather than evil:
I have got
Private access to his chamber, and intend
To visit him about the mid of night,
As once his brother did our noble Duchess.
It may be that the sudden apprehension
Of danger (for I'll go in mine own shape)
When he shall see it fraught with love and duty,
May draw the poison out of Mm, and work
A friendly reconcilement.
(V, i, 7i-79)
This speech is crucial to an understanding of the play, for Antonio
is postulating a system of values love, duty and reconciliation
John Webster 121
which in the world of Flamineo or the Arragonian brothers could
not be possible,
It is the spirit of the Duchess which animates Antonio in the
final act, just as it does Bosola, the one coming to stand for recon-
ciliation and the other for justice. As Antonio dies he hears the
names of Ms wife and children, and 'their very names / Kindle a
little life in me 5 (V, iv, 68-69). ^ t ^ le e ^o scene the voice of the
Duchess seeks to preserve his life, but Antonio has learned also
from his wife that death is the inevitable end, and he accepts it
calmly and peacefully. * We are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck
and bandied / Which way please them* (V, iv, 63-64), says Bosola.
Man's pain is the product of a fickle fortune, but man may escape
the bondage of fortune, as Antonio proves by the nobility of his
endurance:
Though in our miseries Fortune have a part,
Yet in our noble sufferings she hath none -
Contempt of pain, that we may call our own.
(V, Hi, 70-72)
Life may be full of pain and man a mere pawn in the hands of a
capricious fate - aE this Antonio recognizes in his death speech:
In all our quest of greatness * . .
Like wanton boys whose pastime is their care,
We follow after bubbles blown in th'air.
Pleasure of life, what is't? only the good hours
Of an ague; merely a preparative to rest,
To endure vexation. I do not ask
The process of my death.
(V, vi, 75-81)
To pursue greatness is as futile as to pursue pleasure; there is no
escaping the pain and uncertainty of life, but the important lesson
which Antonio has learned from his wife is how to 'endure vexa-
tion* in preparation for his everlasting rest. Webster affirms in
Antonio's death that human aspirations are nothing, that the
only good in life is the ability to endure life itself, and that man
can c fly the courts of princes' and the abysmal evil for which they
stand, as Antonio would have his son to do (V, iv, 84), only by
the assertion of the human quality which separates him forever
Jacobean Tragedy
from the beasts : Ms ability to accept the pain and frustration of life
and to die with courage and dignity. This is the final moral state-
ment to which all of the parts of The Duchess ofMalfi were carefully
designed to give poetic expression, a resolution of the parados
implicit in The White Devil.
CHAPTER SIX
Thomas Middleton
Thomas Middleton's plays are remarkable for a natural-
istic technique which is almost unique in his age. It
appears fin the almost journalistic realism of his
comedies of London life, and among his tragedies in a depth of
psychological penetration and insight such as we find only in
Shakespeare. So striking is the psychological truth of characters
like his De Flores and Beatrice- Joanna in The Changeling^ that it has
tended to obscure other elements in Middleton's art, and critics
often have been inclined to dismiss him as a kind of journeyman
craftsman capable at best of some moments of intense psycho-
logical insight, whose plays reveal little consistent unity of theme
or point of view. This is the judgment of T. S. Eliot, 1 and it has
been repeated, in effect, by the most recent editor of The Changeling,
who holds that c the dramatist's interest, in other words, is psycho-
logical rather than philosophical'. 2 The masterful arguments by
William Empson and M. C. Bradbrook 3 for a close thematic
relation between main plot and sub-plot of The Changeling seem
to have had slight effect, for more recent critics of the play 4 still
dismiss the mad-house scenes of the sub-plot as William Rowley's
1 Selected Essays, pp. 161-70. Omstein, The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, sees
Middleton also as 'interested only in crucial moments of psychological and moral
tension* (p. 181).
2 The Changeling, ed. N. W. Bawcutt (London, 1958)* p. xlvii. See also G. R.
Hibbard, *The Tragedies of Thomas Middleton and the Decadence of tibe Drama,*
University of Nottingham "Renaissance and Modern Studies* I (1957), 3564-
3 William. Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 1935), pp. 4852; M. C.
Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy, pp. 21324.
4 Samuel Schoenbaum, Middleton's Tragedies, A. Critical Study (New York), 1955),
pp. 132-49; R. H. Barker, Thomas Middleton (New York, 1958), pp. 121-31.
Omstein, The Moral Vision, p. 180, sees the sub-plot as burlesquing the 'Petrarchan
conceits* of the main plot, but denies that *plot and subplot form an organic unity
or that the subplot makes a significant enough contribution to the meaning of the
play to justify its repeated interruption of the main plot'.
123
124 Jacobean Tragedy
heavy-handed Intrusion of Irrelevant farce into what might
otherwise have been a greater play by Middleton, and the total
product Is judged an artistic failure*
I would suggest, on the contrary, that the realistic technique,
not only of The Changeling, but of Women Beware Women as well,
Is merely the instrument by which Mddleton effects a larger
thematic design, and that in both plays the main plot and sub-plot
are united by a common theme. Middleton is concerned not so
much with the complexities of human character as with the nature
of evil In the world, and each of his tragedies in its own way
provides the emotional equivalent of a statement about man's
relation to this evil. In this sense the tragedies of Thomas Middle-
ton, like the others we have considered, are profoundly moral
works. They embrace a more comprehensive view of human life
than ever could be encompassed in the psychological study of any
individual, no matter how Intense or revealing.
The canon of Middleton's plays is obscure and confused, but
with our present knowledge we can point to his achievement as a
writer of tragedy in three plays, Hengist^ King of Kent, The Change-
ling y and Women Beware Women. Of these, two are independent
works, and The Changeling was written in a collaboration with
William Rowley so close that the comic sub-plot, which seems to
have been Rowley's principal contribution, was subsumed into
the thematic unity of the whole. That Middleton's genius was the
guiding spirit of the work there can be little doubt, and some light
is thrown upon Middleton's achievement in tragedy when we
consider The Changeling^ which I would take to be the earlier
play, 1 as Middleton's experiment with a dramatic technique and
a moral theme which he was to extend and develop in Women
Beware Women. I would suggest that the relation of these plays to
one another is similar to that of The White Devil to The Duchess of
1 Most commentators would date The Changeling in 1622. Since there is no refer-
ence of any sort to Women "Beware Women before its entry in the Stationers Register
in 1653, any suggestion must be conjectural, but stylistically it appears to be the
later of the two works. R. C. Bald, 'The Chronology of Middleton's Plays,*
MLR, XXXH (1937), 33~43 admits this, but nevertheless argues for a date
in 1621 for reasons which G. E. Bentley has shown to be without merit. I would
agree with Bentley that Women Beware Women is the later play, written some time
shortly before Middleton's death in 1627. See The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, HI,
906-7.
Thomas Middle ton 125
Malfi 9 and that the essence of Middleton* s contribution to the
tragedy of his age, like Webster's, Is implicit in Ms two greatest
plays. 1
Middleton is Christian in his point of view, but we must
recognize that his Christianity is of a distinct kind; it is neither
that of Heywood nor of Tourneur. Heaven and heH are always
present in Middleton's cosmos; the limits of good and evil are
clear and well defined, and the sinner must inevitably suffer
divine retribution. At the end of The Changeling there is a vindica-
tion of divine justice with the emergence of a new moral order;
evil has been purged from society and new life is ready to begin.
That we do not find such tragic reconciliation at the end of
Women Beware Women may be the mark of an increasing pessimism
combined with a broadening social range which causes the
dramatist at last to see all of human society as corrupt and destined
for destruction, with no redeeming qualities in man to offer any
hope for the future. We do not have in Women Beware Women
any of Shakespeare's faith in the heroic capabilities of man or of
Heywood's belief in the power of love and human goodness to
destroy evil. There is no suggestion of a divine providence guid-
ing the affairs of men, in spite of their own indirection, to a re-
birth of good, and there is little of Tourneur's confidence in a
true felicity to be attained in heaven. Middleton's attention is
fixed steadily on hell.
Middleton's plays are conditioned by a Calvinistic bias which
leaves little room for the redemption of sinners. In The Changeling
we find it expressed in the irrevocable damnation of individuals;
in Women Beware Women it is extended to embrace the damnation
of all mankind. The movement from the one play to the other is a
movement from the specific to the universal. There is hope for the
truly virtuous at the end of The Changeling, but Women Beware
Women leaves us only with a feeling of frustration and waste, with
a sense of the sordid ruin man has made of the world in which we
1 Hengist, King of Kent, written some time between 1616 and 1620, is a lesser work
which suffers from its crude sensationalism, but in which the basic tragic themes of
Middleton ncTertheless are present: the confusion of appearance with reality, the
acceptance of evil out of an inherent moral blindness which makes man incapable of
distinguishing it truly from the good, and his total degeneration as his own damna-
tion gradually is revealed to him.
iz6 Jacobean Tragedy
too must live, and with a feeling that this ruin is the product of an
initial human commitment to evil which it is beyond the power of
any man to alter. The play arouses no pride in the human con-
dition, and we feel no sorrow for the destruction of any of the
characters other than that conveyed in our sense of fellowship
with them in damnation. These are not the emotions aroused by
the tragedies of Shakespeare or any of the other writers of tragedy
we have considered, but they are tragic emotions nevertheless,
and they are products of a comprehensive vision of human life,
terrible as that vision may be.
ii
The Changeling is concerned not so much with the degeneration of
Beatrice-Joanna, as is usually supposed, as with her coming,
rather, to recognize and accept the evil which has always been a
part of her, and which has been symbolized by the patient lurking
figure of De Flores. There are no positive signs of virtue about the
Beatrice-Joanna we first meet, only a wild, irrational horror of
De Flores and his ugly dog face. She stands for an evil hidden
from the world as it is hidden from herself. Her initial revulsion
from De Flores seems in excess of any logical justification, but it is
meaningful as the poetic symbol of her unwillingness to face the
horror of what she really is. Beatrice- Joanna is damned from the
first, and her slow acceptance of her own damnation is portrayed
with an amazing psychological truth. The action of the main plot
is a realistic portrayal of the stripping away of her mask of virtue,
'a visor / o'er that cunning face' (V, ii, 46-47). This stripping is
effected by a series of moral choices, in each of which Beatrice-
Joanna thinks that she is choosing by judgment, but in which she
is directed instead by a blind will over which she has no control
and which is in direct opposition to judgment.
Her self-deception is made dear at the beginning of the play:
Our eyes are sentinels unto our judgments,
And should give certain judgment what they see;
But they are rash sometimes, and tell us wonders
Of common things, which when our judgments find,
They can then check the eyes, and call them blind.
(U> 71-76)
Thomas Middkton 127
The power of the eye to beguile judgment Is a repeated motif.
Beatrice-Joanna thinks always that her acts are guided by reason
and wisdom. While she awaits the news of the murder she has
commissioned, for instance, she prides herself upon her rational
powers :
So wisdom by degrees works out her freedom;
And if that eye be darkened that offends me
(I wait but that eclipse), this gentleman
Shall soon shine glorious in my father's liking.
Through the refulgent virtue of my love.
(in, iv, 13-17)
Her wisdom is merely the delusion that love can grow out of
murder, and we know that she has already forfeited her claim to
the virtue on whose power she so prides herself. The polar
opposites in the poetic imagery sunlight growing out of eclipse
point to the contradiction inherent in her position and brand
her speech as the grossest self-deception and moral equivocation.
It is not her judgment but her will which, in fact, governs all
her conduct.
Miss Bradbrook has pointed to the constant repetition in the
play of 'judgment' and VilP. When De Flores proclaims that
'Though I get nothing else, Fll have my wilf (I, i, 240), he is
indicating that his pursuit of Beatrice- Joanna springs from the
kind of passion which destroys judgment. The eclipse of judg-
ment is in the kind of specious moral equivocation with which
Beatrice- Joanna counters De Flores' s demand:
Why, 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked,
Or shelter such a cunning cruelty,
To make his death the murderer of my honour!
Thy language is so bold and vicious,
I cannot see which way I can forgive it
With any modesty.
(in, iv, 120-5)
The moral blindness which cannot perceive that in the act of
murder is the denial of honour and modesty is the sign of the
heroine's commitment to evil. From this blindness she must make
two movements : she must come first to see her own evil, and she
128 Jacobean Tragedy
must come then willingly to embrace It. De Flores first strips her
blindness from her:
Push, you forget yourself!
A Woman dipped in blood and talk of modesty?
(Ill, iv, 125-6)
When she has recognized her own damnation Beatrice-Joanna can
only grow closer and closer to De Flores who is the symbol of this
damnation, until they are as surely united as Shakespeare's
Othello is to lago. Their union is expressed by Middleton in
terms of their sexual relation and in the increasing intimacy of
their speeches until Beatrice, recognizing both the falseness of
her own claim to honour and her closeness to De Flores, can say:
I am forced to love thee now,
'Cause thou provid'st so carefully for my honour.
(V, i, 47-48)
His physical ugliness at kst becomes inconsequential, for the
ugliness of her own soul has been revealed:
How heartily he serves me! His face loathes one,
But look upon Ms care, who would not love him?
The east is not more beauteous than his service.
(V, i, 70-72)
De Flores, with his 'Let me go to her, sk' (V, iii, no), can assert
a right which is greater than her husband's, and which the hus-
band recognizes :
Nay, you shall to her.
Peace, crying crocodile, your sounds are heard!
