Part 23 (2/2)

When the Duke dies and his prey escapes him, the rage of disappointment breaks into this fierce apostrophe:

I cannot conjure; but if prayers or oaths. Will get the speech of him, though forty devils Wait on him in his livery of flames, I'll speak to him and shake him by the hand, Though I be blasted.

As crimes thicken round him, and he still despairs of the reward for which he sold himself, conscience awakes:

I have lived Riotously ill, like some that live in court, And sometimes when my face was full of smiles Have felt the maze of conscience in my breast.

The scholar's scepticism, which lies at the root of his perversity, finds utterance in this meditation upon death:

Whither shall I go now? O Lucian, thy ridiculous purgatory!

to find Alexander the Great cobbling shoes, Pompey tagging points, and Julius Caesar making hair-b.u.t.tons!

Whether I resolve to fire, earth, water, air, or all the elements by scruples, I know not, nor greatly care.

At the last moment he yet can say:

We cease to grieve, cease to be Fortune's slaves, Nay, cease to die, by dying.

And again, with the very yielding of his spirit:

My life was a black charnel.

It will be seen that in no sense does Flamineo resemble Iago. He is not a traitor working by craft and calculating ability to well-considered ends. He is the desperado frantically clutching at an uncertain and impossible satisfaction. Webster conceives him as a self-abandoned atheist, who, maddened by poverty and tainted by vicious living, takes a fury to his heart, and, because the goodness of the world has been for ever lost to him, recklessly seeks the bad.

Bosola, in the 'd.u.c.h.ess of Malfi,' is of the same stamp. He too has been a scholar. He is sent to the galleys 'for a notorious murder,'

and on his release he enters the service of two brothers, the Duke of Calabria and the Cardinal of Aragon, who place him as their intelligencer at the court of their sister.

_Bos_. It seems you would create me One of your familiars.

_Ferd_. Familiar! what's that?

_Bos_. Why, a very quaint invisible devil in flesh, An intelligencer.

_Ferd_. Such a kind of thriving thing I would wish thee; and ere long thou may'st arrive At a higher place by it.

Lured by hope of preferment, Bosola undertakes the office of spy, tormentor, and at last of executioner. For:

Discontent and want Is the best clay to mould a villain of.

But his true self, though subdued to be what he quaintly styles 'the devil's quilted anvil,' on which 'all sins are fas.h.i.+oned and the blows never heard,' continually rebels against this destiny. Compared with Flamineo, he is less unnaturally criminal. His melancholy is more fantastic, his despair more n.o.ble. Throughout the course of craft and cruelty on which he is goaded by a relentless taskmaster, his nature, hardened as it is, revolts.

At the end, when Bosola presents the body of the murdered d.u.c.h.ess to her brother, Webster has wrought a scene of tragic savagery that surpa.s.ses almost any other that the English stage can show. The sight, of his dead sister maddens Ferdinand, who, feeling the eclipse of reason gradually absorb his faculties, turns round with frenzied hatred on the accomplice of his fratricide. Bosola demands the price of guilt. Ferdinand spurns him with the concentrated eloquence of despair and the extravagance of approaching insanity. The murderer taunts his master coldly and laconically, like a man whose life is wrecked, who has waded through blood to his reward, and who at the last moment discovers the sacrifice of his conscience and masculine freedom to be fruitless. Remorse, frustrated hopes, and thirst for vengeance convert Bosola from this hour forward into an instrument of retribution. The Duke and his brother the Cardinal are both brought to b.l.o.o.d.y deaths by the hand which they had used to a.s.sa.s.sinate their sister.

It is fitting that something should be said about Webster's conception of the Italian despot. Brachiano and Ferdinand, the employers of Flamineo and Bosola, are tyrants such as Savonarola described, and as we read of in the chronicles of petty Southern cities. Nothing is suffered to stand between their l.u.s.t and its accomplishment. They override the law by violence, or pervert its action to their own advantage:

The law to him Is like a foul black cobweb to a spider; He makes it his dwelling and a prison To entangle those shall feed him.

They are eaten up with parasites, accomplices, and all the creatures of their crimes:

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