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Such was the elegant apostrophe that I made as I went out of the gates again, happily satisfied in myself, and feeling that I alone of all whom I had seen was able to profit by the silent poem of these green mounds and blackened headstones. "Duchess of Malfi." I knew one once, and the room where, lonely and old, she waited for death.
But they are studied in earnestness and sincerity. Unquestionably he is the greatest of Shakespeare's successors in the romantic drama, perhaps his only direct imitator. He has single lines worthy to set beside those in Othello or King Lear. His dirge in the Duchess of Malfi, Charles Lamb thought worthy to be set beside the ditty in The Tempest, which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father.
When they arrived, Mendez was standing at the door waiting for them, accompanied by Malfi, his servant, a priest, and two or three other persons of the neighbourhood; some of whom advanced to assist Bianca and her father to alight, whilst the others surrounded Guerra as he set his foot on the ground, pinioning his arms and plunging their hands into his pockets, from whence they drew two small pistols and a black mask, such as was worn at the carnivals; besides these weapons, he carried a stiletto in his bosom.
Now it happened that on the horse-road to Aquila, which Faustina herself had never travelled, there was exactly such a spot as that she described. Malfi knew it well. Struck by the circumstance, he desired to have his dinner immediately, and then, accompanied by his hind, he set off to meet Gaspar.
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!
If it is weak in construction so though in a less degree are Webster's Duchess of Malfi, and Shakespeare's Cymbeline. In King Victor and King Charles Browning adopted, and no doubt deliberately, a plain, unfigured and uncoloured style, as suiting both the characters and the historical subject.
With Gaspar it was different: he hated Ripa; but as it hurt his pride that this enmity to one whom he considered so far beneath him should be known, he made no open demonstration of dislike, and when Malfi expressed a wish to invite his friend to supper, hoping that Mendez would not refuse to meet him, the Spaniard made no objection whatever.
"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.
In the meanwhile the Spaniard had got his money and made his purchases in good time, not wishing to be late on the road, so that they had scarcely got a mile beyond the church when they met him; and in answer to his inquiries what had brought them there, Malfi related his wife's dream, adding that he might have spared himself the ride, for he had looked over the wall, and saw nobody there.
In tragic power, Webster approaches nearest to Shakespeare. He loves such gloomy metaphors as the following: "You speak as if a man Should know what fowl is coffined in a baked meat Afore you cut it open." Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy is in Webster's vein, but far inferior to The Duchess of Malfi. Ford's The Broken Heart is a strong, but unpleasant, tragedy.
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