Take your prey to you, get you in to her, sir.
I'll be your pander now; rehearse again
Your scene of lust, that you may be perfect
When you shall come to act it to the black audience
Where howls and gnashings shall be music to you.
Clip your adult'ress freely, 'tis the pilot
Will guide you to the Mare Mortuum,
Where you shall sink to fathoms bottomless.
(V, iii, 111-20)
In this speech is a summation of Beatrice- Joanna's relation to
De Flores. Her tears are the false tears of the crocodile; she has
Thomas Middleton 1 29
from the first been the destined prey of the waiting De Flores,
and now joined inseparably they will go to hell where the sounds
of the damned will provide fit accompaniment for their lust. The
progression of Beatrice- Joanna from a choice of evil through a
moral blindness which is the product of her own damnation, to a
full awareness of evil, and at last to a willing embrace of damna-
tion, is the typical Middleton progression. It involves not a
process of transformation, but rather the stripping away of false
pretence to reveal an inner corruption which has always existed.
The characters upon whom Middleton concentrates his tragic
focus - Beatrice-Joanna, De Flores, Leantio, Bianca - never have
any real choice. They are damned to begin with, and they need
only learn that this is so.
There is a significant difference between The Changeling and
Women "Beware Women in this respect. In the earlier play Middleton
shows us the reality of damnation in the inescapable fate of
Beatrice-Joanna, but he shows us also the grace of God which can
preserve Isabella. On a lesser scale she is faced with a like tempta-
tion and shown a like vision of evil, but she is able to make a
proper moral choice and thus escape damnation. The world of
The Changeling is full of evil, but the sub-plot reveals also the
possibility of good, and this is one reason that Isabella and her
lovers are so essential to the total play. In Women Beware Women
we are never shown the possibility of good, only an invidious evil
corrupting every level of society through the same kind of moral
equivocation which is the mark of Beatrice- Joanna's damnation.
The dating of the two plays, of course, is uncertain, but if no great
time elapsed between diem, we may perhaps account for the more
optimistic moral vision of The Changeling by the share of William
Rowley in that play. That he was principally responsible for the
sub-plot may lend some support to this supposition.
The changeling of the title may refer, as has been suggested
often, both to Antonio and Beatrice- Joanna; if so the reference to
the heroine would be an ironic one, for what seems to be her
transformation from virtue the pky reveals to have been, in
reality, no change at all. The term has been applied also to
Diaphanta and by Empson to De Flores as well. Properly it fits
only Antonio, the disguised fool, for which changeling was a
130 Jacobean Tragedy
common term; the changes in character are only seeming ones.
The dominant motif of the play is the working out of a kind of
inexorable fate which makes Impossible any real change. The
feeling of ominous foreboding is established in the opening speech :
'Twas in the temple where I first beheld her,
And now again the same; what omen yet
Follows of that?
(I> *, i-3)
Alsemero has met Beatrice- Joanna in a church, the place of holi-
ness where divine purpose is expressed, and now he is meeting
her there again. Fate seems to have brought them together., and he
looks for meaning in their encounter. His faith in the holiness of
his own purpose, marriage, leads him to accept his destiny, what-
ever it may be:
Why should my hopes or fate be timorous?
The place is holy, so is my intent.
(I, i, 4~5)
His friend, Jasperino, is amazed by the strangeness of his conduct,
but Alsemero cannot sail with the tide as he had planned; his
fate decrees otherwise:
Even now I observ'd
The temple vane to turn full in my face.
I know 'tis against me.
(I, i, 19-21)
He seems to be directed by c some hidden malady / Within me, that
I understand not* (I, i, 24-25).
The power of a controlling destiny is made clear by the ques-
tions Beatrice- Joanna and Alsemero ask of the audience. T)id my
fate wait for this unhappy stroke / At my first sight of woman?*
(V, iii, 12-13), a ks Alsemero when the horror of his marriage has
been revealed to him, and Beatrice-Joanna asks when she sees her
inevitable union with De Flores : * Was my creation in the womb
so cursed, / It must engender with a viper first?' (Ill, iv, 165-6),
recalling also the sin of Eve. Before her death she explains that
her damnation has been the working out of a terrible destiny:
Beneath the stars, upon yon meteor
Ever hung my fate, 'mongst things corruptible;
Thomas Middleton 131
I ne'er could pluck It from Mm: my loathing
Was prophet to the rest, but ne'er believed;
Mine honour fell with Mm, and now my life.
(V,Iii, 154-8)
De Flores is the meteor, the traditional symbol in Elizabethan and
Jacobean cosmology of change and decay, opposed to the con-
stancy and permanence of the stars. She is saying that her very
loathing of De Flores was a sign of her destined link to him which
she could not evade, that in it her damnation was implicit from
the first. She has known the horror of a terrible self-discovery.
Although all of the characters seek to act by judgment, they
are led by something within them which is stronger than human
judgment and which will have its way. They cannot know their
own motives or the motives of each other until fate is ready to
reveal them. Of this human impotence in the face of divine will,
Alsemero's virginity test is a dramatic symbol. It has been
censured by critics as ridiculous melodrama. I would suggest that
its very ludicrousness is a part of Middleton's design, to illustrate
the futility of any probing into what only time can reveal. With
all his skill and wisdom, the learned doctor cannot discern the
evil which is always before him.
The primary focus of the main plot is upon Beatrice- Joanna
and De Flores; the other characters serve to create the complex of
action in which the heroine must undergo her tragic role, and
they are used also to represent contrasting positions which man
may take in the face of evil. Diaphanta's role is parallel to that of
her mistress. She is a changeling in a double sense, as the sub-
stitute for her mistress in the marriage bed, and as one whose out-
ward appearance of virtue, *As good a soul as ever kdy counte-
nanc'd* (V, i, 101), will be changed by the temptation of gold to
that of the whore which she really is and who will be destroyed
by De Flores as he destroys her mistress. The perverted judgment
of the heroine is paralleled by that of Alonzo de Piracquo who,
in spite of the warning of his brother, sees the evil of Beatrice-
Joanna as good and is destroyed by his inability to distinguish
appearance from reality. His brother, Tomazo, hangs over the
play as a figure ofmmesis* but he is an ineffective one, not knowing
where to strike, no more capable than Alsemero of finding evil
132 Jacobean Tragedy
where It lurks. He is spared at the end from the sin of murder
only by time's revelation of the answer he seeks.
Tomazo stands for human confusion and frustration before
the reality of an evil which he perceives but does not understand.
He needs to strike at evil, and his inability to do so with certain
knowledge embitters his existence while he casts about vainly for
some answer:
I cannot taste the benefits of life
With the same relish I was wont to do.
Man I grow weary of, and hold his fellowship
A treacherous bloody friendship; and because
I am ignorant in whom my wrath should settle,
I must think all men villains, and the next
I meet (who'er he be) the murderer
Of my most worthy brother.
(V, ii, 1-8)
He lives c in the state of ignorance' in a world of false appearance
where * A brother may salute his brothers murderer / And wish
good speed to th'villain in a greeting' (V, ii, 46-48), and he is
incapable of escape from this condition.
That the wise Alsemero is deceived by Beatrice-Joanna's
hidden evil illustrates also the general fallibility of human judg-
ment and reinforces the fatalism of the play. He echoes the plight
of all mankind in his final realization of the evil which has
betrayed him:
Oh cunning devils I
How should blind men know you from fair fac'd saints?
(V, iii, 108-9)
He is a learned doctor whose wisdom can reveal the secrets of
nature, and he is a man of uncompromising virtue:
Oh, were she the sole glory of the earth,
Had eyes that could shoot fire into kings' breasts,
And touch*d, she sleeps not here!
(IV, ii, 105-7)
Even the virtue and wisdom of such a man, representing the
ultimate in human power, cannot unmask an evil wearing the
Thomas bliddletm 133
outward signs of good. Fate must work out Its course. Alsemero
Is deceived, but he never deceives himself, and he is guilty of no
moral equivocation. His remorseless pursuit of the truth leads to
the final revelation of evil when fate is ready to reveal it, and
Alsemero must remain alive at the end of the play to stand for the
birth of a new moral order.
De Flores Is the symbol of damnation. To him Beatrice-Joanna
is pledged, and he waits patiently until by her own action he Is
given the chance to claim his due. He also Is driven by a remorse-
less fate; he cannot choose but haunt his ptey:
Must I be enjoyn'd
To follow still while she flies from me? Well,
Fates do your worst.
(I, I, 101-2)
I know she hates me,
Yet cannot choose but love her.
(1,1,235-6)
I can as well be hang'd as refrain seeing her.
(H. I, 28)
Her virginity stands for the shallow pretence of virtue which
at first keeps her from him, and this vkginity he must destroy:
And were I not resolv'd in my belief
That thy virginity were perfect In thee,
I should but take my recompense with grudging,
As if I had but half my hopes I agreed for.
(HI, iv, 116-19)
When the murder has been committed he can claim her soul with
as much right as the devil claimed that of Marlowe's Faustus,
She belongs to him entirely, his equal and Ms mate:
Look but into your conscience, read me there,
*TIs a true book, you'll find me there your equal:
Push, fly not to your birth, but settle you
In what the act has made you, y*are no more now;
You must forget your parentage to me:
Y'are the deed's creature; by that name
You lost your first condition, and I challenge you,
134 Jacobean Tragedy
As peace and ionocency has turn'd you out,
And made you one with me.
(EI 3 iv, 13^-40)
The words are chilling in their realistic intensity, and they may
have larger symbolic overtones. There is the suggestion that
De Flores in claiming Beatrice-Joanna is the devil himself claim-
ing fallen man. The lost 'first condition' may refer also to man's
state of innocence before the Fall, and to be 'the deed's creature 5
may be to share in the original sin of mankind. That Beatrice-
Joanna's delivery to De Flores represents the final working out of
an inexorable destiny is reinforced by the horror of his cold reply
to her plea for mercy:
Can you weep fate from its determined purpose?
So soon may you weep me.
(in, iv, 162-3)
From this moment forward Beatrice- Joanna is joined to De
Flores and they are, in fact, already in hell together. This is at
last made clear by De Flores :
Yes; and the while I coupled with your mate
At barley-brake; now we are left in hell.
(V, Hi, 162-3)
The game of barley-brake was played with a central area known
as hell. Through this area various couples ran together while the
couple in hell tried to catch them, those caught remaining to take
their turn in hell. It was a popular pastime of the age, and this
game is made to represent the action of the play. Beatrice- Joanna
and De Flores have been the couple in hell throughout. Others
have run through but managed to escape, and at the end of the
play only they remain. There is a terrible pessimism in the re-
joinder of Vermandero: *We are all there, it circumscribes here'
(V, in, 164). This is the motif to which Middleton will return in
Women Beware Women.
The barley-brake symbol is only one of several by which the
main plot and sub-plot are united. No sooner has Antonio cast
off his disguise and begun to court Isabella than a madman calls
out in the background, c Catch there, catch the last couple in hell!*
(HE, ii, 165.) Isabella and Antonio are playing also at barley-brake,
Ibomas Middle ton 1 3 5
and to show thek ability to escape heE is an important function
of the sub-plot. It would be futile to argue that the scenes in the
madhouse of Alibius add much to the artistry of the play. They
are crude, farcical, generally in bad taste, and foil of extraneous
comic horseplay. They represent the kind of comic hackwork for
which William Rowley is known. But to say that the sub-plot is
crudely executed and in bad taste is not to say that it is unrelated
to the central theme of the play. The sub-plot shows links with the
main plot which are deliberate and unmistakeable. Miss Brad-
brook has seen the relation as that of anti-masque to masque.
Isabella provides a counterpart for Beatrice-Joanna. Her mar-
riage to Alibius may be compared to the engagement of Beatrice-
Joanna to Alonzo de Piracquo, for it involves a like restraint.
Isabella is tempted to break her bonds not once but twice, by
Antonio and Franciscus, and it may be because Middleton wishes
to emphasize the ability of Isabella to stand firm in spite of tempta-
tion that he provides her with two suitors rather than one. Lollio
is witness to her courtship by Antonio, and he demands the same
price for his silence as De Flores had demanded for Beatrice-
Joanna's safe marriage to AJsemero. Isabella's reply is a direct
reversal of Beatrice-Joanna's :
Sirrah, no more! I see you have discovered
This love's knight-errant, who hath made adventure
For purchase of my love; be silent, mute,
Mute as a statue, or his injunction
For me enjoying, shall be to cut thy throat:
I'll do it, though for no other purpose,
And be sure he'll not refuse it.
(Ill, Hi, 237-44)
Lollio has been the tempter of Isabella, showing her die pros-
pective lovers, willing to keep thek assignations secret, demand-
ing only her virtue as his fee: c My share, that's all; I'll have my
fool's part with you' (HE, iii, 245). She destroys his power over
her, as Beatrice-Joanna could not and would not destroy that of
De Flores, by turning his own instrument against him. If she must
surrender her virtue, her surrender will be the death of her
tempter and not his gratification. We are shown the kind of
triumph over evil of which Isabella because of her innocence is
136 Jacobean Tragedy
capable, but of which Beatrice-Joanna because of the evil already
within her is not.
There may be in the sub-plot also the suggestion that while
Antonio wears the disguise of the fool he too can escape evil,
thus reinforcing the theme that it is not through human reason
that man may escape evil, but only through a native innocence
with which some few are endowed by the grace of God. Antonio
woos Isabella only in Ms proper shape, never in disguise, and in
this there is the suggestion that only when he casts off the role
of the fool does he risk damnation. This is implicit in Isabella's
rejection of Ms suit:
Fie, out again! I had rather you kept
Your other posture: you become not your tongue,
When you speak from your clothes.
(HI, ill, 170-2)
His "other posture' is Ms fool's habit. The fool, as the special child
of God, saved by a heavenly grace greater than the power of
human reason, is a familiar motif in the world's literature. We may
find some reflection of it in the Fool in King Lear.
The theme is not developed consistently or at length, but
there may be also in the division of Alibius's house into fools and
madmen a suggestion that the entire world is so divided and that
these are the elect and the damned of Calvinist theology. The fools
can escape damnation through divine grace; the madmen repre-
sent judgment vitiated by will, and they engage in moral equivo-
cation wMch is the result of fallible human reason. Antonio's
first temptation of Isabella is followed by the entrance of a chorus
of madmen dressed as animals and birds. They emphasize, as Miss
Bradbrook has pointed out, the bestiality of man, and they serve
as ritualistic commentary upon the action of Antonio*
Similarly, when Isabella decides finally to test the love of
Antonio, she appears to him disguised as a madwoman. The 'wild
unshapen antic' (TV, iii, 125) who confronts him shows him that
lust is madness. In Antonio's rejection of what he once had sought
is the salvation of both, for Antonio has seen lust in its true form
as misshapen madness, and Isabella has seen Ms illicit pursuit of
her as judgment warped by will wMch has led only to a worsMp
of outward appearance :
Thomas Middle ton 137
No, I have no beauty now.
Nor never had, but what was in my garments.
You a quick-sighted lover? Come not near me!
Keep your caparisons, y'are aptly dad;
I came a feigner to return stark mad.
(IV, iii, 1 3 1-5)
He is 'aptly clad* as a fool, and she rejects Ms illicit passion
because he is a fool. His reason lias been as defective as that
of even the wise Alsemero, but he has been protected by his guise
of folly. There is a double meaning in his final admission of the
lesson he has learned:
Yes, sir; I was changed too, from a little ass as I was, to a great
fool as I am, and had like to ha* been chang'd to the gallows, but
that you know my innocence always excuses me.
(V, Hi, 204-7)
By his 'innocence' he means not only his freedom from actual
guilt, but the guise of folly which has preserved him.
The two plots are brought together in the final scene of the
play. Vermandero here sees in his daughter's damnation a sign
of his own defilement and of the general damnation of mankind >
but Alsemero points to the rebirth of good in a mood of tragic
reconciliation:
justice hath so right
The guilty hit, that innocence is quit
By proclamation, and may joy again.
Sir, you are sensible of what truth hath done;
*Tis the best comfort that your grief can find.
(V, iii, 183-9)
This is Middleton's final affirmation of a justice and order in the
universe from which man may draw some comfort in spite of the
evil all around him. In the destruction of Beatrice- Joanna he has
shown the terrible reality of damnation, but he has shown also
that evil is self-destructive, and particularly in his sub-plot, he has
affirmed the possibility of good.
in
Women Beware Women has been more harshly treated by critics
than The Changeling. It has been dismissed usually as a pky of some
138 Jacobean Tragedy
powerful realistic scenes which falls to pieces at the end in the
crude sensationalism of its multiple murder scene. The char-
acters have been condemned for their utter and unredeemed
depravity. I would suggest that the sordid realism of the charac-
terization and the mass murders at the end are not artistic defects;
they are conditioned and made necessary by the particular moral
statement which the total play affirms. Women Beware Women
extends the damnation of Beatrice-Joanna on to a social range, so
that the play becomes the dramatic symbol of the damnation of all
mankind. Each of the moral choices in this play involves the same
kind of moral equivocation we have noted in the earlier play, a
self-deception leading to a choice of evil in the delusion that it is
good. Sub-plot and main plot again are closely related, all of the
elements of the play combining to shape an ethical statement.
Middleton shows his audience a dismal picture of a doomed man-
kind manifesting its own inherent damnation by a deification of
worldly success and false appearance.
The play's action is a neatly interwoven series of moral choices.
In the main plot these are made by Leantio, Bianca and the Duke,
and in the sub-plot by Isabella, Hippolito and the Ward, and with
a lesser emphasis, by Guardiano and Fabricio. Some of these
choices have been made before the action opens. Each of the main
characters pays homage to the outward signs of virtue, but each
is willing to sin so that these outward signs may be preserved;
one evil is embraced willingly so as to avoid the mere appearance
of another. The Ward and his man, with the appropriate name
Sordido, are used as comic commentary on this moral equivoca-
tion and self-deception. Livia and the Cardinal stand apart, she
in her complete and willing rejection of all moral values, and he
in his rejection of the worldly values by which the others live and
in his role as prophet of the retribution which inevitably must
follow. All of the others are moral equivocators, and moral
equivocation sets the dominant tone of the play. The final scene of
mass murder is necessary and proper. It is not to be explained in
terms of logical credibility, but rather as the dramatic symbol of
the inevitable collapse of a society which by a faulty choice of
values inherent in the very nature of humanity has devoted itself
to its own destruction. If it catered to a Jacobean taste for the
Thomas Middle ton 139
spectacular., It Is also the necessary culmination to the moral
argument of the play.
Middleton* s technique Is highly realistic, but there Is also an
important symbolic element In his dramatic art. A failure to
recognize this has led some critics to attribute to Middleton's
supposed Illoglc and his love of the spectacular elements which are
perfectly meaningful as part of a ritual technique designed to
emphasize an underlying theme. This element of ritual is reflected
in the conscious patterning of the action which borrows much
from the technique of masque and anti-masque. The seduction
of Bianca, for Instance, Is paralleled by Livia's move In the game
of chess which she and Leantio's mother pky below, so that seduc-
tion and chess game together take on the qualities of a ritual
dance. 1 At the banquet scene in the third act the Ward's grotesque
dance with Isabella follows closely upon her dance with Hippo-
lito; by burlesquing Hippolito's movements the Ward em-
phasizes the sordid pretence and self-deception of the lovers. This
element of ritualistic parody reaches Its height In the final banquet
scene where the principal characters destroy one another In the
elaborate ritual of a marriage masque, the grotesque incongruity
of the masque emphasising that of the actual marriage of Bianca
to the Duke at which it Is performed.
In The Changeling Mlddleton does not rely heavily upon his
poetic Imagery to carry the theme; there are the obvious associa-
tions of De Flores with poison, but little more. In this regard
Women Beware Women shows a considerable advance In Middle-
ton's artistry, for In the later pky the poetic imagery is highly
developed and systematized, and It is one of the principal devices
by which the main plot and sub-plot are linked. By recurrent
imagery Middleton underlines the common theme to which the
various relationships of the play contribute. Each of the principal
characters Is highly realistic, but each also is a dramatic symbol of
moral equivocation. Each comes to that awareness of his own
corruption so well exemplified in Beatrice- Joanna. The characters
of Women Beware Women are not lovable, but Middleton creates
the feeling that, taken all together, they stand for humanity, and
the total play, with each self-destructive character emphasizing
1 Barker, Thomas Mulcttetm, pp. 142-4, bas perceived Middleton's ritual technique.
140 Jacobean Tragedy
the parallel self-destruction of the others, becomes the tragedy of
humanity at large.
The destructive values which Middleton most strongly casti-
gates are those of worldly success and worldly pleasure, the very
values which in the medieval phlbsopy de contemptu mundi gave
strongest evidence of damnation. This concern is reflected in
poetic imagery drawn from commercial exchange and from
gluttonous feeding. 1 The function of the imagery is not merely to
condition the mood, although it certainly does this, but chiefly
to convey poetically a sense of the sordid shallowness of each of
the play's moral choices in the very lines in which the particular
choice is made. Imagery is further used to link these moral choices
to one another and thus to keep always in the consciousness of the
audience the interconnection among them which sustains the
social range of the tragedy.
The two crucial episodes of moral commitment at the beginning
of the third act, for instance, are linked to one another by imagery
drawn from food and commerce: Isabella's acceptance of the
Ward as a cover for her incestuous relation to Hippolito is linked
by recurring motifs to Bianca's departure from Leantio to be the
open concubine of the Duke.
Isabella is sold to the Ward by her father as he would sell a
horse:
Nay, you shaU see, young heir, what you've for your money,
Without fraud or imposture.
(in, ii, 75-76)
The Ward emphasizes the sordidness of Fabricio's offer by comic
parody as he considers his prospective marriage in the same
terms, and his language is full of references to feasting:
I have seen almost
As tall as she sold in the fair for tenpence:
See how she simpers it, as if marmalade
Would not melt in her mouth! she might have the
kindness i* faith,
To send me a gilded bull from her own trencher,
1 The dominance of this type of imagery has been noted by Miss Bradbr ook,
Themes and Conventions, pp. 234-9, but it is much more highly 'systematized' than
she has indicated and much more closely related to the total structure of the play.
Thomas Mlddkton 141
A ram, a goat, or somewhat to be nibbling:
These women, when they come to sweet things once.
They forget all their friends, they grow so greedy,
Nay, oftentimes their husbands.
(HI, ii, 69-77)
Middleton makes clear to Ms audience that Isabella has accepted
the very values of her father and the Ward as s intent upon her
lust for HippoHto, she allows herself to be examined like a horse
for sale, accompanying her voluntary choice of evil with the same
imagery drawn from food and commerce:
But that I have th' advantage of the fool,
As much as woman's heart can wish and joy at,
What an infernal torment 'twere to be
Thus bought and sold, turned and pry'd into,
When, alas,
The worst bit's too good for him! and the comfort is
Has but a eater's place on't and provides
All for another's table.
(HI,iii, 33-40)
She sees herself as superior to the Ward, as unaware as Beatrice-
Joanna that by her own act she is revealing herself to the audience
as his equal in vice. She has never really been anything else.
Similarly in the main plot, Leantio's mother will c trot into a
bawd now / For some dry sucket, or a colt in march-pane' (in, i,
269-70). She has been charged with the protection of Bianca's
virtue; her complete abandonment of her trust Is rendered sordid
and ludicrous by the imagery of the speech in which it is couched :
I'll first obey the Duke,
And taste of a good banquet; I'm of thy mind:
I'll step but up and fetch two handkerchiefs
To pocket up some sweetmeats, and o'ertake thee.
(HI, i, 265-8)
The virtue she has been ciiarged to protect has been as non-
existent as her ability to protect it. Not only in these two crucial
episodes, but throughout the play, the poetry is dominated by
references to food, and the casting of the play's moral choices in
the crass terms of commerce is reflected again and again. It
appears in the very profession of Leantio, the factor.
Jacobean Tragedy
In the opening scene of the play Leantio describes his stolen
bride as 'the most unvalud'st purchase / That youth of man had
ever knowledge of' (I, i, 12-15). She is his 'life's wealth' (HI, ii,
207), his treasure, and even his enjoyment of her is expressed in
commercial terms :
Tis a bitterness
To think upon to-morrow! that I must leave
Her still to the sweet hopes of the week's end;
That pleasure should be so restrain' d and curb'd
After the course of a rich work-master,
That never pays till Saturday night! marry
It comes together in a round sum then.
And does more good, you'll say.
(I, i, 154-61)
He praises that love which is 'respective for increase' (I, iii, 47),
and when Bianca has been discovered by the Duke, Leantio will
lock up his treasure as a miser hoards his gold:
At the end of the dark parlour there's a place
So artifically contriv'd for a conveyance
No search could ever find it ...
There will I lock my life's best treasure up.
(HI, i, 244-8)
The word 'conveyance' reminds the audience that Bianca has been
stolen, and in its secondary meaning it has further connotations
of commerce, the transfer of property. This commercial imagery
is combined with that of feasting; wedlock to Leantio is 'like a
banqueting house' (EH, i, 90), and he sees his absence from
Bianca's bed as 'a five days' fast' (HI, i, 106).
Leantio in the first act does not represent the idealistic and
devoted lover which critics have sometimes seen in him. The
imagery drawn from feasting and commerce which infuses his
speeches adds a note of the base and sordid to the quality of his
devotion and supports the feeling that his degeneration is already
implicit in the moral choice -the theft of a bride- which he has
made before the opening of the action. He is not to be regarded as
a loving, virtuous husband whose decline will be the theme of the
play. He will merely come to learn the depths of his own evil and
debasement, as it was learned by Beatrice- Joanna in The Changeling,
Thomas Middkfon 143
as it Is learned by Bianca and by every other of this play's major
characters.
Leantio's very devotion to Bianca involves a kind of moral
equivocation, for while he protests the purity of his love and his
superiority to other men in virtue because of it, he admits the
theft of Bianca from her parents and the consequent loss of dowry
which will force them both to live in poverty:
I find no wish in me bent sinfully
To this man's sister, or to that man's wife;
In love's name let 'em keep their honesties,
And cleave to their own husbands - 'tis their duties:
Now when I go to church I can pray handsomely,
Nor come like gallants only to see faces,
As if lust went to market still on Sundays.
I must confess I'm guilty of one sin, mother,
More than I brought into the world with me,
But that I glory in; 'tis theft, but noble
As ever greatness yet shot up withalL
(I, i, 28-38)
But theft cannot be noble, and a virtue dependent upon such theft
is vitiated at its very source; It is only a seeming virtue which
hides an inner corruption. This very theft, with its resulting
poverty for the lovers, will destroy them both.
