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Not Just the Tudors
The Duchess of Malfi
00:49:47
How has this 17th century tale of love, power, and betrayal continued to resonate across the centuries?
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad Free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit With a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward/subscribe.
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Dr. Will Tosh
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- [02:58]
Dr. Will Tosh
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- [03:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. This is a story of defiance, of a young widow standing against the expectations of her family. A woman striving for love and agency in a society which demands she claim neither. This is a woman who knows her own mind, a woman who stands firm in the face of torture and even death. This is the Duchess of Malfi, one of the seminal texts of Jacobean theatre and still one of its most performed. John Webster's remarkable 17th century tragedy about the price of female desire still has much to show us today. But what makes one play endure and another fade into obscurity? Can we find an answer in its writing, its emotional resonance in the spectacle of its staging? Perhaps, like most art, it is in the perfect balance of all three. I'm here today with Dr. Will Tosh, theatre historian, co director of the Shakespeare Centre London and director of Education at Shakespeare's Globe. Dr. Tosh is the author of Male Friendship and and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare's England and his riveting new work, Straight Acting, the Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, is an absolute must read. Together we're going to explore Webster's startlingly modern play, how it was originally performed and received, how it was staged, and where and what we might learn from recreating original performance methods today. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and this is not just the tutors for From History hit Dr. Tosh, welcome to the podcast.
- [05:18]
Dr. Will Tosh
Thank you very much, Susanna. It's lovely to be here.
- [05:20]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So, the Duchess of Malfi, John Webster. Can you recap the plot for those who are feeling slightly rusty?
- [05:27]
Dr. Will Tosh
Very happy to do so. It's a story based on a real incident, a real kind of scandal from very early 16th century Italy, and it concerns a very young aristocratic Widow who has no name other than the duchess in Webster's play, but was in fact based on a specific person, someone called Giovanna d' Aragona, who was Duchess of Amalfi. She married into this Neapolitan royal family that, connected to the Spanish royal family of Aragon, was left a widow, very young, very beautiful, very intelligent, with some young children. And in the story, as Webster tells it, she forms a relationship with her steward, her kind of chief of staff, a man called Antonio Bologna. But knowing that her family, and particularly her brothers, her twin brother Ferdinand and her other brother, who is a cardinal in the Catholic Church, will disapprove of her marrying out of her class, keeps this marriage secret, maintains the secrecy over a number of years, where she has several more children with Antonio, until, through the sort of bad offices of a spy character called Bosola, the marriage is discovered. And the duchess and Antonio and her children and her waiting woman, Cariola, are forced to flee from their home in Malfi to try to take refuge at a holy shrine, where they're sort of expunged and kind of banished on the orders of the cardinal. And eventually the duchess and Antonio and her children are overtaken on the road by Ferdinand and the cardinal's men, and the duchess and her children and Cariola are taken to a dark, terrifying castle where the duchess is subject to psychological and actual tortures until she and her children and Cariola are murdered. Antonio, who remains at liberty at this point, is desperate to find his wife and his children and gets to the castle by Act 5, where he meets a terrible fate as well, but so does more or less everyone else. So Ferdinand, the twin brother, who has a sort of strange, incestuous, repressed desire for the duchess, is stricken with lycanthropy. He goes insane and thinks he's a wolf. And in the sort of turmoil of Act 5, Ferdinand, Cardinal, Bosola, Antonio, all end up dead. And there is simply a sort of minor courtier left to kind of pass judgment on what has happened, holding fast to the one child kind of left from all the turmoil, who inherits to become the next Duke of Malfi.
- [08:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So it's quite a spectacle, it's quite blood drenched and it's quite strong on social commentary and judgment. Can we talk first of all about that setting? I mean, you said it's based on those real life events from the early 16th century. I was thinking about the time at which it was written and the time it was first performed. There might have also been echoes of the kind of the French court of Louis xiii, Cardinal Richelieu, that sort of thing. What has been conveyed by the geographic and temporal choices of the setting? Or is it just that it's recreating this original story?
