The Body and Beyond: The Corporeal and the Supernatural in The Duchess of Malfi

John Webster’s tragedy The Duchess of Malfi is no doubt a play that is concerned with the corporeal and matters of the flesh.  This is reflected not only in the language, but also more overtly in the play’s imagery.  The beginning of the play is filled with images of conjoining hands and conjoining bodies; but as the play progresses, spiraling downward to death and madness, conjoined hands become severed hands and conjoined bodies become dismembered ones (recall the disinterred leg Ferdinand carries on in Act V).  These occurrences of dismemberment and disembodiment are linked hand in hand with supernatural phenomena and the discourse of the supernatural.  Ferdinand’s sudden propensity for digging up limbs from graveyards is attributed to a case of lycanthropy, a condition in which one takes on the form and characteristics of a wolf, often held as a sign of witchcraft or demonic possession.  When Ferdinand reveals the hand he has offered to the Duchess is not his own, but rather a hand severed from the presumably dead Antonio, the Duchess exclaims, “What witchcraft doth he practise that he hath left a dead man’s hand here?” (IV.1.54-55).  It seems that these disturbing matters of the flesh ultimately become an invitation for the supernatural, that these problematic issues of the body must be explained by matters beyond the body and beyond the flesh.