Lust goes ever c to market', and when Leantio sees Blanca's
surrender to lust and his own reward of a captainship for his
cuckoldry, his speech again fuses the imagery of commercial
husbandry and gluttonous feasting:
a fine bit
To stay a cuckold's stomach: all preferment
That springs from sin and lust it shoots up quickly,
As gardeners' crops do in the rotten' st grounds;
So is all means raised from base prostitution
Even like a salad growing upon a dunghill.
I'm like a tiling that never was yet heard of,
Half merry and half mad: much like a fellow
That eats his meat with a good appetite,
And wears a plague-sore that would fright a country;
Or rather like the barren, hardened ass
144 Jacobean Tragedy
That feeds on thistles till he bleeds again;
And such is the condition of my misery.
, 11,46-58)
The striking image of the 'plague-sore that would fright a country'
reinforces the theme of a hidden evil beneath the outward appear-
ance of virtue and reminds the audience of the self-deception in
all of Leantio's claims to goodness. This is the condition not only
of his misery, but of all the others, of humanity at large.
Livia, who keeps a c shop in cunning' (H, ii, 29), will buy the
body of Leantio for which she lusts : f l have enough to buy me my
desires' (HI, ii, 63). She will 'follow my true labour day by day*
(III, ii, 141), a tradesman in sin like Leantio, and it is fitting to
the theme that he should sell himself to her for the worldly goods
she offers : 'Troth, then, I'll love enough, and take enough' (III, ii,
376). After his sordid bargain, Leantio c eats his meat with grudg-
ing still' (IV, i, 115), while Livia,
Yet, blinded with her appetite, wastes her wealth,
Buys her disgraces at a dearer rate
Than bounteous housekeepers purchase their honour.
(IV, i, 154-6)
Leantio's relation to Livia, like that to Bianca, is expressed by the
dramatist in the same terms of food and commerce, and we are
left with the feeling that there is no real difference between the two
relations, the lustful infatuation of Leantio for the Bianca he has
stolen being recapitulated in Livia's lustful infatuation for the
Leantio she has bought. Leantio's entire career is cast as a dramatic
symbol of dedication to shoddy values which must culminate in
his ignominious death.
Bianca too at the beginning of the play prides herself on her
vktue, her ability to forego wealth and luxury in dedication to the
love of her husband, but it is only the appearance of virtue which
she values, and when she is faced with her choice between poverty
as a faithful wife and luxury as the Duke's mistress, it is the Duke
she chooses. Her seduction, with her feeble attempts at resistance,
is an elaborate game, which is emphasized by the parallel game of
chess which is played below while it is taking place. The chess
game serves to emphasize the essential falseness of Bianca's pro-
Thomas Middle ton 145
testations of chastity, to show that the protests are part of the
game and that it Is merely the appearance of virtue she is striving
to protect. The seduction also is portrayed in commercial terms.
'Why should you seek, sir/ she asks, *To take away that you can
never give* (II, ii, 373-4), and the Duke replies:
But I give better in exchange - wealth, honour . . .
Come, play the wise wench, and provide forever;
Let storms corne when they list, they find thee shelter'd.
Should any doubt arise, let nothing trouble thee;
Put trust in our love for the managing
Of all to thy heart's peace : well walk together,
And show a thankful joy for both our fortunes.
(H, H, 375~92)
The emphasis is upon wealth, security, fortune, and these are
covered by the transparent mask of love and honour. Walking
out together, Bianca and the Duke are united in a common
dedication to lust, but they find thek hearts' peace in the delusion
that it is love which joins them. Bianca accepts the Duke's values
because they are hers as well. Guardiano explains how he had c to
prepare her stomach by degrees / To Cupid's feast* (II, ii, 406-7),
the food imagery uniting this faulty moral choice to the others in
the play.
Bianco does not regret her corruption, but she turns against
Guardiano who has betrayed her:
sin and I'm acquainted,
No couple greater; and I'm like that great one,
Who making politic use of a base villain,
He likes the treason well, but hates the traitor.
(II, ii, 445~8)
These lines would have a familiar ring to the Jacobean audience,
for Bianca is repeating a stock formula of c Machiavellian policy',
that anathema of the age which had become stereotyped in stage
tradition. The evil-doer, maintaining always die guise of virtue,
must destroy his own evil instrument. The keynote of 'policy* was
a seeming virtue as the mask for villainy, and this speech would
remind die audience that Bianca' s supposed honour is indeed
'leprous' (II 3 ii, 429), that like Leantio she stands only for a shallow
pretence of virtue.
146 Jacobean Tragedy
Guardiano accepts the role of villain in images of greed and
feeding which link his function as pander to the Duke to the other
sordid relations of the play:
Well, so the Duke love me,
I fare not much amiss then; two great feasts
Do seldom come together in one day.
(II, ii, 449-5 1)
Livia sums up her own role in the seduction of Bianca in much the
same poetic terms :
Sin tastes at first draught like Wormwood water,
But drunk again, 'tis nectar ever after.
(II, ii, 481-2)
Thus by iterative imagery Middleton links the moral positions
of his various characters. All work out their own destruction by
making moral commitments, the sordid nature of which is made
clear by imagery drawn from money and gluttony. None of these
characters is aware of the damnation implicit in his choice of evil,
for each of them, like Beatrice- Joanna, prides himself upon his
wisdom and prudence. Their initial commitments to evil make
them incapable of any other choice than that which must assure
their own damnation.
Just as Leantio's sense of loss turns to exultation in the new
found wealth of Livia, Bianca' s corruption is signalized by a
desire for the material objects of wealth:
some fair cut-work pinned tip in my bed chamber,
A silver and gilt casting-bottle hung by't -
... a silver basin and ewer.
(HI, i, 20-23)
She asserts her claim to these paltry objects again in commercial
terms: 'And by that copy, this land still I hold' (III, i, 59). Hus-
band and wife together reach the full depth of their degradation
as they vaunt their ill-gotten wealth before one another in a kind
of ritual dance, each parading the signs of his damnation (IV, i,
42-105). By this scene of symbolic ritual, emphasized by the short
clipped speeches with which Bianca and Leantio echo and mock
one another, Middleton underscores the theme of his play.
Thomas Middkton 147
The Duke's moral choice is presented to Mm by Ms brother,
the Cardinal, who reminds him of the damnation wMch must be
the price of Ms lechery. The Duke too will preserve the appear-
ance of virtue, committing the greater sins so as to preserve the
mere semblance of a virtue he knows he has already forfeited.
He will murder the husband so that he can lawfully marry Ms
concubine, desecrating the institution of marriage by making it
the license for lust. His marriage to Bianca is the play's cul-
minating instance of moral equivocation, e religious honours done
to sin' (IV, iii, 1-2). The outward signs of holiness mark only an
inner corruption, as the Cardinal makes clear:
Must marriage, that immaculate robe of honour,
That renders virtue glorious, fair, and fruitful
To her great master, be now made the garment
Of leprosy and foulness? Is this penitence
To sanctify hot lust. What is it otherwise
Than worship done to devils?
(TV, Hi, 13-18)
The clothing image emphasizes once more the deification of false
appearance wMch the marriage will represent, the doaking of evil
with a mask of virtue, wMch is so dominant a theme in the play.
TMs final sacrilege is linked to the others by another image of
loathsome gluttony:
As if a drunkard, to appease Heaven's wrath,
Should offer up his surfeit for a sacrifice.
(TV, iii, 21-22)
The seeming health of the Duke, like that of Leantio, Mdes
c a plague-sore that would fright a country*.
In the sub-plot the moral equivocation of Isabella and Hippolito
parallels that of Bianca and the Duke, with the shocking vicious-
ness of the simple-minded Ward to throw into relief the equally
cuckolded Leantio. Hippolito and Isabella pride themselves on
the nobility of their love, as opposed to the crude commercialism
of marriage for wMch Fabricio stands. They will not commit
incest, but they will commit adultery, and Isabella will joy in the
knowledge of her supposed bastardy wMch enables her fully to
accept the incestuous relationsMp she is seeking to avoid. He
148 Jacobean Tragedy
wisdom Is of the same order as that of Beatrice- Joanna; It succeeds
only in bringing her to the very damnation she seeks to avoid.
Isabella will sell herself to the Ward whom she loathes, and she
will accept the very commercial values of her father to which
she had once opposed her love for Hippolito. Like Bianca and
Leantio, the lovers of the sub-plot willingly commit evil so as to
avoid the mere appearance of evil.
This is emphasized further by Hlppolito's determination to
murder Leantio in order to preserve the appearance of an honour
which he knows that he and his sister, livia, already have for-
feited:
Put case one must be vicious, as I know myself
Monstrously giiilty, there's a blind time made for't,
He might use only that, - 'twere conscionable;
Art, silence, closeness, subtlety and darkness,
Are fit for such a business; but there's no pity
To be bestowed on an apparent sinner,
An impudent daylight lecher.
(IV, ii, 5-10)
And he puts his desire for revenge, appropriately to the theme of
the play, in terms of wealth and material advantage:
The great zeal
I bear to her advancement in this match
With Lord Vicentio, as the Duke has wrought it
To the perpetual honour of our house.
(IV, ii, 11-14)
This shallow worship of a meaningless outward appearance is
echoed in the comic badinage of the Ward and Sordido. Of the
Ward's c foul skin* Sordido says, 'But you've a clean shirt, and
that makes amends, sir' (H, ii, 129-30), Only the outward appear-
ance is valued, no matter what evil lie beneath it. Women Beware
Women has been criticized as verging too close upon the comic to
be truly a tragedy, but the antics of the Ward and his man are
bitter comedy, and they are carefully linked to the more serious
level of the play so as to support the thematic impact of the whole.
The open viciousness of the Ward emphasizes the hidden vicious-
ness of the other characters, for he is linked to them by parallels
of action and by a common poetic idiom. When, for instance,
Thomas Middkton 149
with bis trapstick the Ward has struck the child of a poulterer's
wife, raising *a bump in her child's head as big as an egg' (I, ii,
96-97) this bit of wanton cruelty is related to the sins of the major
characters by the same commercial imagery we have noted :
An egg may prove a chicken, then in time
The poulterer's wife will get by't.
(I, H, 98-99)
In his idiotic torn-foolery the Ward emphasizes the lust, vice and
crass commercialism of the major characters, as Sordido details
the qualities necessary to the wife he would purchase (H, ii,
103-21), and as they put Isabella through her paces as they would
a horse (111, iii).
Such comic commentary links the sub-plot to the main plot,
and the common theme of both is made striking by the same
poetic imagery. Livia, who at first would defend Isabella from the
sordid commercialism of her father, in her earliest speeches puts
the relation of women to men in terms of the kitchen :
Besides, he tastes of many sundry dishes
That we poor wretches never lay our lips to,
As obedience forsooth, subjection, duty and such kickshaws,
All of our making, but serv'd in to them;
And if we lick a finger then sometimes,
We're not to blame, your best cooks often use it.
(I, ii, 40-45)
By this use of imagery Middleton prevents his audience from the
natural sympathy for livia which might arise from her seeming
opposition to Fabricio's sordid plans. We are made at once aware
that she lives in the same moral climate as her brother and that her
values are no different from his. We are prepared to see her total
villainy emerge at the beginning of the next act.
Hippolito seeks always the outward signs of virtue, but he
sums up an important theme of the play in his awareness of the
corruption man may carry within himself in spite of outward
appearance. He has accepted his incestuous love affair 'even as
easily / As man comes by destruction, which ofttimes / He wears
in his own bosom' (Et, i, 2-4). like Beatrice-Joanna he can never
escape the damnation he cames always within him. Livia offers
150 Jacobean Tragedy
her aid in his illicit suit, Ms 'ill husbandry 5 (H, i, 13), in terms of
commercial exchange which again link them both to the moral
values of Fabricio to which at their first appearance they had
seemed opposed:
Thou keep'st the treasure of that life I love
As dearly as mine own; and if you think
My former words too bitter, which were minister'd
By truth and zeal, 'tis but a hazardizing
Of grace and virtue, and I can bring forth
As pleasant fruits as sensuality wishes
In all her teeming longings.
Isabella's commitment to sin is linked to that of the other
characters also by the imagery of her lines. Marriage for her is a
relation in which 'women buy their masters' (I, ii, 78), and when
Livia betrays her into her affair with Hippolito, she does so again
in terms of eating :
If you can make shift here to taste your happiness,
Or pick out aught that likes you, much good do you;
You see your cheer, I'll make you no set dinner.
(H, i> i-3)
When she has tasted Livia's sinful repast, Isabella invites Hippo-
lito to feast upon her love, as she tries to make amends for the
rebuke with which she at first had rejected him:
When we invite our best friends to a feast,
'Tis not all sweetmeats that we set before them;
There's somewhat sharp and salt, both to whet appetite
And make 'em taste their wine well; so methinks,
After a friendly, sharp and savoury chiding,
A kiss tastes wondrous well, and full o' the grape;
How think'st thou? does't not?
(II, ii, 198-204)
She describes the secrecy and deception with which they must
conduct their afiair in the same poetic terms :
She that comes once to be a housekeeper
Must not look every day to fare well, sir,
Like a young waiting-gentlewoman in service,
For she feeds commonly as her lady does,
Thomas Middkton 151
No good bit passes her but she gets a taste on't;
But when she comes to keep house for herself,
She's glad of some choice cates then once a-week,
Or twice at most, and glad if she can get 'em;
So must affection learn to fare with thankfulness.