- [08:44]
Dr. Will Tosh
Well, I think you've put your finger on it in terms of what Italy and the Continent mean to dramatists of this time. So it's by John Webster, who is a contemporary of Shakespeare. And although we actually know rather less about Webster than some of his fellow dramatists, the Duchess of Malfi is the most performed early modern play not by Shakespeare, on the contemporary stage. It's really survived the test of time. And like Shakespeare, Webster drew on a whole number of sources of his own time, and chiefly collections of stories that were known as novella or fableau, that were published in Italy and in France and in England in various forms of translation and adaptation through the 16th century. So Webster, like Shakespeare, like these other early modern dramatists, had at his fingers this sort of store of fictional assets, telling stories that were dramatic and sort of full of scandal and bloodshed and sexual misdemeanors and all these sorts of things that, you know, make good stories that were available in published, easy accessible, published form. So Webb Stewart turns to one particular collection. It's called in English, the Palace of Pleasure, by a man called William Painter, which is itself based on a French translation of an Italian original. So you can see how sort of Italianate stories find their way into English popular culture through a kind of interconnected web of commercial publishing and fiction writing that's very, very active in the 16th and 17th centuries. And there's a sort of benefit to theatre artists with this kind of Italianate setting, which is that as well as being just a source of stories, scandalous and kind of lurid tales set somewhere else, particularly in elite or aristocratic contexts, are great box office because they're about important rich people doing terrible things, but they're not domestic. They're not about English rich and powerful people doing terrible things which would attract disapproval and might indeed attract legal issues around what you're allowed to talk about and what you're not. So it's really helpful to have these stories come from somewhere else, particularly somewhere else associated in the English Protestant mind with a terrible, corrupt Catholic country where all sorts of awful things happen without the control of the good and virtuous Protestant church.
- [11:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Right. So Catholicism foreignness has become a kind of theatrical shorthand for moral decay.
- [11:19]
Dr. Will Tosh
Absolutely. And you see that happening in plays of the late 16th century, and there's a real flourishing of that really in the early Years of the 17th century under King James and then Charles, a sense of potentially actually that English Protestant writers are sort of responding against a kind of policy of international Catholic engagement on the part of James and then Charles, a bit more of a kind of populist sense from London English writers that no, we don't like the values and qualities associated with Catholic Europe.
- [11:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So this is a play that has stood the test of time, but that indicates perhaps something about how it was received when it was first performed. Do we know anything about the reaction?
- [12:00]
Dr. Will Tosh
Yeah, we do. Telling stories about how early modern plays land in their time is hard because you don't have in the 16th and 17th centuries the critical infrastructure of new sheets that carry reviews of plays and things like that. So you're sort of always searching for the kind of information that might suggest popularity. And in the case of Malfi, we have a really good indication that it does well on its first arrival. It's first staged in 1614, some point before the death of one of the actors who plays a leading role. So that gives us a good kind of latest date, but not published until 1623. So that's nine years later when it's published. It's the first English play to be published with a cast list that includes the actors names. And for several of the key roles there are two actors listed which suggests that the play remains in repertory. And as actors die or move on, they pass the part on to another actor. So even that list tells us that this play has a lively existence on the commercial stage. We know it's performed a number of times both at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre, wonderful candlelit indoor space, but also the Globe Theatre on Bankside, obviously famous for its association with Shakespeare. And the Duchess of Amalfi is performed by the theatre company at that point, co owned by Shakespeare. And it has a life on the English stage through the 16 teens and 20s and 30s. Theatre stops commercially for a 20 year period during the English Civil War. But the Duchess of Malfi also is one of the first plays to be restaged in the Restoration. And it's popular then too. And it receives the sort of slightly ambivalent honour of being rewritten and adapted by Restoration and 18th century dramatists, usually taking out some of the kind of more lurid aspects and giving at a happy ending. And then by the late 19th century people are interested in it in its sort of own time, the original play gets kind of brought back onto the stage and then it has a really active life in the 20th century as well, mostly post war, as theatre audiences and critics and theatre artists become more and more interested in the sort of non Shakespeare world of any modern drama.
- [14:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And how common was it in early modern theatre to see a female character as the driving force of a play's event?
