6 - The Echoing Past: William Dugdale and Early Medieval Warwickshire

Summary

Antonio: I do love these ancient ruins.

We never tread upon them but we set

Our foot upon some reverend history:

And, questionless, here in this open court,

Which now lies naked to the injuries

Of stormy weather, some men lie interred

Loved the church so well, and gave so largely to’t,

They thought it should have canopied their bones

Till doomsday. But all things have their end:

Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men,

Must have like death that we have.

Echo: Like Death that we have.

John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi 5.3.9–19

Ruins speak. These lines set up the Duchess of Malfi's “Echo scene,” in which an uncanny Echo responds to Antonio's and Delio's dialogue as if to warn Antonio from confronting the Duchess's brothers. In the lines before the Echo's first interjection, Antonio regards the ruined church's disintegration as analogous with human death, even to the point of suffering bodily illness before the inevitable end. Antonio's words underscore the physical and conceptional juxtaposition of human remains and the built environment – the overlap between stones and bones. Ruined structures’ dilapidation, like interred bodies, marks the uncanny continuity of the then into the now. What's more, as Antonio learns from Echo, ruins can blur boundaries between not just past and present but living and dead. Andrew Hui states, “while Antonio thinks he is hearing the graves speak back, as if communing with some spectral spirit, in fact he hears only his own echo,” but the scene seems to me more ambiguous. Antonio's comment that the Echo “’tis very like my wife's voice” indicates that Echo is voiced by the actor who played the Duchess; the audience, who knows as Antonio does not that the Duchess has been murdered, hears the “dead” speak. Other critics have certainly interpreted the scene as a ghostly warning to Antonio, one in which the Duchess, although dead, has some limited agency to communicate.