(n, i, 217-25)
The imagery of these lines makes it impossible for the audience to
see the relation of Isabella and Hippolito with any romantic
colouring. These lovers do not really decline in moral stature;
they are corrupt from the very beginning. They merely become
aware of their own corruption as they come to suffer the inevitable
tragic consequences.
Except for the role of livia in both, the main plot and the sub-
plot are kept apart until the beginning of the third act. It is
significant that they are brought together at a feast at Livia's
house. Here the Duke displays Bianca to the world as his concu-
bine, and here the match of Isabella to the Ward is concluded,
while in the ironic asides of Leantio and Hippolito the parallel
between the two plots is made clear to the audience. It is fitting
also that the final climactic scene, with the self-destruction of all
the major participants in the formal ritual of a masque, should
take place also at a feast, this time in the palace of the Duke. This
final scene is utterly without logic in terms of human probability,
but the moral choices of which it is the inevitable result have been
equally in defiance of logic. The play is unified not in terms of the
logic of event or the consistency of character - although there are
few figures in Jacobean drama who exhibit the illusion of reality
so fully as Leantio and Bknca - but in terms of the larger theme
which governs the total play. The final scene is a climactic explo-
sion which the audience experiences as the inevitable result of the
moral ambiguities in which the characters have engaged, and of the
passions of jealousy, hatred and revenge which these inevitably
have engendered. Death is the inevitable end, and the audience is
conditioned for the final destruction by the imagery of light and
darkness which begins to intrude into the last two acts. In the
rapidly moving action of the theatre, the audience, conditioned
by the poetry of the lines, does not ask questions of logical
probability.
i5 2 Jacobean Tragedy
It does no justice to Middleton's art to call him, as T. S. Eliot
has done, 1 an author with c no point of view* whose greatness
consists only in the gripping realism of his characterization and of
certain scenes. Of his realism there can be no doubt, but he is also
a highly moralistic artist who could skilfully pattern his action in
terms of a central theme. His scenes are often ritualistic and sym-
bolic, and his poetic language is carefully chosen as the instrument
by which the parts of his play are related to one another. Women
Eeware Women* like The Changeling* is a unified work of art governed
by a moral point of view to which all of the parts contribute.
1 Sdected Essays 3 p. 162.
CHAPTER SEVEN
John Ford
In a widely influential essay written some half century ago,
Stuart P. Sherman set the pattern which has shaped most
subsequent criticism of John Ford. 1 Sherman called Ford
a 'decadent* dramatist., the last writer of tragedy in tragedy's
greatest age, whose plays came as a sterile anti-climax to the great
achievements of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Webster. He saw
Ford as the romantic apostle of illicit love who could glorify even
incest for the delight of an effete upper class audience, sated with
the ordinary fare of a drama whose novelty had long been ex-
hausted. Ford for Sherman stood for moral anarchy; interested
only in shocking the moral sense of his audience he made sin
appear beautiful and thus created a kind of problem play which
implicitly denied all moral order.
Sherman's views have been subject to some questioning in
recent years, 2 but Ford is still generally regarded as one who, if
not immoral himself, deliberately avoided the great moral issues
of his age. He has been called a psychologist interested only in the
complexities of individual behaviour, *in any situation that
revealed character, normal as well as abnormal, and in characters
conventionally moral or immoral/ 3 One writer sees Ford's
1 Torde's Contribution to the Decadence of the Drama/ in John FordesDramatiscbe
Werke, ed. W". Bang, Materialm *&tr Rwde des alterm Englischen Dramas, XXHI
(Louvain, 1908).
2 See M. E. Prior, T&t 'Language of Tragedy, p. 145. H. J. Oliver, The Problem of John
Ford (Melbourne, 1955), goes to the opposite extreme in seeing Ford as a champion
of the conventional moral order. Other attempts to find a conventional morality in
Ford's plays include G. H. Blayney, 'Convention, Plot and Structure in "The
Broken Heart"/ MP, LVI (1958), 1-9; Cyrus Hoy, 'Ignorance in Knowledge:
Marlowe's Faustus and Ford's Giovanni,' MP, LVH (i9&o)> i45~54 and very
notably, Ornstein, The Moral Vision, pp. 200-1, who writes that Ford 'presents the
rare individual instance that proves conventional moral generalizations* (p. 212).
3 M. Joan Sargeaunt, John Ford (Oxford, 1935), p. 140- See also Una M. Eilis-
Fermor, The Jacobean Drama* pp. 225-46.
153
1 34 Jacobean Tragedy
characters primarily as clinical case-studies based upon Burton's
Anatomy of Melancholy, and calls Ford a scientific determinist who
'removes human activity from the realm of ethical choice, and
anticipating the exponents of modern thought, looks at life with
amoral eyes'. 1 T. S. Eliot has called Ford a dramatist without
purpose and y Tis Pity a failure because it does not 'dramatize an
action or struggle for harmony in the soul of the poet 9 , 2 and
Clifford Leech offers no explanation in moral terms for the suffer-
ing which Ford's characters have learned to accept with stoic
dignity and without question in a world in which Vicissitude has
become irrelevant'. 3
I would suggest that Ford struggled as fully as his predecessors
had struggled with the problem of man's position in the universe.
He is, in fact, among the most obvious of writers in his moral
concern, but his moral position is more subtle than his critics
usually have been willing to allow. Ford does not hold up incest
or illicit love for the admiration of his audience; he is not a
champion of moral anarchy, but it is nevertheless true that he
arouses a pity for the incestuous lovers of * Tis Pity such as Middle-
ton never does for those of Women Beware Women : this is implicit
in the words of Giovanni before he kills Annabella:
Kiss me; if ever after times should hear
Of our fast-knit affections, though perhaps
The laws of conscience and of civil use
May justly blame us, yet when they but know
Our loves, that love will wipe away that rigour
Which would in other incests be abhorred.
(2380-5)
This is not a defence of incest, but it is a plea for sympathy for
the lovers on the basis of a natural human feeling which we can
1 G. F. Sensabaugh, The Tragic Muse of John Ford (Palo Alto, Calif., 1944), p. 70.
On the influence of Burton, see also S. Blaine Ewing, ~Burtonian Melancholy in the
Plays of John Ford (Princeton, 1940).
* Selected Essays^ p. 196. Cf. also M. C Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions, pp. 250-
261, who sees Ford as a mere imitator of Ms predecessors, writing with no realunder-
lying purpose.
*]obn Ford and the Drama of bis Time (London, 1957), particularly p. 74. Robert
Davril, in the most comprehensive of recent works on Ford, Le Drome de John Ford
(Paris, 1954) sees in the plays also a stoic acceptance of suffering in a world which
can no longer accept traditional values.
John Ford 155
understand, and it Is an exposure of the ordinary limitations of
"the laws of conscience and of civil use*. What sets Ford apart
from Ms contemporaries is not a disregard for moral issues, but
an inability to lead Ms audience to a full resolution of the moral
problems wMch he poses. His are the tragedies of paradox, pro-
ducts of a sceptical age wMch can no longer accept without ques-
tion the doctrine of a human law reflecting the will of God in a
perfectly reasonable and harmonious universe,, such as Richard
Hooker had expressed it in some half century before. We cannot
find in Ford's tragedies the kind of moral certainty we may find
in Shakespeare, and it is tMs fact wMch reveals John Ford as
among the most pessimistic tragedians of Ms age. He draws for us
the tragic plight of humanity aware always of evil but unable to
find good, forced to live in a world where moral certainty seems
impossible, and able to escape destruction only by blind con-
formity to principles wMch oppose man's reason and Ms most
basic human feelings. The tragedy of Ford's heroes and heroines
is in their inability to find a satisfactory alternative to sin. They
can only die with courage and dignity.
Although Ford appears to have been writing for the stage as
early as 1621 when he shared in the composition of The Witch of
Edmonton, Ms particular contribution to English tragedy may be
summed up by four plays of the following decade. 9 Tis Pity Shis
A Whore,, Love's Sacrifice and The Broken Heart were all published
in 1633, and Per kin Warbeck followed in 1634. It has usually been
assumed that Tr Pity was the earliest of these plays, largely on
the basis of Ford's reference to the play in Ms dedication to
the Earl of Peterborough as 'These first fruits of my leisure*. Such
an assumption, however, is hardly warranted, for Ford's state-
ment is, to say the least, extremely ambiguous. 1 We have no real
evidence as to either the dates of Ford's four masterpieces or the
order of their composition. I do believe, however, that the play
in wMch Ford's particular tragic position most dearly and force-
fully emerges is *Tis Pity She's A Whore, and I would tend to
regard tMs play as the culmination of a movement begun in
The Broken Heart and continued in Love's Sacrifice. As a Mstory
1 See G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, HI, 43^-7> 44-*
462-4, for the most thorough survey of the chronology problems.
156 Jacobean Tragedy
play, PerMn Warbeck stands somewhat apart from the others, but
if I were fotced to hazard a time of composition, I would place it
immediately after 9 Tis Pity Shis A Whore.
ii
There is a unity of tone in The Broken Heart and what Professor
Ellis-Fermor has called a quality of stillness. 1 Although the play
is full of suffering, violence and death, we do not feel the turbu-
lence of passion; there is a calm about the action, emphasized
most strongly in the dignified and studied death of Calantha at the
end, and we seem to see the characters as figures in a dream. In
this unique quality the play's greatness lies, for in spite of its
somewhat overburdened plot, it is a unified aesthetic whole. But
in this quality is also the play's weakness as tragedy, for it induces
a sense of detachment which makes it difficult for us to feel the
vitality and significance of the moral issues the play poses. The
influence of Beaumont and Fletcher is strong - it is natural that
Ford should have begun by imitating the dominant tragic mode
of his day - and it lends a note of artificiality which renders The
Broken Heart a far less moving work than *Tis Pity y where Ford
seems to have broken entirely from the Beaumont and Fletcher
tradition and found his own tragic style.
The setting of The Broken Heart In a mythical Sparta reminiscent
of Sidney's Arcadia., and the pastoral names of the characters
contribute to the play*s artificiality. The influence of Beaumont
and Fletcher is seen also in that the play's moral issues involve
the same kind of conflict of absolutes we may find in their plays,
with characters incapable of varying from an initially determined
moral stance. 2 But Ford goes beyond his models in that whereas
the conflicts in Beaumont and Fletcher are usually resolved by
artificially contrived action - such as Evadne's killing the king in
The Maid's Tragedy - which avoid the moral issues and leave the
conflicting absolutes undisturbed, Ford's conflicts cannot be
resolved, and if they also are based upon the conflicting demands
1 The Jacobean Drama, pp. 236-7. See also Leech, p. 75 ff.* who sees the movement
In Ford's tragedies towards the moment of stillness, the static scene, which he sees
most perfectly realized in The Broken Heart,
2 See J. F. Danby, Poets on "Forttmfs Hill (London, 1952), pp. 152-206.
John Ford 157
of absolute codes of social behaviour, they are made to reflect
upon the krger problem which Is always Ford's concern: man's
inability to find his place in the universe.
There is no active force of evil in The Broken Heart. All of the
characters are exemplary in their virtue, and they are caught in the
consequences of an act belonging to the past, irrevocable and
beyond human control. The disposal by Ithocles of his sister
Penthea to Bassanes is the root of all the play's difficulties, but
this has taken place long before the opening of the action. Ithocles
himself regrets it as the action of a hasty and irresponsible youth
he has left behind him. He is no longer the man who committed
the act; that man no longer exists. This placing of evil's origins
outside the sphere of the play's action creates a feeling of fatalism
somewhat similar to that of Shakespeare's Borneo and Juliet where
the young lovers step into a world already full of an ancient evil
not of their own creation. There is a difference, however, in that
the world of HLomeo and Juliet affords a means for evil's extinction,
whereas that of The Broken Heart does not. Ford exhibits only the
heroic suffering and the calm and dignified death of men and
women who cannot excape the demands of conflicting moral
commitments.
Of this human plight Penthea is Ford's supreme example. She
seeks only for virtue in terms of an inexorable moral law, but her
very pursuit of virtue involves her more and more deeply in sin;
to be faithful to her husband, Bassanes, she must be a whore to
Orgilus, to whom she has been married in spirit:
For she that's wife to Orgilus, and lives
In known adultery with Bassanes,
Is at best a whore.
(1200-2)
There is no escape but death, and in her death speech she points
to the tragic paradox which has destroyed her:
Oh my wrack'd honour ruin'd by those tyrants,
A cruel brother and a desperate dotage!
There is no peace left for a ravish'd wife
Widow'd by lawless marriage; to all memory,
Penthea's, poor Penthea's name is strumpeted.
158 Jacobean Tragedy
The woman who has pursued honour and made an Ideal of
chastity to the extent of destroying both herself and the man she
truly loves dies a whore in spite of all. To preserve the honour of
her husband in name she must destroy that of her husband in
spirit. Her pursuit of virtue not only negates the normal feelings
of humanity but makes a mockery of virtue itself. She is the slave
of a moral position into which she has been thrust by an action
over which she has had no control.
The fate of Penthea serves as a dramatic symbol of the un-
certainty of all human values. Those absolutes which men most
firmly revere, love, friendship, honour, may be the very sources
of hatred, death and desecration. In Penthea's honesty is her
whoredom; in her fidelity to Bassanes is her betrayal of Orgilus.