- [14:23]
Dr. Will Tosh
Well, I mean, not uncommon. And of course, we can think of lots of Shakespeare plays that we're familiar with where the female roles are the driving engine. A play like Antony and Cleopatra or even a play like Macbeth where the figure of Lady Macbeth is this sort of powerful centre. It's not something that Webster innovates, but he's certainly part of an upswell in early 17th century, early Jacobean plays that are really interested in the idea of virtuous female leadership and virtuous female authority. And that's been connected, I think, probably plausibly, to the fairly rapid onset of dissatisfaction with King James. So listeners will know that James comes to the throne in 1603 at the tail end of a really grim, unhappy, depressing period in the late 1590s, early 1600s, when the economy is terrible, there's sort of war. Everyone is completely exhausted with Queen Elizabeth. She's become old and difficult and she's not happy and everyone's just grim. So James's arrival as a male monarch with at that point three children, clear succession, is greeted with just, you know, delight. And everyone is just incredibly relieved that they now have a king with children and everything seems hunky dory. And it really doesn't take long before James problems as king become apparent and everyone sort of forgets how exhausted they'd been with Elizabeth and are thinking, oh, for the days of good Queen Bess and Gloriana and the Virgin Queen. So you find quite quickly dramatists feeding on that sense of nostalgia and creating stories where preternaturally virtuous, brilliant women are the kind of moral centre of the place doesn't always end well for them because audiences also like to see virtuous, preternaturally brilliant women brought low. But you have a series of plays I can think of, coupled by dramatists like Beaumont and Fletcher or Middleton, that feature these sorts of wonderful leading women. And Webster's Duchess of Malfrey, I think, is in a sense the most successful of those plays and possibly sort of one of the last, because it's written in 1614. So it's sort of catching the kind of tail end of that wave of nostalgia for Elizabeth.
- [16:43]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
In the play, the Duchess's brother is preoccupied, you said, almost incestuously with her widowed chastity. What do you think this tells us about ideas of female honor? Is it echoing Elizabeth I and her chastity? What does it tell us about social status? Do you think contemporary audiences would have found his response over the top?
- [17:04]
Dr. Will Tosh
Yes, I do. And I think the play is really interesting and not simple in its presentation of female sexuality. And I think those issues are also really intersectional around class and status as well. So the duchess's position as a duchess means her own self representation of her chastity and sexual desires and sexual identity is a bit different to other women in the play. So Ferdinand, the twin brother, is unquestionably characterized as mentally unstable in relation to his attitude. He's given these extraordinary scenes where he spirals mentally, spirals, thinking about what she might be doing. And not only are his kind of visions incestuously tinged towards his sister, they're also kind of shot through with latent homoerotic visions of the kind of men she might be sleeping with. He has these wonderful phrases about a strong thighed bargeman that he's imagining his sister having sex with. Mad. We are supposed to see that as outrageous. And in fact, his brother, the cardinal, rebukes him for that kind of uncontrollable fantasy. So we're definitely supposed to see it as unacceptable. How the duchess represents her own sexuality and her own kind of erotic rights is, I think, fascinating. So at various points she's given speeches where she is able to lay claim to her right as a widow to remarry. When she's confronted by her brother, by Ferdinand, she has this great line where she says, why might I not marry? I have not gone about in this to create any new world or custom. She's just asserting what is reasonable and right within the terms of early modern Europe for any person to kind of trammel their sexuality into marriage. And that's what she's asserting her right to do. The position of widows is interesting and complex in early modern society because they're women without a male authority figure who are nonetheless understood to have knowledge about what sexuality and men are. And therefore they're seen from a patriarchal point of view as problematic. And society is sort of split really as to whether it's a good idea for widows to remarry as quickly as possible and be fitted back into a kind of patriarchal model, or whether it represents a sort of terrible hunkering after sex on the part of widows to marry again. And we see both of these views expressed by characters in the play. It is Ferdinand, the Mad brother who says they are most luxurious that seek to wed twice. So the view that it's immoral for a widow to seek remarriage is given to the completely mad person. So I think we were sort of allowed to disregard that view. And the Duchess's very calm, very centred claim to her right to marry, if she so chooses, is the one that's given kind of moral authority by the play, I think.
- [20:12]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
But in the end, spoiler, the play feels like it adheres to the same sort of narrative we get in Othello, which is, you know, female immorality, real or otherwise, is punished. And, I mean, I wonder if this is, in part the sort of safety valve that we get in moments of the world turned upside down, moments of Carnival at this time, the audience get to see the high and mighty pulled down. They get to see the humbling of a woman, you know, they get to enjoy that. Or do you think that there's something essentially being asserted about, you know, English moral values here?
