"Hotel’s cannibalism is theoretically based on the ravening act of adaptation. Its sexuality, including prostitution and necrophilia, is far more graphic than its violence, which tends to be sleek and hidden by night, as one of the duchess’s brothers says, 'I’ll goe hunt the Badger, by Owle-light: / “Tis a deed of darkenesse' (4.2.360-61). The sexual resurrection of the director in Hotel recalls not only the Winter’s Tale-influenced resurrection in The Fatal Secret but Webster’s own brief resuscitation of the duchess through the medium of Bosola’s love-struck repentance: 'Upon thy pale lips I will melt my heart / To store them with fresh colour' (4.2.370-71). She awakens: 'her Eye opes, / And heaven in it seems to ope, (that late was shut) / To take me up to mer[c]y' (4.2.373-75). Bosola speaks in the language of Petrarchan poetry, itemizing the beloved’s lips and eyes. This verbal anatomization recalls Nancy J. Vickers’s discussion of the Petrarchan disarticulation of the beloved, 'an obsessive insistence on the particular' and the 'individual fragments of the body' (266). For Vickers’s study of Petrarch, this dismemberment is misogynistic, but here it is matched by Bosola’s linguistic excisement of his own heart to nourish the duchess. Both are broken into pieces, collapsed, lost. The duchess cries for Antonio, whose dead body had been presented to her in waxwork alongside waxworks of their children slain, and Bosola assures her, '[Antonio] is living, / The dead bodies you saw, were but faign’d statues' (4.2.377-78), foreshadowing Theobald’s radical reversal of monument into living body. She cannot live, however, though she has proven resilient enough to come back from the dead. Dying, she cries out forgiveness in an echo of Bosola’s word, 'Mercy!' (4.2.381). Not only is this scene unabashedly sentimental, it contains the resurrection trope within Webster’s own text."
Citation: Bowman, Elizabeth. “Gender Memory in the Adaptation History of The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy: Webster, Theobald, Figgis.” Philological Research. Chapter 9. Ed. Almitra Medina and Gilda M. Socarras. Athens: ATINER, 2011.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Excerpt from my new chapter
Citation:
Bowman, Elizabeth. “Gender Memory in the Adaptation History of The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy: Webster, Theobald, Figgis.” Philological Research. Chapter 9. Ed. Almitra Medina and Gilda M. Socarras. Athens: ATINER, 2011.
Excerpt:
"Monuments of memory, laurels of self-reflexive immortality, and other symbols of posterity display Webster’s ambitions for the future of his work but also his fundamental skepticism of any ability to control his posthumous reputation and work. As events have shown, that skepticism was valid. Webster himself, in memorializing the sensational death of an Italian duchess in 1518, had revised and updated his source material, most notably in giving his female protagonist both a Stoic strength of will and indomitable virtue, a combination almost unique in early modern drama. While the play [The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy] was performed and admired at intervals for the next century, attended by Charles II and Samuel Pepys, the next major staging was a version written and directed in 1733 by Lewis Theobald, known for his meticulous 1726 edition of Shakespeare. His Dutchesse, however, did not so closely follow the original Webster text but was highly revised, even to impose a happy ending, and retitled The Fatal Secret. Its performance was a commercial and critical failure, although Theobald had done his best to appeal to the neoclassical mores of his age by imposing the Aristotelian unities on the structure of the play. For example, the events of The Fatal Secret all take place in one day. After that, Webster fell out of favor until, in 1850, the actress Isabella Glyn spearheaded a revival based not on the merits of the play, for critics denounced its graphic nature, but on her own personal popularity. In the twentieth century, the Modernist revival returned attention to Webster, and since the Second World War the play has been staged near-continuously across the globe, with a straitlaced fidelity to the original text that represents the long history of critical and commercial disdain for Theobald’s revisionist approach.
Bowman, Elizabeth. “Gender Memory in the Adaptation History of The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy: Webster, Theobald, Figgis.” Philological Research. Chapter 9. Ed. Almitra Medina and Gilda M. Socarras. Athens: ATINER, 2011.
Excerpt:
"Monuments of memory, laurels of self-reflexive immortality, and other symbols of posterity display Webster’s ambitions for the future of his work but also his fundamental skepticism of any ability to control his posthumous reputation and work. As events have shown, that skepticism was valid. Webster himself, in memorializing the sensational death of an Italian duchess in 1518, had revised and updated his source material, most notably in giving his female protagonist both a Stoic strength of will and indomitable virtue, a combination almost unique in early modern drama. While the play [The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy] was performed and admired at intervals for the next century, attended by Charles II and Samuel Pepys, the next major staging was a version written and directed in 1733 by Lewis Theobald, known for his meticulous 1726 edition of Shakespeare. His Dutchesse, however, did not so closely follow the original Webster text but was highly revised, even to impose a happy ending, and retitled The Fatal Secret. Its performance was a commercial and critical failure, although Theobald had done his best to appeal to the neoclassical mores of his age by imposing the Aristotelian unities on the structure of the play. For example, the events of The Fatal Secret all take place in one day. After that, Webster fell out of favor until, in 1850, the actress Isabella Glyn spearheaded a revival based not on the merits of the play, for critics denounced its graphic nature, but on her own personal popularity. In the twentieth century, the Modernist revival returned attention to Webster, and since the Second World War the play has been staged near-continuously across the globe, with a straitlaced fidelity to the original text that represents the long history of critical and commercial disdain for Theobald’s revisionist approach.
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