There is even the suggestion that the jealousy of Bassanes springs
from what is good, the beauty of Penthea and his reverence for
that beauty:
Bassanes
The man that calls her wife; considers truly
"What heaven of perfections he is lord of,
By thinking fair Penthea his. This thought
Begets a kind of monster love, which love
Is nurse unto a fear so strong and servile,
As brands all dotage with a jealousy.
(148-54)
Thus beauty becomes the source of its own destruction. There is
no certainty of good of any kind in The Broken Heart, only the
conflict of commitments to social codes which at last seem
arbitrary and without meaning.
Such is the force which guides Orgilus. Just as Penthea is
destroyed by her ideal of chastity and fidelity in marriage, Orgilus
is destroyed by his own code of honour. His betrothed has been
taken away from him by Ithocles who thus has become the
destroyer of his honour. Honour demands revenge, but Orgilus
has come to love and admire Ithocles, and vengeance thus demands
the destruction of his friend. That the Euphranea-Prophilus rela-
tionship is not adequately developed is a flaw in the play, but
from what we do have of it, it appears that in having Orgilus
assert control over his sister's marriage, Ford may have intended
John Ford 159
a farther illustration of the paradox implicit in Orgilus's position.
To avenge himself against Ithodes he must prevent the marriage
of his sister to the friend of Ithocles, but in doing so he must
destroy his own sister just as Penthea has been destroyed by her
brother, Ithodes. To avenge the sin against himself he must
become as guilty as the sinner he opposes. That Orgilus at last
gives his consent to his sister's marriage is a weakness in the play,
for it lessens the emphasis upon this moral paradox and it renders
Euphranea and Prophilus somewhat extraneous to the central
action, although Ford may have been trying to use these lovers as
an illustration of what Penthea and Orgilus might have been and
thus to heighten the pathos of their destruction.
The paradox in Orgilus's position is implicit in the means of
Ithocles's death. Orgilus must kill the friend he admires because
honour demands it, but the manner of the killing involves a total
forfeit of honour, for Orgilus stabs Ithocles while he is trapped by
the 'engine' which renders him powerless. In killing Ithocles
basely, Orgilus denies the honour he has been seeking to preserve.
The device of the Engine' is not, as is so often supposed, merely
an instance of Ford's catering to the demands of his audience for
the bizarre and sensational. It is crucial to the theme of the play,
as Orgilus makes clear at the end:
Nor did I use an engine to entrap
His life out of a slavish fear to combat
Youth, strength, or cunning, but for that I durst not
Engage the goodness of a cause on fortune,
By which his name might have outfac'd my vengeance:
Oh Tecrticus, inspir'd with Phoebus' fire,
I call to mind thy augury, 'twas perfect;
Revenge proves its own executioner.
(2489-96)
The demands of vengeance could only be safely met by an abdica-
tion of those very premisses of honour which had dictated ven-
geance in the first place. Honour for Orgilus has been the destroyer
of honour as it has been the destroyer of life; revenge has been
its own executioner.
Tecnicus is used to offer an ideal of honour against which the
actions of the other characters may be measured:
160 Jacobean Tragedy
Honour consists not In a bare opinion
By doing any act that feeds content;
Brave in appearance, 'cause we think it brave:
Such honour comes by accident, not nature
Proceeding from the vices of our passion
Which makes our reason drunk. But real honour
Is the reward of virtue, and acquired
By justice or by valour, which for basis
Hath justice to uphold it. He then fails
In honour, who for lucre or revenge
Commits thefts, murders, treasons and adulteries.
With such like, by intrenching on just laws,
Whose sov'reignty is best preserv'd by justice.
Thus as you see how honour must be grounded
On knowledge, not opinion : For opinion
Relies on probability and accident,
But knowledge on necessity and truth:
I leave thee to the fit consideration
Of what becomes the grace of real honour,
Wishing success to all thy virtuous meanings.
(1070-89)
The philosopher is predicting what OrgHus is to experience: that
an honour based on the uncertain values of the social order
(opinion) must be its own destruction, and that true honour must
be based upon the kind of moral certainty (knowledge) which
none of the characters of The Broken Heart is capable of attain-
ing.
The grim fatalism of the play is emphasized in the plight of
Ithocles, the prisoner of his own past, enslaved in his maturity by
the heat
Of an unsteady youth, a giddy brain,
Green indiscretion, flattery of greatness,
Rawness of judgment, wilfulness in folly,
Thoughts vagrant as the wind, and as uncertain,
Might lead a boy in years to.
(775-80)
Ithocles must suffer the consequences of a course of action which
once set in motion cannot be averted; there is no room in Ford's
world for divine forgiveness or reconciliation. The tragedy of
John Ford 161
Ithocles Is that of man's inability to atone for sin; his penance
is of no avail :
I now repent it;
Now, uncle, now; this 'now*, is now too late:
So provident is folly in sad issue,
That after-wit, like bankrupts* debts, stand tallied
Without all possibilities of payment.
(1646-9)
Ithocles is the prisoner not only of the folly of his own youth,
but also of a rigid social code which makes it impossible for him
to express his love for the princess, Calantha. He mirrors the
general plight of man in his helpless suffering, and he serves as a
model for what to Ford is the only glory of which man is capable,
the calmness and courage with which he dies.
There are four kinds of suffering in The Broken Heart: that of
Orgilus through his own pursuit of vengeance, that of Ithocles
because of his own past action, that of Penthea through another's
act directed against her, and finally that of Calantha as the final
victim of a series of events begun by others and with little relation
to her own concerns. She is a poignant example of that human
suffering which Ford sees in the very nature of things, a suffering
which need not be attributed either to one's own act or to the
malice of any external agent. Calantha's tragedy is utterly without
human cause or reason. Her death scene, so often condemned as
mere theatrical sensationalism, is Ford's most dramatic means of
showing man's only answer to such suffering. Calantha dies with a
studied calm and dignity, performing all of the necessary duties
of life before she goes. We have as the final statement of the play
the inability of man to avoid suffering and death, with his destruc-
tion implicit in moral paradoxes which he cannot resolve. The
only good he can seek is in a calm, fearless recognition of this
human plight, in a stoic devotion to duty and in an acceptance of
death with courage and dignity. In spite of its artificial setting and
its many dramatic flaws, The Broken Heart is the vehicle for a tragic
view of life.
What The Broken Heart kcks is the kind of emotional intensity
which may enable an audience to experience fully the tragic vision
it unfolds. This intensity Ford achieved in y Tis Pity She's A Whore,
162 Jacobean Tragedy
and we may perceive some movement towards it in Love's Sacrifice >
for this play does place its characters in the real world of Renais-
sance Italy, although the moral paradoxes which destroy them
spring from a particular neo-platonic love code as far removed
from reality as the code of honour in The Broken Heart* We do
not have in Love's Sacrifice characters of an inflexible and unalter-
able virtue. Now they are subject to ordinary human passions and
temptations which serve to humanize them and which permit the
audience more fully to participate in their disasters. In the
machinations of D'Avalos and Fiormunda, moreover, Ford makes
his audience aware of evil as it never is in The Broken Heart. If the
Ferrentes sub-plot of Love's Sacrifice has any function, it is to rein-
force for the audience this sense of evil's reality and omni-
presence.
For these reasons I would regard 'Love's Sacrifice as a movement
towards the kind of tragedy Ford realized in 9 Tis Pity She's A
Whore. Otherwise, Love's Sacrifice is the least successful of Ford's
tragedies, for it has none of the excellence which stems from the
very artificiality of The Broken Heart., its particular unity of tone.
The plot is as overloaded as that of The Broken Heart, with such
large elements as the banishment and disguise of Roseilli very
difficult to relate to the rest of the play, and with the comedy of
Mauruccio and Giacopo neither amusing nor in keeping with the
rest. What remains when all of the extraneous matter in Love's
Sacrifice is ignored is the central poignant situation of Bianca who
loves Fernando with a physical passion she cannot overcome in
spite of all the forces of society which demand her fidelity to the
kind and benevolent Duke who has taken her without dowry to
be his duchess; while Fernando is torn between his own physical
passion for Bianca and his friendship for the Duke. We approach
the theme of 'Tis Pity She's A Whore in this play, for Love's
Sacrifice concentrates also upon the conflict between man's obedi-
ence to his own human impulses and his need to conform to a
social order which runs counter to them. Man is a slave both of
his own physical being and of the society into which he is born;
1 Peter Ure, 'Cult and Initiates in Love's Sacrifice/ MLQ, XI (1951), 298-306,
sees the tragedy as that of Bianca, the would-be adulcress whose physical nature
makes her incapable of living up to a neo-platonic code of love, as Fernando does.
John Ford 163
over neither has he had any control. He Is destroyed by their
conflicting demands, and he has no escape other than in the
courage of his death.
in
When we turn to *Tis Pity She's A Whon y we leave the dream
world of Beaumont and Fletcher with its artificial standards of
virtue and its elaborate social codes. We enter the world of
Webster and Marston, Renaissance Italy, full of Intrigue and of an
evil which is as pervasive as it is real. In 'Hr Pity Ford poses the
moral paradoxes of the earlier plays in more realistic terms, in
a setting we can experience as true, and in characters with whom
we can emotionally Identify ourselves. As in the other plays,
death is the only resolution to the moral conflicts of *Tis Pity\
no real ideal of virtue is possible for man. But the Impossibility of
good makes all the more striking the reality of evil which in this
play Ford displays more fully than in any other of his plays.
Giovanni and Annabella are transgressors; their sins are
destructive both of society and human life. The bleeding heart on
Giovanni's dagger is a poignant symbol of the desecration of life
to which their conduct must lead. For their sins they suffer and
they die, but while Ford shows us the fruits of such transgression,
he does not defend the moral order against which they transgress.
By the use of his carefully linked sub-plots Ford shows the woeful
inadequacy of the very human and divine institutions by which
Giovanni and Annabella are condemned and destroyed. The
peculiar tension of 9 Tis Pity springs from Ford's inability to offer
any real alternative to sin. The final statement of the play is that
man must conform to a moral order whose inadequacy he always
knows, for the only escape from moral uncertainty lies in desecra-
tion and death. That such uncertainty is the necessary condition of
man is established in the opening lines of the play:
Dispute no more in this, for know (young man)
These are no school-points; nice philosophy
May tolerate unlikely arguments,
But Heaven admits no jest; wits that presum'd
On "wit too much, by striving how to prove
There was no God, with foolish grounds of art,
164 Jacobean Tragedy
Discovered first the nearest way to hell;
And filled the world with devilish atheism:
Such questions, youth, are fond; for better 'tis
To bless the sun, than reason why it shines.
(55-65)
The Friar draws a distinction between rational philosophy and
revealed religion; lie urges a blind acceptance in spite of reason. 1
Accept without question, the Friar urges, while the action displays
the sordidness of what must be accepted. The tragedy of Giovanni
is that he cannot accept blindly, and in the quest for certainty lies
inevitable destruction. Giovanni is the philosopher,
that miracle of wit
Who once within these three months wert esteem'd
A wonder of thine age throughout Bononia?
How did the university applaud
Thy government, behaviour, learning, speech,
Sweetness, and all that could make up a man.
(105-10)
He is man in his highest state of excellence, reflected in the beauty
of his physical form, man the seeker after truth, and it is his very
need to know which is his destruction. ' *Tis not I know, / My
lust; but 'tis my fate that leads me on' (308-9), he says in an
important soliloquy. This fate which destroys him is in his very
nature as a sentient and intelligent man.
The sub-plots are related to one another and controlled by the
governing theme of the play in that each one is designed to make
clear some aspect of the moral order which Giovanni cannot
blindly accept. The Cardinal is needed to pass religion's judgment
upon Giovanni at the end, but the corruption of this very religion
is at the same time made apparent:
And all the gold and jewels, or whatsoever,
Confiscate by the canons of the church,
We seize upon to the Pope's proper use.
(2588-90)
1 Sargeaunt, John Ford, pp. 124-5, holds that this blind acceptance in defiance of
formal philosophy, *in spite of Thomas Aquinas, accords with much of the theology
of the Medieval church/ Miss Sargeaunt, however, finds the Friar an 'enigma',
entirely inconsistent in his religious position: *When he gives his blessing to the
marriage feast one feels that he must be either a complete knave or a complete fool*
(p. 126). I would regard the Friar's confused religious position as part of Ford's
deliberate purpose, his means of showing religion's inadequacy.
John Ford 165
It had been made clear earlier by Ms protection of the murderer
Grimaldi and by the moral equivocation of Friar Bonaventura.
The institutions of courtship and marriage and society's code of
honour are represented by Soranzo, with the Hippolita sub-plot
to throw them into relief. Two aspects of justice are displayed :
the corruption of divine law in the exoneration of Grimaldi, and
the painful futility of earthly vengeance in the intrigues of
Richardetto. The ideals of true service and loyalty are rendered
sordid by Vasques and Putana. The fool, Bergetto and his man
are used to throw these themes into sharper focus. His courtship
of Annabella makes ludicrous the role of Florio in the disposition
of his daughter according to the customs of the age. The pathos of
Bergetto's death makes more poignant the injustice of the Car-
dinal, and the simple fidelity of Poggio mourning over the body
of his master throws the brutal fidelity of Vasques into clearer
light. If we admire Giovanni it is not because Ford would glorify
incest, but because of the sordidness of the established moral
order to which he stands opposed.