- [20:44]
Dr. Will Tosh
Well, there's definitely a sense that this play wants to have its cake and eat it. Like, I think, a lot of lurid drama, lurid tragedy. We want to see the virtuous brought low. You know, the kind of tragic arc, of course, is the sort of, you know, the noble figure who, through some flaw or incident is brought to cataclysm. And that's definitely the arc we see with the Duchess of Malfi. I'm not sure that necessarily means that the intentions of the author or indeed the attitudes of the audience are wholly of a piece with that arc. And I think, certainly in the Duchess of Malfi, and I would say actually in Othello as well, what we're seeing is a bad actor, as in, you know, a bad agent of destruction, noticing a chink in the armour and going in for the kill. So in Othello, the chink in the armour is a marriage that strikes the society around the married couple as unusual, although not regarded as unacceptable by most people. Unusual, yes. Unacceptable, no. But Iago can go in and plant the seed that is based in that unusualness to cause destruction. And I think similarly, in the Duchess of Malfi, we're given a socially highly unusual setup, but one where the intentions of the individuals concerned, the Duchess and Antonio, are shown as wholly good, which then leads to their destruction. And Webster is, in a sense, making his own way through the different views offered by the sources that he's using. So the original Italian novella that the story is based on is actually relatively sympathetic towards the Duchess character. And the Antonio character and that view of the aristocratic woman and the lower status man, there's more hostile views expressed towards them in the French and the English translations. And I think Webster's slightly rolling back from that hostility to create something where the sympathy really is entirely on the part of the Duchess. Antonio, to a lesser extent, because he demonstrates less glowingly virtuous characteristics than the Duchess, but she is absolutely figured as the most ethically high status person in that world.
- [23:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And it's very striking that now the Duchess is regarded as one of the most difficult, one of the strongest roles that a woman can play in early modern theatre. But of course it would originally have been played by a boy. So what does that tell about the skill of boy actors for whom such a role was written?
- [23:20]
Dr. Will Tosh
It's astonishing, isn't it? And really unusually, as I said earlier, we've got information about the early company that performed the Duchess Amalfi. And so we know that one of the early duchesses was a boy called Richard Sharp. So we know who that individual was. And it's likely that he wasn't the first Duchess because he wasn't playing those sorts of roles at that point. But it would have been another boy in Shakespeare's company. And we have the sort of astonishing kind of congruence or overlap that a Duchess Amalfi performs. Formed in 1614 by the King's Men. Almost certainly the boy playing the Duchess was also the boy who was playing the leading female parts in Shakespeare's plays at that time, including plays written more or less concurrently. So that might be the Tempest, that might be something like Winter's Tale or Cymbeline. So you can see a sort of repertory of astonishing female parts being written for a very, very talented boy actor. We say boy actor. I mean, the boys would have been playing these parts from the ages of about sort of 14 or 15 up to 21 or 22. They've had enough years of training to make a fist of it. And I think we have to assume, given the complexity and nuance of the parts that were written for them, that they did it well. And what early modern women theatre goers thought about seeing plays that carried great sympathy and kind of respect towards female characters played by boys. History does not record, or certainly doesn't record overtly. And that, I think, is a really fascinating question about what that mixed audience, socially and mixed in terms of gender, thought about the presentation of their, effectively their own society, albeit this play is set in Italy, being portrayed in a way that at the same time that it was telling the story was activating, consciously or not, all sorts of other kind of queer or kind of gender transgressive energies about what the presentation of gender and erotic desire might look like.
- [25:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I find it totally thrilling that we know this boy's name and, you know, late teens, before he's got his beard boy, and that we can imagine from that moment, that chronological moment of those plays being produced, the quality of acting that he's producing. Do we know more about the initial performances? You mentioned that it took place at the Blackfriars Theatre and then moved to the Globe. I mean, was this unusual for a play to move from indoor to an outdoor space? What does that tell us about audiences, that sort of thing?
- [25:56]
Dr. Will Tosh
So this is a completely normal but relatively new. So Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, had for a long time been based at the Globe on Bankside, their big open air amphitheatre. A few years before Webster writes, the Duchess of Malfi, the King's Men also get their hands on an indoor space that in fact they've been connected to for years, but hadn't been able to play there. But it's very different to the Globe. It's an indoor theatre built into an existing space, the monastic, the formerly monastic hall of the Blackfriars, where an earlier theatrical impresario had built a whole kind of wooden theatre into this hall. So effectively a purpose built theatre, but in a kind of found space. And this was very different to the Great, but was smaller, it had a roof, it was much more expensive in terms of theatre tickets. It's sort of, you know, Royal Opera House rather than pub theatre down the road. And it was lit by candles. Now that didn't mean that it had the same sort of quality of light and dark as a modern theatre where you can flick a switch and suddenly the stage is bathed in light. There were still windows in this building. And because performances took place at 2 o' clock in the afternoon, usually it was still daylight, but the candles allowed a creation of a wholly different atmosphere. And also, I think, really importantly, they allow the beginning of what we might now understand as lighting design, where you can change, amend, alter the lighting to create an artistic or a thematic effect. Now, again, that isn't the same thing as casting a sort of floodlight on a particular actor, but it, it does mean that those candles which can move, they can go up and down because they need to move to be able to be changed or lit or extinguished. Individual actors can hold candles, candelabra or torches and Unlike on the outdoor stage, where if a scene is taking place at night, all you can really do is have your character say, isn't it dark? And hope that everyone in the space goes with it. In an indoor theatre, you can begin to reflect that kind of temporal reality, light and dark reality on stage. And there's a scene in the Duchess of Malfoy where Webster seems to be exploring that. The first scene in the fourth act. So halfway through the play, the Duchess has been seized by her mad brother and imprisoned in a. In a castle. And earlier on, when he'd exposed the Duchess's marriage, Ferdinand had said, I'll never see you again. So when he comes to visit his sister, he insists that all the lights are extinguished and he comes to her in the dark. They talk. And Ferdinand also plays a very cruel trick on the Duchess where he tells her that a dead hand that he passes to her is the hand of Antonio. It isn't, but it's enough to torment her. Now, that scene could be played, was indeed played on the Globe stage in bright daylight, and the audience had to pretend that it was dark and they would also see Ferdinand, the actor, holding a prop hand on a darkened Blackfriars stage. The audience are in the gloom as well, and they're sharing that sense of the Duchess's confusion, fear. Then they're sort of on the Duchess. They're sort of seeing through the Duchess's eyes rather than seeing through Ferdinand's eyes. Webster is one of a number of playwrights of the time, John Ford is another one, who is clearly, theatrically, really interested in what you could do with light and dark as a dramaturgical tool. How can he extend the sort of capacities, the capabilities of his stage with this new technological opportunity?
- [29:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I suppose it's worth reminding listeners that these plays are generally being performed in the daytime. This is not going to the theatre in the evening, as we so often do. So I suppose even with an indoor venue, there may have been challenges of creating darkness. If there are windows. Do we know anything about that?
- [30:10]
Dr. Will Tosh
It's a live question in theatre historical research. I'm sure your listeners will be glad to know there are divergent views as to the extent to which an early modern commercial playhouse, or really lent in to the possibilities of darkness and light. And I think the reason that this is controversial in as much as anything in theatre history is controversial, is because it relies on a sort of full awareness of how these sorts of companies put on theatre, which is quite different to commercial theatre today. As you said, the companies are Performing in the afternoon plays start at 2:00. And those timings are set by a number of things. They're set by daylight. So it's a convention drawn for an outdoor performance that you have to perform when it's light and people need to be able to see. But they're also set by the times of divine service and kind of when you can do stuff and when you can't. And that two to five o' clock window is sort of set. You can't really mess around with that. And that doesn't change, really, in the entire period until the restoration. That's more or less when theatre happens. With indoor theatre, yes, there are windows, yes, there are candles. No one is quite sure how much of the windows in the old Blackfriars monastic hall, which, as you can imagine, given what it used to be, were big. They were sort of great big kind of church like windows. How much of those were covered by wooden galleries for seats? How much of those were covered just by the people's backs, if they were sitting on the benches watching the show? Whether those windows were covered with shutters, we don't know. There's some evidence that playhouses were equipped with window shutters that could be closed by choice. But again, a stage crew running round, kind of slapping the shutters closed every time someone wants a dark scene or not, people don't really know. We get a bit of information from the plays themselves about the kind of way that theatre companies might have started a show. They would come on and light the candles while the audience was still settling down. So we know there were sort of protocols and habits for how light was used. But these were companies that put on a different play every single day. There weren't great long runs of a play. There weren't technical rehearsals or dress rehearsals when the closing of a window or the lighting of a taper could be practiced within an inch of its life to look incredibly slick and smooth. This was just get the story on. And I don't mean to suggest that it was done in a slapdash way, but the actors relied on established practices about how you did stuff on stage in the same way, for example, that a modern orchestra following a score would be able to come together and produce something beautiful with fairly minimal rehearsal, because they all know what they're supposed to be doing according to their line. The same sort of thing applies with early modern drama. Actors know their lines, they know their cues, they're familiar with the arc of their character, they're familiar with what the playwright kind of likes to do. They go on and they do it. So as soon as you start introducing oh, for this play we're going to have this amazing dark scene where it's a harder job and it doesn't mean that it never happened. And I think there was really strong evidence in the Duchess of Malfi that that Act 4 scene is played in the dark. But it's, it's unusual and it's certainly for the time that it comes.
