Where did Julia Sit?: Another Borrowing from Montaigne in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi

Abstract

At the beginning of Act 2, Scene 4, of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (probably written in 1613), the Cardinal appears with his mistress Julia and they flirt onstage, obviously fueling anti-Catholic sentiment in early audiences. First, he says to her ‘Sit. Thou art my best of wishes’ (2.4.1).1 There is no stage direction here in the original texts, but given the dramatist’s many borrowings elsewhere from John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays (1603, 2nd edn, 1613),2 it is evident, I argue, that Webster intended Julia to sit, not simply on a chair or even on a bed but in the Cardinal’s lap. In the same Act, before the scene in question, when Bosola ridicules women for their natural promiscuousness by referring to their sexual habit as ‘the mathematics’ by which ‘to know the trick how to make a many lines meet in one centre’ (2.2.21–2, 24–5), Webster borrowed this idea and the expression, as F. L. Lucas and other critics have already noted, from Book 3, Chapter 5 in Montaigne’s Essays: ‘All the worlds motions bend and yeelde to this conjunction: it is a matter euery-where infused; and a Centre whereto all lines come, all things looke’.3 Then, Montaigne goes on to discuss phallicism on the next page, and Webster must have continued to make notes in his commonplace book. The French philosopher refers to the contemporary instances of the ‘devotion’ to the male genitalia: