| dc.description.abstract | John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi (1612-13) is obsessed with questions of memorialization and legacy. In this paper, I contribute to the critical conversation about memorialization in the play by arguing that Webster presents his audience with two distinct forms of material and memorial legacy. On the one hand, there is the bleak non-legacy most
closely associated with the Duchess’s two brothers, Ferdinand and the Cardinal, which is expressed through images of scattered matter and snowy prints that melt away in the sun. On the other hand, there is the enduring legacy of the Duchess—a legacy closely tied to the material of
wax, which can be infinitely shaped and reshaped, but which retains an integrity and sense of identity. I argue that Webster presents this waxen—and notably feminine—version of memorialization as more positive and long-lasting, linked to the enduring power of poetry. A great borrower and imitator, Webster draws from a number of texts and traditions in outlining these two forms of memorialization, and part of my project in this paper is to trace these influences. I introduce Aristotle and Ovid as important interlocutors for Webster, but my analysis foregrounds a thinker whose influence on The Duchess of Malfi has heretofore gone
unrecognized: the Roman poet and materialist philosopher Lucretius. I specifically place Lucretius’s poem De Rerum Natura (ca. 50 BCE) into conversation with The Duchess of Malfi, arguing that this text helps illuminate some of Webster’s key affinities with, and selective departures from, the classical materialist tradition. | |
