Sexual and social mobility in The Duchess of Malfi

Abstract

The real subject is not primarily sexual lewdness at all, but “social lewdness” mythically expressed in sexual terms. Burke A Rhetoric of Motives It may be compared to a cage, the birds without dispaire to get in, and those within dispaire to get out. Florio's Montaigne The Duchess of Malfi rewrites The Spanish Tragedy after Hamlet and King Lear . It echoes the early play's concerns with wandering royal women and hysterical royal men, with erotic mobility and killer servants. But it transforms these variables in crucial ways. The erotic mobility shifts distinctly, away from Bel-imperia's rebellious sexual raids and toward the emergent bourgeois and Protestant ideal of companionate marriage. Conversely, the tense fraternal defensiveness is even more embattled. Antonio's outrageous and successful invasion is far from heroic, his initial potency athletic rather than martial. Yet his achievement is, intolerably, fully marital . The Lorenzo figure attracts the lurid energy that his sister and her lover relinquish, and becomes himself uncontrollably eroticized. After Shakespeare's two greatest tragedies the figuration of status narcissism as incest has probably become inevitable. And Pedringano has come fully of age as well. The meditative qualities of the neglected malcontent have by 1614 been refracted among a host of pungent instances: Hamlet, Malevole, Iago, Vindice, Edmund, Kent, Webster's own Flamineo, all contribute to Bosola's strange mixture of calm knowing violence and puzzlement. The seminal issues of The Spanish Tragedy have now, after a full generation of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, produced their curious bitter fruit.

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