Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

John Webster (c.1580–c.1634) ((Antonio, then, opens the play with a…

- - - - Antonio admires the French court for its lack of corruption, the ‘judicious’
        or wise king having banished all flatterers and people of bad character or reputation.
        
        The king considers this cleansing of his court to be divinely
        inspired; God’s work rather than his own.
        
        This is because of the enormous influence the royal court has on the entire country
        – the court that is healthy has a benign influence, while the corrupt one infects ‘the whole land’.
        
        Antonio then asks what the source is of this ‘blessed government’
        that he found in France and answers that it is the king’s wise and truthful counsellors who, rather than flattering the king, give him candid and truthful advice about the state of the nation.
- - - - 4.
        We could hardly have a clearer indication of how far the Italian courts fall short of the ‘fixed order’ described by Antonio: in place of a rational prince advised and guided by honest advisors, we have a prince who surrounds himself with courtiers whose sole purpose is to flatter his ego with their obsequious behaviour.
        So Webster begins his play with a description of an ideal court only then to show onstage a court that fails in every respect to live up to that ideal. This is a crucial part of his construction of the play’s dramatic world, but most critics have assumed that this portrayal of courtly decadence and corruption in the play text also gains from being viewed in the context of the court of King James I, who had been on the English throne for around ten years when The Duchess of Malfi was first performed. James would wholeheartedly have endorsed the sentiments expressed in Antonio’s opening speech; indeed, he had himself produced a comparable description of the ideal royal court in his book on kingship, Basilikon Doron (Greek for Royal Gift) (1599). The book is addressed to his eldest son and heir Prince Henry, and advises him to take great care in choosing his chief courtiers:
        
        5.see that they bee of a good fame and without blemish: otherwise, what can the people thinke? but that yee have chosen a companie unto you according to your owne humour, and so have preferred these men for the love of their vices and crimes that ye know them to be guyltie of … And nexte, see that they be indued with such honest qualities, as are meete for such offices as yee ordayne them to serve in, that your judgement may be knowne in imploying every man according to his gifts … Make your Court and companie to bee a paterne of godlinesse and all honeste vertues to all the reste of the people.
        (James I, 1599, pp. 76–7, 83)
        
        6.Yet in reality, James’s court was infamous for its profligacy and corruption. He himself showered his favourites with money, offices and privileges, and those same favourites spared no expense in displaying their prestige to the world through their own lavish spending. James’s extravagance contributed to a constant need for money that he satisfied in part by selling titles of honour like knighthoods and peerages. Traditionally thought of as indicators of distinguished ancestry or rewards for loyal service, such titles in James’s court were up for grabs by anyone with sufficient money to pay for them. It is not hard to see how a court dominated by the king’s powerful favourites which funded its taste for extravagance through the unabashed sale of honours worked to point out the discrepancy between James’s theory of kingship and the actual practice. This was no doubt reinforced by the Jacobean court’s reputation for graft – James’s treasurers were notoriously corrupt – and for the sexual licentiousness that will be embodied in Webster’s play by Julia and the Cardinal. Later in the opening scene of The Duchess, when Ferdinand secures Bosola the post of the Duchess’s Provisorship of Horse on condition that he spies on his employer, the play enacts another feature of James’s court: its status as a hotbed of plotting and intrigue.