- [33:45]
Holly Fry
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- [34:45]
Jana Kramer
This summer. Instacart is bringing back your favorites from 1999 with prices from 1999. That means 90s prices on juice pouches that ought to be respected, 90s prices on box Mac and cheese and 90s prices on ham, cheese and cracker lunches. Enjoy all those throwbacks and more at throwback prices only through Instacart. $4.72 maximum discount per $10 of eligible items. Limit one offer per order. Expire September 5th while supplies last. Discount based on CPI comparison Hi, I'm.
- [35:19]
Richard Karn
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- [36:15]
Dr. Will Tosh
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- [36:18]
Unknown
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- [37:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I suppose where the metaphor with the orchestra breaks down is that the other thing about these playing companies is that they also were used to working together. So they may not be have done that play before, but they've done many other plays together before so they can, they can read off each other whatever's going on.
- [37:21]
Dr. Will Tosh
Exactly. And playwrights typically are writing for companies that they know. And it certainly seems to be the case that actors had lines or types. And again, that isn't to suggest that they were all incredibly sort of reductive and similar to each other, but that there were particular kind of characteristics for individual leading actors which were tapped on time and again by dramatists because they knew the performers were able to deliver them with real virtuosity in ways that really dazzled audiences.
- [37:54]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Can I ask you a couple more questions about the lighting because it's so fascinating? I'm thinking about the fact that in recent years we've seen films or TV series made using natural light and candlelight. Now as cameras are good enough to do that, so Wolf hall and becoming Elizabeth amongst them. And the problem for modern audiences is there's a kind of intimacy, even romance, in candlelight with what connotations would it have had for an early 17th century audience?
- [38:24]
Dr. Will Tosh
It's such a striking difference, isn't it? At Shakespeare's Globe, where I work, we launched the San Wanamaker Playhouse, our indoor theatre, with a production of the Duchess Amalfi in 2014, which was filmed and listeners can watch it online. And actually, I think that the technological learning that came out of filming that candlelit performance was really helpful for later filmings of Wolf hall and things like that. It really conjures up associations of romance, birthdays, intimacy, charm, beauty. All of these things that do not really belong to a play like the Duchess Amalfi, but more to the point, don't really cohere around candles as an early modern lighting technology. Audiences coming into the San Juan and Maker Playhouse, when it's full of candlelight, will be really struck by its beauty, but also probably struck by the fact that it's quite a lot dimmer than an electrically lit room. We kind of go in and go, ooh, kind of the gloom, you know, the kind of charming shadows. I think an early modern person going into a room of that scale lit by 60 or 100 candles would be like, oh my God, it's Piccatilly Circus. You know, this is dazzle. Most people, if they had candles, had one for a room in the hours of darkness, one to do the one thing you're doing, whether it's reading or sewing or eating your dinner or whatever it is. So the notion, you know, that I think put over by sort of earlier generations of film and tv, that sort of every person living in the pre electric past had kind of branches of candles around them at all times is obviously fantasy and doesn't reflect the way that most people responded to darkness and to candlelight. So I don't think there's that sort of immediate association of candlelight with something whether that's terror or romance or anything like that. But there are associations of particular forms of light and particular emotions or attitudes or ideas. There's a particular kind of lighting technology in the early modern period called a dark lantern. Sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it's a metal lantern with a shutter at the front, which means that you can quickly extinguish the light by pulling down the shutter and then put the light back on by opening the shutter. That sounds fairly minor. I accept it's not a kind of world changing technology, but it means you're not having to extinguish a candle and then fiddle with a flint to light it again. You go on, on, off. Now that seems innocuous, but that was associated very intensely, particularly after the early 1600s with villainy, because Guy Fawkes was found with a dark lantern under the Houses of Parliament when he attempted to blow them up. And obviously the main kind of giveaway was the gunpowder. But another Kind of controversial element in what Guy Fawkes was doing or holding was the dark lantern. It was like the thought was, well, why do you need to extinguish your light at a moment's notice? That can only be associated with some sort of evil intent. So a dark lantern held on stage then betokens someone about to do something awful. And you see that in lays of the period as well. And then even simpler kind of ways, a torch. So a flaming torch means that you're outside. People don't hold flaming torches inside for obvious safety reasons. A taper. So a little bit of rope soaked in wax almost certainly means you're in an intimate indoor setting and you may well be going to bed, because people take tapers to bed. Particular kinds of candles, wax candles in particular would denote a certain social setting. So wax candles are more expensive, potentially also a religious setting. Wax candles are used in churches and in chapels. So we perhaps just have a kind of idea of candlelight meaning something an early modern audience would have been more attuned to, the particular lighting technology, the particular quality of the light, and where and when on the stage it was being deployed.
