United States or United States Minor Outlying Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He has been bred in arts and letters at the university of Padua; but being poor and of luxurious appetites, he chooses the path of crime in courts for his advancement. A duke adopts him for his minion, and Flamineo acts the pander to this great man's lust.
Brachiano is struck by this plan, and with the help of Vittoria's brother, Flamineo, he puts it at once into execution. Flamineo hires a doctor who poisons Brachiano's portrait, so that Isabella dies after kissing it. He also with his own hands twists Camillo's neck during a vaulting-match, making it appear that he came by his death accidentally.
She calls him 'ruffian' and 'villain, refusing him the reward of his vile service. This quarrel emerges in one of Webster's grotesque contrivances to prolong a poignant situation. Flamineo quits the stage and reappears with pistols. He affects a kind of madness; and after threatening Vittoria, who never flinches, he proposes they should end their lives by suicide.
Webster's invention in this plot is confined to the fantastic incidents attending on the deaths of Isabella, Camillo, and Brachiano, and to the murder of Marcello by his brother Flamineo, with the further consequence of Cornelia's madness and death.
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.
Yet we know that the art of Raphael and Correggio is in exact harmony with the Italian temperament of the same epoch which gave birth to Cesare Borgia and Bianca Gapello. The comparatively slighter sketch of Iachimo in 'Cymbeline' represents the Italian as he felt and lived, better than the laboured portrait of Flamineo.
But his true self, though subdued to be what he quaintly styles 'the devil's quilted anvil, on which 'all sins are fashioned 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 noble.
Flamineo might have used it; or the disguised friars, who made the deathbed of Bracciano hideous, might have plunged it in the Duke's heart after mocking his eyes with the figure of the suffering Christ. To imagine such an instrument of moral terror mingled with material violence, lay within the scope of Webster's sinister and powerful genius.
We see her first during a criminal interview with Brachiano, contrived by her brother Flamineo. The plot of the tragedy is developed in this scene; Vittoria suggesting, under the metaphor of a dream, that her lover should compass the deaths of his duchess and her husband. The dream is told with deadly energy and ghastly picturesqueness.
To the Italian text has been added the Teutonic commentary, and both are fused by a dramatic genius into one living whole. One of these men is Flamineo, the brother of Vittoria Corombona, upon whose part the action of the 'White Devil' depends.
Word Of The Day