I’m writing about The White Devil and Webster’s other tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, in my dissertation, so it was a lovely surprise to see a production of the former last weekend in Greenwich Village, which was reviewed this week by The New York Times. The critic entirely omits the role of Cornelia, the mother of the cunning and murderous siblings Vittoria and Flaminio. As with so many children and their parents, neither Flaminio nor Vittoria listen to their mother’s exhortations, but the siblings keep their mother by their sides right until they meet their bloody ends. It surprised me to see this omission in the review given her part.
As Flaminio and Vittorio’s plans to do away with those who stand in the way of their advancement becomes clearer to Cornelia, she confronts her son. In response to Flaminio’s protests that he must have a minimum of wealth to live out his life without serving others, Cornelia responds, in lines spoken with a degree of clarity and transparency that contrast with other moments of Webster’s stylistic excess, that no excuses suffice: “What! Because we are poor/ Shall we be vicious?” Flaminio’s response that his father lived a life of wealth, squandering his fortune until it was all gone the day before he died, and inquiring if his mother has any other less nefarious means to keep him out of servitude demonstrate Webster’s marvelous ability to see a situation without passion, free of illusions, and any of the pretty embellishments that ordinary life so often requires we place on our description of things. While Flaminio is not wrong to suggest that his mother cannot provide him or his sister Vittoria with a means to escape a life of servitude and drudgery, he also has no qualms or illusions about the terrible route along which he and Vittoria must proceed in order to attain their enrichment. Flaminio and Vittoria are so close to possessing the wealth to which they aspire that they can smell the skin of the exquisite meats, taste the fine red wines, and touch the diamonds that will soon be all theirs once Vittoria marries the Duke of Brachiano. Webster gives us room to appreciate the cunning and pride that the siblings obviously possess at that the same time that their mother’s harangue coats their entire enterprise in uncertainty, doubt, hesitation.
This conflict between an almost preternatural ability and its shocking display constitutes the animating force of Webster’s drama, and makes it difficult to discern the true nature of any of his best characters. This is a challenge that both the director of the current production and the reviewer of that production prefer to simplify for the sake of clarity. The first half of the production, for instance, basks in the glory of Vittoria’s ingenuity as she crafts a plan to murder her husband and the wife of her lover. Her evil is too clear, so by the time she appears to be a victim of others after the intermission it is only her words that garner her any sympathy.
The critic for the newspaper writes that in The White Devil, you each “pick your poison.” This gets closer to Webster, but also misses the mark; for Vittoria as for Flaminio–or for the Duchess, Ferdinand, and Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi–the poison has already penetrated to our core–it begins with anxious thoughts, continues in extensive meditations, never-ending doubts, perplexities, and terminates in perennial ambivalence, all of which are born in the mind. And it must be asked: if the poison is already in your mind, do we have any choice in selecting it? It’s not enough to say that psychoanalysts would have loved to live in Webster’s time, because it is this period that saw the birth of a totally disabused practice of self-analysis that preceded Freud by almost two centuries. The nuance, detail, and identification of each step in the vagaries of the mind did not, however, impede Webster or any of his contemporaries and characters from seeing the errors before them: when Flaminio responds to Cornelia with a story about his father’s long-gone wealth, she responds with force and determination in act of obvious disappointment. She spits on him.
