Book contents
- Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England
- Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I The Arts of Remembering Death
- Part II Grounding the Remembrance of the Dead
- Part III The Ends of Commemoration
- Chapter 9 The Unton Portrait Reconsidered
- Chapter 10 Andrew Marvell’s Taste for Death
- Chapter 11 The Many Labours of Mourning a Virgin Queen
- Chapter 12 ‘Superfluous Men’ and the Graveyard Politics of The Duchess of Malfi
- Parting Epigraph
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 12 - ‘Superfluous Men’ and the Graveyard Politics of The Duchess of Malfi
from Part III - The Ends of Commemoration
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 October 2022
- Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England
- Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I The Arts of Remembering Death
- Part II Grounding the Remembrance of the Dead
- Part III The Ends of Commemoration
- Chapter 9 The Unton Portrait Reconsidered
- Chapter 10 Andrew Marvell’s Taste for Death
- Chapter 11 The Many Labours of Mourning a Virgin Queen
- Chapter 12 ‘Superfluous Men’ and the Graveyard Politics of The Duchess of Malfi
- Parting Epigraph
- Bibliography
- Index
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.
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- Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England , pp. 235 - 256Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022