The Duchess of Malfi de John Webster ou le corps dans tous ses états: « Some said he was an hermaphrodite, for he could not abide a woman » (3. 2. 217-218)

Abstract

In The Duchess of Malfi, Webster stages the Duchess’s pregnant body (1.1), the Duchess gorging on apricots (2.1), the Duchess kissing a cut-off hand (4.1), the wax effigies of Antonio and the children’s dead bodies (4.1). All those episodes point to the possible metamorphoses of the body which, apart from the Duchess’s pregnant body, were strikingly absent from Webster’s main source, Painter’s novella. It seems therefore that Webster willingly foregrounds the body’s physicality, all the more so as his medium, drama, relies on the physical presence of the actors on stage. In his play, the suffering body is omnipresent, yet one also notices an ambivalent perspective focusing both on the body as womb and as tomb, and even, at times, on the body as the meeting-point between the masculine and the feminine, reminding us of the figure of the hermaphrodite. Webster’s ambivalent perspective on the body is in keeping with his contradictory attitude toward his artistic medium, drama.

Keywords

• body
• cosmetics
• diseases
• effigy
• face painting
• hermaphrodite