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The Equilibrium of Opposites in the White Devil: A Reinterpretation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
At one point in Webster's The While Devil the Cardinal Monticelso addresses a shocking invitation to the Duke of Florence, the arch-revenger of the play:
Come, come my Lord, untie your foulded thoughts, And let them dangle loose as a bride's haire.
(iv.i.1-2)
As a scene-opener the speech deserves to be thought of as one of Webster's coups de théâtre, for the whole play is of a kind to make the words hyperbolically preposterous. We are, of course, in the chosen realm of Jacobean imagining, that lurid Italy where every thought “Imitates / The suttle fouldings of a Winters snake” (i.ii.345-346) and where brides epitomize hypocrisy:
O the Art,
The modest forme of greatnesse! that do sit Like Brides at wedding dinners, with their looks turn'd
From the least wanton jests, their puling stomacke Sicke of the modesty, when their thoughts are loose …
Even acting of those hot and lustfull sports
Are to ensue about midnight … (iv.iii.145-151)
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- PMLA , Volume 74 , Issue 4-Part1: Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America , September 1959 , pp. 336 - 347
- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1959
References
1 Complete Works of John Webster, ed. F. L. Lucas, 4 vols. (London, 1927), i.
2 The Lion and the Fox (London, 1927).
3 Berkeley, 1950, p. 29.
4 See v.iv.41-42, where Flamineo seems to play on his name.
5 This contrast is suggested by Lucas, i, 98.
6 “The Case of John Webster,” Scrutiny, xvi (1949), 41-42.
7 I cannot accept the important argument too briefly put forward in Clifford Leech's John Webster: A Critical Study (London, 1951), pp. 54-57, that Monticelso, both here and in the trial scene, is a moral agent representing “the ordered life.” Leech ignores Monticelso's vehement espousal of revenge early in the play (n.i.386-389) and his florid advice to Francisco to pursue revenge with patient cunning (iv.i.14-23). In the trial scene, where his complete fairness is alleged, Leech notes that the charge of murder was dropped for lack of evidence but neglects to say that this was done upon the urging of Francisco (iii.ii.189-198). There are, it seems clear, more contradictions in Monticelso's behavior than the single one Leech is willing to allow (p. 56), and strong reasons for one to hesitate before placing him in “the company of the good.”
8 “A Treatie of Humane Learning” (st. 48), Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1945), i, 166.
9 W. B. Yeats, “Lapis Lazuli.” I hope my analysis has served to reveal in Webster's play a remarkable prefiguring of Yeats's discipline of the mask—of which the following passage may act as partial reminder :
I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one's self, something created in a moment and perpetually renewed; in playing a game like that of a child where one loses the infinite pain of self-realization, in a grotesque or solemn painted face put on that one may hide from the terror of judgment (“Anima Hominis,” Essays, New York, 1924, pp. 496-497).
10 With more space at my command I might have strengthened my case by drawing upon The Duchess of Malfi and also by saying more about Webster's 17th-century context. That the Renaissance was experiencing an epoch-making shift from ontology to psychology; that the baroque sensibility, so-called, was absorbed in the shifting planes of reality; and that more than one dramatist was following Shakespeare's lead in exploring the persona in personality—these facts all relate to Webster and ask for amplification.