The severed hand in Webster's Duchess of Malfi

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Spring, 2004 by Albert H. Tricomi

With the ascendancy of cultural studies, the purpose and significance of source study in literary criticism has become less certain. At the time that R. W. Dent wrote John Webster's Borrowing in 1960, he declared that the purpose of source study is to "gain not only a more accurate but also a more complete view of Webster's [--that is to say, the author's--] creative process." (1) But for us today the author, although far from "dead," is no longer the exclusive object of study or concern; rising in importance are the cultural transactions or "circulating social energies," as Stephen Greenblatt put it, that produce textual meaning. (2) Given these present concerns, source study needs to expand its object from a restricted preoccupation with the author and move to accommodate as well pertinent discursive contexts that produce fresh understanding of literary texts in their social embeddedness.

The example I propose to treat begins as a long-standing problem of source identification in Webster criticism: the origin or context for the "dead man's hand" episode in the first scene of the fourth act of The Duchess of Malfi. In this scene, Duke Ferdinand, the young Duchess's erratic, highly volatile twin brother, punishes his sister for secretly remarrying after her first husband's death. Having enveloped the Duchess in total darkness, Ferdinand determines to terrify her with a series of mental tortures that begins with his presenting (what the Duchess discovers to be) a dead man's hand:

   [FERDINAND.] I come to seale my peace with you: here's a hand,
     To which you have vow'd much love: the Ring upon't You gave.
     gives her a dead mans hand.
   DUTCHESSE. I affectionately kisse it.
   FERDINAND. 'Pray doe: and bury the print of it in your heart:
     I will leave this Ring with you, for a Love-token:
     And the hand, as sure as the ring: and doe not doubt
     But you shall have the heart too: when you need a friend
     Send it to him, that ow'de it: you shall see
     Whether he can ayd you.
   DUTCHESSE. You are very cold.
     I feare you are not well after your travell:
     Hah? lights: oh horrible!
   FERDINAND. Let her have lights enough. Exit.
     [Enter Servants with torches.]
   DUTCHESSE. What witch-craft doth he practise, that he hath left
     A dead-mans hand here?
   Here is discover'd, (behind a Travers;) the artificiall
   figures of Antonio, and his children; appearing as if they
   were dead. (3)

Pertinent in fixing the cultural context of the passage is, as we shall see, the Duchess's anguished reaction, which I also cite:

   There is not betweene heaven and earth one wish
   I stay for after this: it wastes me more,
   Then were't my picture, fashion'd out of wax,
   Stucke with a magicall needle and then buried
   In some fowle dung-hill.
   (IV.i.60-4)

Having watched his sister closely, Ferdinand exults, explaining to Bosola and thus to the audience that the bodies are pieces of artifice, prepared in wax:

   Excellent; as I would wish: she's plagu'd in Art.
   These presentations are but fram'd in wax,
   By the curious Master in that Qualitie,
   Vincentio Lauriola, and she takes them
   For true substantiall Bodies.
   (lines 109-13)

The main source for Webster's tragedy is, of course, Painter's Palace of Pleasure, but it does not treat the subject of a dead man's hand, or for that matter Ferdinand's framing of the wax images and his subsequent affliction with lycanthropy. (4) Webster's first comprehensive scholarly editor, F. L. Lucas, relying on Charles Crawford, traces the source of this torture scene to Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, observing that the "scene with the dead hand and the mock corpses recalls ... the pretended executions of Philoclea and Pamela in the sight of those dearest to them in Arcadia, III.--with the difference however that Sidney's attempts to be terrifying are painfully ineffective." (5) But a perusal of the Arcadia reveals that while Sidney presents a mock spectacle of corpses and pretended executions, nowhere does a dead hand appear as part of the spectacle. (6) Subsequent studies by Gunnar Boklund and O. Bruckl confirm that Sidney's Arcadia is a source for The Duchess, but again neither can adduce evidence to explain the dead man's hand. (7)

Addressing this gap, Dent recalls Mario Praz's belief that Webster was indebted to a story by Herodotus ("Tale of Rhampsinitus") in which a thief escapes but leaves "a dead man's arm in the grasp of his intended captor." (8) David Gunby's critical edition of The Duchess repeats this suggestion but is not impressed with its plausibility, for as Dent himself had observed, quite correctly, "there is no evidence that Webster was in any way familiar with Herodotus," and "the resemblance is slight." (9)

The source I propose to put forward comes from another direction, not literary high culture but popular contemporary culture--and its subject is witchcraft. The text is Henry Boguet's Discours execrable des sorciers, first published in 1590, and the relevant episode is the principal part of its forty-seventh chapter, "De la Metamorphose d'homme en Bestes & specialement des Lycanthropes, ou loups-garoux" ("Of the Metamorphosis of Men into Beasts, and Especially of Lycanthropes or Loups-garoux"): (10)