- [42:36]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That was so fascinating. Thank you for talking us through that. I recently had a power cut for about eight hours before these light summer days where it stays light well into the evening. And it was so interesting to experience an evening by candlelight, because normally we have a power cut for about an hour, don't we? And I would highly recommend it as an experience in terms of thinking one's way into the past a little bit. You know, I did take a candle up to bed. And the other thing that lighting sort of raises for me is I know that a lot of research has been done into the way in which the audience could be seen at the Globe, and some people might go onto the stage in order to be seen better. And Gemma Austin, who played the title character in the performance of 2014, which I have rewatched in advance of our conversation, talked of how the intimacy of the replica indoor playhouse invited her to engage with the audience surrounding her. So I wonder what the indoor playhouse, the lighting, that setting, has to say about inviting audiences into that kind of dual act of voyeurism and judgment.
- [43:54]
Dr. Will Tosh
This, again, you really put your finger on a vital difference between early modern performance in the 1590s, 1600s, 16 teens and today. And the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is obviously very unusual in being a small, intimate, candle lit theatre and also a theatre where a lot of the work staged is early modern drama. Not all But a large fraction. And I think what it's asking of audiences is, in a sense, to slightly revisit our assumptions about some of these plays. I think we're quite used, those of us who go to the theatre a lot or enjoy watching early modern drama, to have a kind of quick association with particular plays. And Jacobean drama probably conjures up certain associations in the minds of a modern theatre goer about what that plays might be, what kind of themes it might activate. And probably those themes are not a million miles away from the Duchess of Malfi. They're probably themes that draw on lurid spectacle, female nobility and chastity assailed by outside forces, madness, some kind of proto gothic element of setting or theme, and a kind of dark humour that people may or may not find funny. In the 2000 and twenties, horrid laughter was the term that was used in earlier critical engagements with these plays. And that's not to say that all of that is not present in some form in Malfi and in lots of other early modern plays. But I think watching that sort of drama in a playhouse like the San Wanamaker Playhouse, which is lit in an unfamiliar way, which includes lighting the audience, it means audiences can see each other. It means the actors can see the audience. They're engaging with them in a much more direct way. Monologues and soliloquies don't really exist in that sort of early modern playing space. It can only ever really be talking to the audience, a conversation with the audience. Audiences experience that play in different ways. If you're sat in the pit in the San Juan America Playhouse, you have a really different experience than if you're sat up in the upper gallery, where you might even be looking through the candelabra to see the action below, which is really exciting. And then sometimes it's quite annoying. So you've kind of got these really sort of varied experiences in the room. And although it can be thrilling when an actor is talking to you and sort of you're sharing the actor's emotional and psychological experiences, it can also be deeply disturbing when some of the more lurid elements of Jacobean drama are unfolding on the stage right in front of you, and that sense of proximity becomes bystanderism rather than anything more positive or engaging. You're watching something awful and you can't get away from it. I think that was certainly a sense that was activated really early in performances at the San juanmeka Playhouse and certainly in the Duchess of Malfi. The audiences are right there, right in the sort of thick of the action.
- [47:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's so interesting, isn't it? Because of course, there'll always be something inevitably alien about staging a play according to original practices, as far as one is able to do that. But it suggests there's much to gain from doing so.
- [47:27]
Dr. Will Tosh
It's a huge amount to gain from doing so. And I think that goes for work at the Globe, the outdoor amphitheater and the sound Wanamaker. There's the term that actors, contemporary actors use when thinking about their character in the world that they're in, which is given circumstances. It's like, what is the character? What's just happened? What do they know? Who are they? And that helps an actor kind of create a kind of world map for the person that they're playing. And I think the given circumstances of the Playhouse and the Globe are really provocative in a good way. Those given circumstances are mostly architectural. You know, work takes place in a certain way on that stage, and there's only so much you can do to mitigate that. Even if you choose to do so, it will just happen in a way that's really different to conventional proscini march space, where the audience are kind of in the dark on the other side of the stage. And then you bring in things like candlelight and potentially historic music and historic movement. And without necessarily going the whole original practices, authentic performance hog. We're not trying to do everything that early modern theatre makers did 400 years ago. You're just giving the play a particular set of circumstances and asking it to make meaning today. And what's brilliant is that audiences come out with new questions about the plays that they've just seen. They might see things that they're familiar with, you know, Duchess Amalfi is not an unknown play. It's on school syllabuses. It's, as I said, you know, the most performed, non Shakespearean early modern drama. But it was really surprising how much of the play I certainly realized I hadn't really heard before. Before I saw it in the San Wanamaker and I saw it numerous times, that you really hear Webster's language. And it's a slightly deranging experience because you sort of think you know something and then go, oh, wow, this is wholly new.