The Friar's opening words, as we have seen, affirm the inscru-
tability of divine law: Tor better 'tis / To bless the sun, than
reason why it shines/ This is the staple of his religion and when
Giovanni asserts the normal condition of nature (82-92) as justi-
fication for incest, theFriarcannotanswerhis argument; he can only
counsel an unquestioning subjection to the ritual of the church:
then fall down
On both thy knees, and grovel on the ground:
Cry to thy heart, wash every word thou utter'st
In tears, and if 't be possible, of blood:
Beg heaven to cleanse the leprosy of lust
That rots thy soul, acknowledge what thou art,
A wretch, a worm, a nothing: weep, sigh, pray
Three times a day, and three times every night:
For seven days' space do this.
(129-37)
The Friar's religion involves a debasement of man, a denial of his
intellectual capacity, and this Giovanni accepts :
All this FU do, to free me from the rod
Of vengeance, else I'll swear my fate's my God.
(142-3)
1 66 Jacobean Tragedy
He goes through all of the formal ritual of religion, but it offers
him no release, for he cannot deny his own nature as a thinking
man as such religion demands; he must have answers to his ques-
tions which the Friar and his religion cannot give.
Ford creates an antithesis between a blind acceptance of the
existing religious and moral order on the one hand, and on the
other an acceptance of fate as man's controlling principle. For
Giovanni to acknowledge the primacy of fate rather than divine
kw is for him to see himself as governed not by God but by those
forces which are inherent in his nature as a man. In the very
lines with which he recounts the futility of his attempt to follow
the Friar's advice, Giovanni avows his acceptance of fate, which
is to acknowledge his human condition with all its inevitable
consequences :
Lost, I am lost: my fates have doomed my death:
The more I strive, I love, the more I love,
The less I hope: I see my rain, certain.
What judgment, or endeavours could apply
To my incurable and restless wounds,
I throughly have examined, but in vain:
that it were not in religion sin,
To make our love a god, and worship it.
1 have even wearied heaven with prayers, dried up
The spring of my continual tears, even starved
My veins with daily fasts: what wit or art
Could counsel, I have practised; but alas
I find all these but dreams and old men's tales
To fright unsteady youth; I'm still the same,
Or I must speak, or burst; 'tis not I know
My lust; but 'tis my fate that leads me on.
(294-309)
When he says to Annabella, *I have asked counsel of the holy
church, / Who tells me I may love you' (403-4), Giovanni is not
practising a cheap duplicity. He is saying to the audience that
although he has followed the ritual of the church it has offered
him no help; in the inability of religion to convince him of evil,
he finds a justification for evil.
John Ford 167
Giovanni constructs Ms defence of incest out of the very
scholastic principles on which the Friar's religion is based:
What I have done, I'll prove both fit and good.
It is a principle (which you have taught
When I was yet your schokr) that the frame
And composition of the mind doth follow
The frame and composition of the body:
So where the body's furniture is beauty,
The mind's must needs be virtue: which allowed,
Virtue itself is reason but refined,
And love the quintessence of that; this proves
My sister's beauty being rarely fair,
Is rarely virtuous; chiefly in her love,
And chiefly in that love, her love to me.
If hers to me, then so is mine to her;
Since in like causes are effects alike.
(918-31)
This moral casuistry does not represent Ford's point of view. It
is a specious parody of scholastic logic designed to emphasize the
shallowness of the very moral postulates of the Friar's religion.
Giovanni has learned from his religious teacher only how to
justify in religion's own terms the shocking perversion of nature
which is incest. To this the Friar has no rational answer. He can
only again assert that religion must prevail in spite of human
reason:
O ignorance in knowledge, long ago,
How often have I warn'd thee this before?
Indeed if we were sure there were no deity,
Nor heaven nor hell, then to be led alone,
By nature's light (as were philosophers
Of elder times) might instance some defence.
But 'tis not so; then madman, thou wilt find,
That nature is in heaven's positions blind.
When the Friar urges Giovanni to 'Persuade thy sister to some
marriage' (945), his reply is an indictment of the moral system
from which this suggestion springs: 'Marriage? Why that's to
damn her; that's to prove / Her greedy of variety of lust' (946-7).
The retort is shocking, but it states the logical corollary to the
1 68 Jacobean Tragedy
Friar's position, and its truth is borne out by the consequence of
Annabella's acceptance of the Friar's religion in a later scene
designed perhaps to contrast with her brother's rejection of it.
When Annabella comes before him wringing her hands and
weeping in her abject penitence, the Friar draws for her a picture
of hell In conventional terms :
There Is a place
(List daughter) In a black and hollow vault,
Where day is never seen; there shines no sun,
But flaming horror of consuming fires;
A lightless sulphur, choked with smoky fogs
Of an infected darkness; in this place
Dwell many thousand, thousand sundry sorts
Of never dying deaths ; there damned souls
Roar without pity, there are gluttons fed
With toads and adders; there is burning oil
Poured down the drunkard's throat, the usurer
Is forced to sup whole draughts of molten gold;
There is the murderer forever stabbed,
Yet can he never die; there lies the wanton
On racks of burning steel, whiles in his soul
He feels the torment of his raging lust.
(1406-21)
Annabella in her terror calls 'Mercy, oh mercy' (1422), and when
she asks, Is there no way left to redeem my miseries?' (1432),
the Friar offers the best his religion can afford:
There is, despair not; heaven is merciful,
And offers grace even now; 'tis thus agreed,
First, for your honour's safety that you marry
The Lord Soranzo, next, to save your soul,
Leave off this life, and henceforth live to him.
To earn the grace of heaven she must cheat Soran2o; to save her
own honour she must commit the greatest crime against Sor-
anzo's honour of which her society could conceive. The Friar's
counsel is, as Giovanni has suggested, that she heap sin upon sin,
and we know that when she follows it her tragedy will only be
hastened and intensified. The Friar's religion only offers moral
John Ford 169
equivocation whose shallowness is immediately apparent. Gio-
vanni scorns religion while Annabella seeks it; to neither can it
afford any solution.
Ford takes special pains to depict the society which condemns
the incestuous lovers, with its code of honour and its standards of
nobility, as sordid and self-destructive. 'I am a Roman and a
gentleman, one that have got / Mine honour with expense of
blood' (159-60), cries Grimaldi when first he appears upon the
scene. c You are a lying coward and a fool' (101), replies Vasques
as he beats him down, and in this is Ford's commentary upon the
social values for which Grimaldi stands. He is never mentioned
without some reference to his high connections and his noble
blood, but his nobility can only express itself in the sordid plot of
Richardetto, and his sole accomplishment is to stab a pathetic fool.
Yet Grimaldi's is the kind of honour which the world respects
and which merits the special protection of cardinal and pope.
The shallowness of worldly honour and of the moral sanctions
of marriage is made even more clear in the meeting between
Soran2o and Hippolita. He has seduced her with promises of
marriage, and he has been instrumental in the supposed death of
her husband, but now he rejects her claims upon him with a moral
sophistry blatant in its hypocrisy:
The vows I made, if you remember well,
Were wicked and unlawful; 'twere more sin
To keep them than to break them; as for me,
I cannot mask my penitence; think thou
How much thou hast digressed from honest shame,
In bringing of a gentleman to death
Who was thy husband.
(703-9)
Even Vasques is moved to comment, *This part has been scurvily
played' (719), but Soranzo's moral position is that of the very
world which condemns Giovanni and Annabella, for there is no
secret of Soranzo's past relation to Hippolita, and he is accepted
by all as the image of nobility most fit to be AnnabeUa's husband.
The tragedy which falls upon Soranzo is a product of the very
moral code for which he stands, for as Annabella tells him, f 'twas
not for love / I chose you, but for honour' (1791-2). The fruits
170 Jacobean Tragedy
of the very honour which moved her to betray him are made
evident as Soranzo drags his wife by the hair across the stage,
crying in his torment only for vengeance. His kind of love, with
all of the sanctions of honour, religion and social custom, can
only express itself in the tormented fury of the cuckold. We see
the evil of Giovanni's violation of moral law, but we see also the
evil implicit in Soranzo's conformity to it.
In the idea of a harmonious cosmological order which Eliza-
bethans carried over from the Middle Ages, the true servant had
an honoured place. In his loyalty to his master he reflected his
master's loyalty to his king and his king's loyalty to God. A chain
of trust and obedience extended from highest to lowest, cemented
by the love of God for man which was reflected in the king's
concern for the welfare of his people and the master's care of his
servant, who repaid him with true service, loyalty and devotion.
Upon this system Ford's Vasques is an ironic reflection. Of his
absolute loyalty to Soranzo there is never any question, but this
very loyalty is a destructive force in the social order. It fosters the
plot of Hippolita and her consequent death, as it is to destroy
Giovanni and Annabella and even Soranzo himself. This carnage
is the fruit of his loyalty, and in it Vasques exults : 'I have paid
the duty to the son, which I have vowed to the father* (255 1-2).
There is no place for remorse in the system he represents : 'what
I have done was duty, and I tepent nothing, but that the loss of
my life had not ransom'd his' (25 59-60).
The very loyalty of Vasques is a sordid commentary upon a
social order and a moral system dear to the Elizabethans, but
which Ford could not accept in the same unquestioning spirit.
T/J- Pity She's A Whore is a product of Caroline scepticism. It
opposes to accepted standards of religion and morality the crime
of incest, not because Ford approves of this, but because it is
probably the most shocking challenge to traditional values of
which he can conceive. It is a dramatic symbol of the moral
uncertainty which is the theme of the play. Ford is saying that
this moral uncertainty which is the fate of thinking man may also
be the source of his destruction. Man has no alternative but to
accept, difficult as such acceptance may be. The way of Giovanni
is evil, but that of Soranzo is not good. Man cannot fully embrace
John Ford 171
the one position or the other, and in this dilemma is the essence of
his tragedy.
Giovanni when he first encounters Annabella in the play is a
'blessed shape / Of some celestial creature' (277-8), and Annabella
is the paragon of female beauty, the perfection of their bodies
reflecting that of their souls. Ford uses all of his poetic powers to
display them as superior in mind and body to the sordid world
which must condemn and destroy them. By their very magnificence
their tragedy is heightened; the Friar laments that c one so excellent
should give those parts / All to a second death' (965-6). As they
defy the moral order which they cannot bring themselves to
accept they both disintegrate and become hardened in vice. They
often have been compared to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
The crucial difference is that while Shakespeare's young lovers
grow to maturity through pain and suffering, Ford's lovers
decline from an initial magnificence to the sordid desecration of
life implicit in Giovanni's entrance with the bleeding heart upon
his sword. But Ford's lovers merit no less of pity and admiration
than Shakespeare's, for their tragedy is an heroic opposition of
their own humanity to a world which they cannot accept. The
price of such opposition must be sin and death, but such self-
destruction is not without its heroic quality.
That Giovanni's love for his sister is an assertion of primitive
nature in opposition to human and divine law is made clear at
the beginning :
Shall a peevish sound,
A customary form, from man to man,
Of brother and of sister, be a bar
'Twixt my perpetual happiness and me?
Say that we had one father, say one womb,
(Curse to my joys) gave both us life, and birth;
Are we not therefore each to other bound
So much the more by Nature; by the links
Of blood, of reason; Nay if you will hav't,
Even of religion, to be ever one,
One soul, one flesh, one love, one heart, one all?
(82-92)
Religion, he is arguing, can have no validity when it runs counter
172 Jacobean Tragedy
to the claims of nature. He is led, as the Friar exclaims, 'By nature's
light as were philosophers / Of elder times/ (936-7).
But the irony is that human reason guided only by the light of
nature can lead only to self-deception and error. This is evident
in the smug sense of victory with which Giovanni in the final act
congratulates himself upon his triumph over the world's morality :
Busy opinion is an idle fool
That as a school-rod keeps a child in awe,
Frights the unexperienced temper of the mind:
So did it rne; who ere my precious sister
Was married, thought all taste of love would die
In such a contract; but I find no change
Of pleasure in this formal law of sports.
She is still one to me, and every kiss
As sweet and as delicious as the first
I reaped, when yet the privilege of youth
Entitled her a virgin: O the glory
Of two united hearts like hers and mine!
Let poring bookmen dream of other worlds,
My world and all of happiness is here,
And I*ld not change it for the best to come.
A life of pleasure is Elysium.
(2145-60)
This is the height of his delusion, rudely to be shattered by the
Friar who enters with the news that his incest has been discovered.
He has not, after all, been master of the world, but entirely subject
to it. His felicity has rested upon a crude deception and subterfuge,
subject to destruction by the weak foolishness of a Putana and the
perverted loyalty of a Vasques. It can only issue now in his com-
plete degeneration as he murders Annabella, the madness of the
act punctuated by her dying words : 'Brother unkind, unkind
mercy great heaven' (2410).
Living by the light of nature alone, Giovanni has become the
destroyer of life and of all human value. Of this the heart upon
his sword is a dramatic symbol :
Be not amaz'd; if your misgiving hearts
Shrink at an idle sight; what bloodless fear
Of coward passion would have seized your senses,
John Ford 173
Had you beheld the rape of life and beauty
Which I have acted?
(2444-8)
He boasts of his final desecration, while he tells the audience in
the imagery of his lines that it has been a perversion of nature:
'The glory of my deed / Darkened the mid-day sun, made noon
as night 5 (2450-1). He who would live by nature comes at last to
be the destroyer of nature, as he has destroyed his family, 'gilt
in the blood / Of a fair sister and a hapless father' (2504-5). As
he courts his own destruction, he dying acknowledges the feeble-
ness of the human condition: 'Feeble arms / Have you so soon
lost strength' (2521-2).
