Chapter 12 - ‘Superfluous Men’ and the Graveyard Politics of The Duchess of Malfi

Summary

No play of the period is more preoccupied with memorial artifice than John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi: especially striking are three episodes involving the Duchess herself. In the opening scene her wooing of Antonio is coloured by oddly disturbing references to ‘a winding sheet’ and to ‘the figure cut in alabaster / Kneels at my husband’s tomb’; while in Act 4, her murder is prefaced by a piece of macabre theatre, when Bosola enters in the guise of an old man, announcing himself a ‘tomb-maker’ whose ‘trade is to flatter the dead’. Advising the Duchess that ‘I am come to make thy tomb’, he proceeds to discourse on the iconographic niceties of ‘fashion in the grave’, before bringing her ‘By degrees to mortification’. But the tomb he promises never appears, becoming instead a conspicuous absence at the centre of the action. Focusing on the haunted graveyard of the Echo scene (5.3), the essay argues that this absence is closely bound up with the outpouring of grief that followed the death of the idolized Protestant hero, Prince Henry, and thus with the dissident politics on which Webster's great tragedy is grounded.