- [49:31]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
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- [49:47]
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- [50:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I never cease to be amazed by how a text changes in the mouth of an actor. Given that the one thing you can't control when it comes to staging a play today is that modern audiences bring their modern values to an interpretation like Malfi's play to finish, I wonder if I can ask you why you think this play in particular has retained its emotional power, its emotional impact over the centuries.
- [51:26]
Dr. Will Tosh
So I think like some other early modern plays, particularly those by Shakespeare, there's something about dramatists abilities at this era to capture something about human experience, which is not to say that it's universal in every culture and every time, but to say that the human experiences of sexual desire, of envy, of ambition, of fear, of hope, things that are the raw material of drama were caught and explored and staged in a particularly vibrant and exciting way in the 1590s. 160016 teens. They weren't the first people ever to do that, and they certainly weren't the last. But there was just a sort of of meeting point of language and narrative sources and theatrical ambition that meant that that time created stories that captivated and excited people for generations afterwards. And in those generations afterwards, other dramatists came along and were inspired by those plays in turn. Later on, it was filmmakers, novelists, makers of television programs, et cetera, et cetera, who have been captivated and inspired and want to do something more with that material. So a play like Malfi has been helped by being sort of kept in the canon, if you like, over 400 years. I think particularly the sort of darker plays in the early modern canon got a real boost in the 20th century, particularly post war, particularly post the 1960s and 1970s, when audiences and theatre makers and artists were looking for earlier work, historical work, that seemed to capture something about not only human capacity for wrongdoing and evil, as we see in the kind of grotesque elements of Jacobean drama, but also the sort of possibilities of sexual and identitarian possibility, whether that's a figure like the Duchess asserting her right to a sexuality and a sexual identity, which found a whole new kind of resonance in the post 60s, post 70s era than it would have done in its own time, and certainly did in earlier years, or ways in which kind of queer desire are activated both overtly in these plays and also in a kind of subliminary way through the performance of female parts by boy actors and the fact that dramatists enjoyed kind of leaning into that as a stage of possibility. So I think. I think there's a lot packed into a play like Malfi and the canon that it comes from that mean people are very much not done with asking what it can tell us and asking where those plays can go in future years.
- [54:27]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's wonderful. Thank you. I got two little postscripts, things I want to tell you. One is something that I might have said on this podcast before, but I wanted to tell you, Will, which is that many years ago, I was at Hampton Court as a curator when Tom Betteridge, Gregory Thompson and Greg Walker staged the Play of the Weather in the Great Hall. And one of the early performances was staged with the men of the audience on one side and the women of the audience on the other. And in that early invited audience, we had Will Young, the singer, who was at the time at the kind of height of his fame and very beautiful. So this meant that as the play was being performed, the audience, women and men, looked to Will Young to see his reaction, which I always found fascinating as a kind of reflection on, say, the play being performed before Henry VIII and people looking to see his reaction, but also possibly in thinking about people looking at aristocrats on the stage and wanting to see their reaction. That's postscript number one. And the second is I have a cat that 10 years ago, I called Malfi after the Duchess of Malfi. And when I took her to have her ovaries out, discovered that she was male.
- [55:44]
Dr. Will Tosh
There's something very Jacobean about that as a storyline. I have to say I feel like I've read that play. But I think your point about Will Young at Hampton Court is fabulous, and I love that. And that sense that this isn't a time when a kind of box comes down over the stage and the actors are in their world and nothing can penetrate it. Actors on an early modern stage are always conscious of the room that they're in, and they're conscious of the people in that room and what they bring into the space. And unquestionably dramatic performance at an early modern royal court was about the connection between the most high status person in that room, she's usually the monarch, and what's going on on stage. And that was the line that counted and, and almost nothing else did. And that was certainly the experience of audience members at Jacobean Court Masques, for example, where really they only worked from the position occupied by the king. And everyone else just saw a stagehand in the wings picking his nose.
- [56:51]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What a note to leave it on. Thank you so much for your time. It's been an absolute delight, a great pleasure.
- [56:58]
Dr. Will Tosh
Thank you very much for having me.
- [57:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tutors from History. Hit.
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Dr. Will Tosh
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