Comparative Drama

Continuity in the Art of Dying: The Duchess of Malfi Bettie Anne Doebler The tilt of Jacobean tragic symbolism towards the melan­ choly undergoes an ironic balancing towards comfort as Webster uses elements from the old ars moriendi tradition to structure the death scenes in Act IV of the Duchess of Malfi.I By 1612 or shortly afterwards when the Duchess was written, Webster employed his inventive dramatic imagination to refurbish the worn garments of the popular ars instruction so that they vir­ tually glitter with poetic paradox. The art of dying well, at the heart of medieval and Renaissance iconography of death, had shifted in the last ten years of the sixteenth century from a major focus on its reassuring tragi-comic ending to an increas­ ing emphasis upon one of the temptations. Literature of the nineties reflects a growing fear of falling victim to the temptation of despair.2 In spite, however, of such a seeming shift towards darkness, many writers, devotional and literary, continued in the first quarter of the seventeenth century to explore paradox­ ical reconciliations of hope and despair within the tragic frame. Webster, known for his interest in death scenes, orchestrates a fearful comfort through the murder of the Duchess by Bosola. Such a macabre tour de force transcends all earlier questions of the Duchess’s guilt or innocence in what Clifford Leech has called the “long ecstasy of pain”3 in Act IV. It is Webster’s genius that he creates this transcendence through an integration of symbolism from the ars tradition with his own poetic voice. The sophistication of Webster’s dramatic poetry does not therefore spring forth miraculously without roots. The symbo­ lism of the ars moriendi in varying degrees of literalism and displacement is integral, for example, to many earlier plays of Shakespeare. The conscience scene the night before the death 203 204 Comparative Drama of Richard III on the eve of the battle of Bosworth Field only slightly displaces the old temptation to despair.4 In the original woodcut, the demon parades before the eyes of the moriens all the past sins of a lifetime. In keeping with the popular associa­ tion of despair with suicide, the demon also offers a knife, and the Latin banderolle translates “Kill thyself.” In Shakespeare the ghosts of those Richard has murdered become an analogous parade of sins, almost liturgically ordered in their refrain: “Despair and die.”5 In the major tragedies the use of the ars is less explicitly developed, but Othello, Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet incorporate many assumptions and images that are (if not directly from the main line of the tradition) from the rich storehouse of death iconography that formed part of the ela­ borate ritual by which European persons of that age distanced the terrifying fear of spiritual death. It is no surprise that these and other death scenes of Eliza­ bethan and Jacobean tragedy have rich associations with the old ars tradition.6 The particular iconography of death with which I am concerned in the European Northern Renaissance stretches from the years of the great plagues, before the first elaboration of the ars series about 1450, to the end of the seventeenth century, as one may see from Romeyn de Hooghe’s detailed baroque version of the death of the Christian.7 Caxton published an unillustrated translation of the popular medieval text of the ars moriendi in 1490, and the eleven woodcuts of the series with the five temptations, the five inspirations, and the happy death were frequently reproduced on the continent throughout the sixteenth century.8 In England perhaps they were seen most often as single illustrations. Examples appeared in continental books and in popular English devotional books. They surfaced also in tomb art and as stained-glass windows in churches. Some of the single motifs of death associated with the conflation of the ars moriendi and the dance of death were engraved on plate, armor, and jewelry. The ubiquitous skull of the memento mori, in addition to its appearance in numerous paintings as a reminder of the fragility of life, took the form of one rare gold watch signed by Jan Heyder and also of a...