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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.
Consider now the aspect of this very same remark, as it occurs in the fourth act of John Webster's tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi. The Duchess, overwhelmed with despair, is talking to Bosola: Duchess. I'll go pray; No, I'll go curse. Bosola. O, fie! Duchess. I could curse the stars. Bosola. O, fearful. Duchess.
But none the better is it for the good: if Ferdinands, Bosolas, Brachianos, and Flaminios perish miserably, it is only after having done to death the tender and brave Duchess, the gentle Antonio, the chivalric Marcello; there is virtue on earth, but there is no justice in heaven. The half-pagan, half-puritanic feeling of Webster bursts out in the dying speech of the villain Bosola
The Duke and his brother the Cardinal are both brought to bloody deaths by the hand which they had used to assassinate 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.
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 Duchess to her brother, Webster has wrought a scene of tragic savagery that surpasses almost any other that the English stage can show.
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.
The iniquities of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, il gran Biscione; the blood-thirst of Gian Maria; the dark designs of Filippo and his secret vices; Francesco Sforza's treason; Galeazzo Maria's vanities and lusts; their tyrants' dread of thunder and the knife; their awful deaths by pestilence and the assassin's poniard; their selfishness, oppression, cruelty, and fraud; the murders of their kinsmen; their labyrinthine plots and acts of broken faith all is tranquil now, and we can say to each what Bosola found for the Duchess of Malfi ere her execution: Much you had of land and rent; Your length in clay's now competent: A long war disturbed your mind; Here your perfect peace is signed!
"Why," asks the Duchess of Malfi, "do we grow fantastical in our death-bed? Do we affect fashion in the grave?" A more trenchant criticism than this could hardly have been pronounced upon Andrea Contucci di Monte Sansavino's tombs of Ascanio Sforza and Girolamo della Rovere, if Bosola had been standing before them in the church of S. Maria del Popolo when he spoke.
The iniquities of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, il gran Biscione, the blood-thirst of Gian Maria, the dark designs of Filippo and his secret vices, Francesco Sforza's treason, Galeazzo Maria's vanities and lusts; their tyrants' dread of thunder and the knife; their awful deaths by pestilence and the assassin's poignard; their selfishness, oppression, cruelty and fraud; the murders of their kinsmen; their labyrinthine plots and acts of broken faith; all is tranquil now, and we can say to each what Bosola found for the Duchess of Malfi ere her execution:
We find nowhere such an echo or reflection of the spirit of this scene as in the last tremendous dialogue of Bosola with Ferdinand in the house of murder and madness, while their spotted souls yet flutter between conscience and distraction, hovering for an hour as with broken wings on the confines of either province of hell.
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