Ford sees mankind poised, like a morality play hero, between
divine law and a nature which seems in opposition to it; but unlike
the morality hero he is incapable of choice. If human reason will
not allow him easily to accept divine law, and if the moral order
is full of a manifest corruption, it is equally true that to live by
nature's light as Giovanni does is to become the destroyer of life.
Upon this dilemma rests the moral vision of *Tis Pity She's A.
Whore, and it gives meaning to the title. Annabella is a whore,
but her very human attributes have led her to be one, and in our
pity for her we lament the moral dilemma implicit in the human
condition. 'The gravity of the subject may easily excuse the light-
ness of the title : otherwise, I had been a severe judge against mine
own guilt/ Ford wrote in his dedicatory epistle to the Earl of
Peterborough, with an obvious pun upon lightness. The title is
more meaningful and more appropriate to the gravity of the
subject than one might immediately suppose.
In man's inability to escape moral uncertainty lies his tragedy.
If he would live in the world he has no alternative but a blind
conformity. If Ford suggests any escape from the problem he
poses it may be in Bichardetto's speech to Philotis:
My counsel is that you should free your years
From hazard of these woes, by flying hence
To .fair Cremona, there to vow your soul
To holiness a holy votaress,
Leave me to see the end of these extremes.
174 Jacobean Tragedy
All human worldly courses are uneven,
No life is blessed but the way to heaven.
(1750-6)
Man may ignore the world and place his hope in the prospect of
heaven. If he would live in the world he has no alternative but a
blind acceptance of the moral order which runs counter to his
highest human attribute, his searching, rational spirit.
IV
If the movement of Ford's tragedies is from an Arcadian setting
to a more and more realistic one, "PerJdn Warbeck would appear to
be the final stage of his development, for now he casts his moral
paradox against the background of his own country and shows it
destroying the lives of characters whose actuality the audience
cannot doubt. In placing the history of England upon his stage,
Ford was following a well-worn dramatic tradition, although one
which had been moribund for a quarter of a century; 1 in reviving
the history play he wrote with the examples of Marlowe and
Shakespeare to guide him. Like them he was interested in the
political implications of his story, and Perkin Warbeck is an
exemplary lesson in the ethics of kingship. Henry VII is set up as a
model ruler, with James IV and Perkin Warbeck to emphasize
his perfection. What gives this play its particular effect, however,
is that the audience is never allowed to embrace the virtue of
King Henry with any sense of affirmation; it seems unimportant
and unconvincing in the light of Perkin's tragedy.
What is paradoxical about Perkin Warbeck is that this most
realistic in setting of all Ford's plays is the play in which Ford
most effectively questions the very nature of reality. In answer
to the ancient question of what makes a king, the play offers the
efficient ruler, Henry VII, but it offers also Perkin Warbeck, the
impostor with all the outward signs of royalty, who has come
himself to believe in his own royalty and who dies a martyr to his
own belief. Towards the pretender is directed all of the audience's
sympathy, with the loving fidelity of Lady Katherine Gordon to
make his tragedy more poignant The world's justice is triumphant
1 1 have treated Perkin Warbeck as a history play, stressing its political implications
in The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, 1957), pp. 299-305.
John Ford 175
at the end, with a restitution of peace and harmony in England,
but it has been purchased by the betrayal of Perkin by the Scottish
king, and when Perkin goes to the gallows convinced of his own
truth the audience is left in a state of doubt and ambivalence.
It cannot really choose between the values of Perkin and King
Henry; it is unable finally to distinguish appearance from reality.
Perkin Warbeck more than anything else is a play about the
impossibility of belief, a motif emphasized in the treachery to his
king of Sir William Stanley with which the play opens and
repeated in the treachery of Sir Robert Clifford to his friend.
Where can one place his faith in a world in which those a man
loves most may turn against him? Perkin is a liar, but in his
fidelity to his own pretence he attains a glory greater than that of
any other in the play. The alternative of truth is exhibited in the
sordid role of Lambert Simnel. We leave Perkin Warbeck with the
feeling that reality may, after all, be only what we think it is, that
there is no truth of which man can be certain, and that we may
attain some victory by a heroic persistence even in a false pretence.
Perkin Warbeck cannot answer the questions which it poses. As
surely as 9 Tis Pity She's A Whore, it is the tragedy of man's in-
ability to find certainty, to understand reality or to grasp his own
position in the universe. This is why Perkin Warbeck is entirely
characteristic of Ford, and not, as is sometimes argued, something
alien to his ordinary dramatic mode. It is a perfect expression of
the Caroline scepticism for which Ford stands, the product of a
search for moral order which can only resolve itself in paradox,
and never in the kind of certainty attained by those Elizabethan
forebears whom Ford so assiduously imitated and in whose com-
pany he longed in vain to be.
Index
Adams, H. H., 52, 75, 80
Allen, D.C, 5,7
Aquinas, Thomas, 8, 73, 164
Archer, Edward, 72
Archer, William, 75
Augustine, St., 73
Bacon, Sir Francis, 2, 6, 9, 36
Baker, Herschel, 2, 73
Bald, R. C, 124
Barker, R. H., 72, 123, 139
Bawcutt, N. W., 123
Beaumont, Francis, i, 12, 18, 163 ;
Maid's Tragedy, 15-17, 156
Bentley, G. E., 124, 155
Blayney, G. H., 1 5 3
Bogard, Travis, 98, 109, in
Bradbrook, M. C, n, 60, 75, 98,
123,127, 135,136, 140,154
Brooke, Rupert, 1 1 1
Brown, J. R., 99
Browne, Sir Thomas, Urn-Buna/,
6
Bruno, Giordano, 4
Burton, Robert, Anatomy of
Melancholy, 5, 154
Bush, Douglas, 2
Calvinism, 9, 74-75* 99> I2 5> i3 6
Carr, Robert, 35, 36, 38
Castelvetro, Lodovico, 14
Cecil, Lord David, 99, no
Chapman, George, 7, 9, 11, 17,
19-49* 5> 5i 73* 9 8 > I00 >
Bjrott, 7, 21, 22, 26, 37; Bussj
D*Ambozs, 7, 19, 20, zi, 22,
2J-35> 39' 44, 5; Caesar and
Pompej, 7, 14, 19, 20, 22;
C&zfawf, 7, *9 22 > 35-^P, 81;
ILastward Ho, 37; Gentleman
Usher, 25; JLevenge of "Bussy
D'A-mhois, 7, 19, 20, 22, 24
Charles I, King, 10
Chaucer, Geoffrey, Franklin's
Tale, 54
Coke, Sir Edward, 36, 45
Corneille, Pierre, 14
Craig, Hardin, 2, 30
Danby, J. P., 15, 16, 17, 156
Davril, Robert, 154
Dekker, Thomas, 97
Donne, John, 6, 1 1 3
Edwards, W. R., 99, no
Ekeblad, Inga-Stina, 72, 74
Eliot, T. S., 13-14, 16, 5*> 5*> 53>
75>779 8 > 12 3>i5 2 >*54
Elizabeth, Queen, 19
EUis-Fermor, U. M., 3, 4, 50, 72,
75, 100, 153.156
Empson, William, 123, 129
Ewing, S. B., 154
Ferguson, A. S., 21
Field, Nathan, 15,37
Fletcher, John, i, 12, 18, 163;
Maid's Tragedy, 15-17, 156
177
I 7 8
Index
Ford, John, i, 10, n, 12, 15, 18,
*53-*75; Broken Heart, 5, 155,
156-163; Love's Sacrifice, 155,
162-163; Verfdn Warbeck, 155,
156, 174-175; *Tis Pity Shis a
Whore, 154, 155, 156, 161, 162,
Galileo, 5
Goodman, Godfrey, Fall of Man, 5
Hakewill, George, Apology of the
Power and Providence of God, 5 , 6
Henry, Prince, 37
Heywood, Thomas, i, 16, 50-71,
73, 97, 100, 125; Edward IV,
53,68; English Traveller, 55,58;
If You Know Not Me, 68 ; R/#*
<?/* "Lucrece, 12, 59-71; Woman
Rilled with Kindness, 8-9, 51-5$,
67
Hibbard, G. TL, 123
Higgins,M.H.,2i,74,9i
Holaday, Alan, 59, 60
Hooker, Richard, 4, 100, 155
Howard, Sir Thomas, 20
Hoy, Cyrus, 153
Innocent III, Pope, 73
Jack, Ian, 99, 109
Jacquot, Jean, 19, 36
James I, King, 15, 19, 35, 36, 37,
39
Jenkins, Harold, 72
Jones, R. F., 5
Jonson, Ben, 12, 59; Catiline , 14,
iy,Sejantts, 14, 15
Kyd, Thomas, 12
Laymon, B. J., 99
Leavis, F. R., 99
Leech, Clifford, 21, 91, 98, 154,
i 5 6
Lipsius, Justus, De Constantia, 6
Lisca, Peter, 77
Livy, 60, 64
Lucas, F. L., 98, 99, in
MachiavelH, Niccol6, 4, 102, 145
Machiavel, the, 12, 41, 107, 108,
119
Marlowe, Christopher, 3-5, 153,
174; Dr Faustus, 3, 4-5;
Edward II, 4, Tamburlaine, 4
Marston, John, 12-14, 97, 163;
Antonio 9 s JLevenge, 12, 13; In-
satiate Countess, 13; Malcontent,
13; Sophonisba, 13-14
Massinger, Philip, 15, 17, 18
McCollom, W. G., 21
Middleton, Thomas, n, 12, 50,
72, 97, 123-152; Changeling, 9,
10, 53, 123, 124, 125, 126-157;
139, 142, 146, 152; Hengist,
King of Kent, 124, 125; Women
Beware Women, 9-10, 124, 125,
129,134, 137-152,154
Montaigne, Michel de, 4
Oliphant, E. H. C, 72
Oliver, H.J., 153
Ornstein, Robert, 4, 20, 21, 36,
3 8 > 75>87, 99, 123,153
Ovid, Metamorphoses, 6
Parrott, T. M., 21, 34, 36, 37
Pasquier, Etienne, 36, 37, 42, 47
Peter, John, 73, 76, 83
Price, H. T., 99, 116
Prior, M. E., 20, 52, 75, 116, 153
Lamb, Charles, 5 1
Racine, Jean, 14
Index
Ralegh, Sir Walter, History of the Smith, James, 23, 30
World, 5, 6 Solve, N. D., 36
Rees, Ennis, 20, 21, 26, 33, 36, 38 Spacks, P. M., 56
Rowley, William, 97, 1 3 5 ; Change- Stradling, John, 6
ling, % 10, 53, 123, 124, 126-
137, 139, 142, 146, 152
179
Salingar, L. G., 75, 80
Sargeaunt, M. J., 153, 164
Scaliger, J. C, 14
Schoenbaum, Samuel, 72, 75, 123
Schwartz, Elias, 19, 20, 22
Seneca, 13, 14, 15, 38, 89-91, 97;
Hercules Oetaeus, 34
Sensabaugh, G. F., 154
Shakespeare, William, i, 2, 4, 7*
10, II, 12, 13, 15, 17, 20, 21,
Thorndike, A. EL, 75
Tillyard, K M. W., 2
Tomlinson, T. M., 75
Tourneur, Cyril, 8, 9, n, 12, 17,
*9> 72-pd, 97> 9 8 > I00 > I2 5;
Atheist's Tragedy., 10, 72, 73, 74,
86-96; Revenger's Tragedy, 10,
13. 7*> 73> 75~* 8 9> 9*> 94>
95-96, 104, 112, 113
Townsend, F. L., 5 3
Ure, Peter, 23, 162
2 3> 5 1 * 53-55, 73> 9 8 > I00 > I2 5>
126, 155, 174; Antony and Villiers, George, 36, 41
Cleopatra, 3; Coriolanus, 3, 42-
43; Hamlet, 5, 112, 113; Lear, Webster, John, i, 2, 9, 10, n, 12,
15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 50, 97-122,
153; Duchess of Malfi, 97, 98,
100, 105, 106, 108-122, 124-
125; White Devil, 97-98, 99,
100-108, 109, no, 112, 116,
i, 3, 60, 87, 107, 136; Macbeth,
*> 3> 59? 60-61, 62, 63, 64, 71;
Measure for Measure, 13 ; Othello,
i, 3, 51, 107, 128; R<?/zft?0 rf#^
Juliet, 157, 171; Tempest, 13
Sherman, S. P., 153
Shirley, James, 15, 17, 18, 19, 35,
37; Cardinal, 18
Shore, Jane, 5 3
Sidney, Sir Philip, Arcadia, 156
Smith, H.D., 52
122, 124
Wells, H. W., in
Wieler, J. W.,2i, 36, 38
Williamson, George, 5
Wilson, F. P., 2, n, no
Witch of Edmonton, The, 12, 155
By the Same Author
Patterns in
Shakespearian Tragedy
e . . . comprehensive, confident and
optimistic, tracing Shakespeare's moral
patterns from Titus Adronicus to Coriolanus.'
The Times Literary Supplement
e An important contribution to Shakespeare
criticism. . . . The development of moral
ideas is traced through the plays, stressing
the function of tragedy as a distinctive
mode of knowing. 5
Higher Education Journal
'Probably the most comprehensive general
statement about Shakespeare's tragic writ-
ing since Bradley. 5 John 0* London's
2 is net
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