"Great Women of Pleasure": Main Plot and Subplot in The Duchess of Malfi

Abstract

It is commonplace to say that cannot construct plays-to agree with George Rylands, who directed 1945 revival of The Duchess of Malfi, that Webster could handle scene but he could not compass plot.'' Even though our notion of plot' with regard to Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists has changed after important work of Maynard Mack and Bernard Beckerman, who, among others, have illuminated multiple, analogical nature of Shakespeare's dramatic construction, it remains acceptable to speak of unplotted undulations of Webster's drama.2 As John Russell Brown points out in his edition of The Duchess of Malfi, the structure of play is yet to be vindicated.3 Compounding problem of dramatic construction is one of moral interpretation. Some critics like to see play as cautionary tale against marrying an inferior; other critics and directors invariably treat it as melodrama with heroic martyr at its center. himself included subplot in The Duchess of Malfi which, though it has received little serious critical attention, may have been intended as an interpretive key to certain aspects of main plot. An examination of function of subplot in The Duchess of Malfi illuminates both Webster's dramatic construction and his moral emphasis in play. The adventures of Cardinal's mistress that form Julia subplot were pure invention on Webster's part. Gunnar Boklund tells us that did not borrow subplot from any source, used as he was to borrowing.4 Nor is subplot strictly necessary to main plot, fact which has led some critics to dismiss it as a mere excrescence on play.5 Yet structural significance of