“I know death has ten thousand
several doors
For men to take their exits, and 'tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges,
You may open them both ways.”
– The
Duchess [IV, 2]
Elizabethan
tragedies – and by extension, their natural Jacobean successors – are a strange
bunch, all fire-and-brimstone, hellfire and damnation, a never-ending downward
spiral of revenge and death and murder that ends only through the extinguishing
of the lives of the play’s characters. Of all of the Elizabethan-Jacobean
tragedies, none are better or more potently – delightfully, malevolently,
gleefully – delicious than Shakespeare’s: Titus
Andronicus, beneath the innumerable killings and murders and barbaric acts,
is darkly comic and is an absolute blast; Macbeth
is a potent examination of power, and what happens when you become drunk on its
allure and promise; Othello is
devastating in its misrepresentation of evidence, while King Lear and Hamlet are
perhaps the pinnacles, the generally-considered perfections, of the form.
Shakespeare was not just writing for himself, he was writing in reaction to
those that had gone before him – Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd – and those
that were writing around him – Ben Johnson, John Webster. Of all of them, it is
Webster whose plays perhaps took Shakespeare’s achievements and reverted them
to the glory-days of Kyd’s Spanish
Tragedy or Marlowe’s Tamburlaine,
denying the dramatic tragedy form of Shakespeare’s elegance and finesse, and restoring
to it much of the robust and blatant disregard for humanity, along with all the
bile and brimstone that one could muster. (If you’ve seen Shakespeare In Love, you’d already be familiar with John Webster;
he’s the street urchin kid who’s often seen outside the theatres, playing with
the cats and mice, and who facilitates Thomas Kent’s unmasking as Viola de
Lesseps.)
This presentation
of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi was
written in 2006 by Ailsa Piper and Hugh Colman and first performed by the Red
Stitch Actors Company under the title of ‘Hellbent.’ It’s a pretty accurate description of the play, to be honest, as the two
brothers scheme and plot the maintenance of their sister’s chastity, her
subsequent downfall and eventual death, along with that of her maid and husband
(and former steward).
