The Treachery of Images in The Duchess of Malfi

For thirty years people have been asking me how I reconcile X with Y! The truthful answer is that I don't. Everything about me is a contradiction and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There is a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them. Orson Welles

Centuries before these words were uttered by Orson Welles, playwright John Webster seemed to understand this idea. Often cited as a ‘structurally defective’ and ‘frequently contradictory’ (Leech 66), Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi embodies this concept of a willful mass of contradictions. Few if any plays from the era create characters so vivid and real, yet so regularly remind the audience of the artificiality of this staged drama. Webster draws on clichés, other plays, and the culture at large to add more jarring elements to this strange mix of high naturalism and cutting metatheatics. With this, Webster concocts a play that alternatively blurs and contrasts the border between what is real and what is only representation or an image of something else. By confusing the theatrical and the natural on stage, Webster emphasizes a greater relationship between the real and the unreal, the imagined and the depicted, while also pointedly illustrating the power representation and images have to affect reality.