Incest and lycanthropy: Ferdinand’s impotency protecting his social rank
and the violent ways control is manifested in Webster’s The Duchess of
Malfi.
Ferdinand, the Duke of Calabria in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi is a study of the
carnal and grotesque. In his struggle for power he engages in destructive behavior that
continually manifests as violent outbursts and actions. These actions directly contribute to the
tragic devastation of his family. It is in his incestuous fantasy for his sister, the Duchess, that this
violent grasp for power is most obvious: his need to control her sexually and his failure to do so
is analogous to his authoritative and possible physical impotence. This essay examines the
grotesque spectacles arranged for the benefit of the Duchess with the intent of understanding the
extent of the Duke’s damaged connection with reality and the use of madness as a weapon for
the intention of achieving sexual authority. Additionally, I will explore Ferdinand’s impotency
acted out in his supposed lycanthropic transformations.
Nador Fodor’s Lycanthropy as a Psychic Mechanism argues that Ferdinand’s type of
lycanthropy can be seen as “self-denunciation” or the freeing of one’s guilt. This essay finds
connections between Ferdinand’s incestuous desire for his sister and his descent into
lycanthropy. It is my assertion that Fodor’s analysis applies to Ferdinand and his monstrous
transformation; I further explore the possibility that his transformation is an attempt on his part
to alleviate himself of the subversive desire he possess for his sister, his guilt brought on by her
murder, and the criminal responsibility of that act. I challenge clinical definitions of “sanity” that
depend on very narrow definitions of “the human” to broaden our understanding of the nature of
emotional catastrophes and their inherent nature to bring about psychosomatic regeneration.
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The intensely violent Duchess of Malfi may begin as a contrived love story complicated
by family in-fighting, but the plot quickly unfolds into the world of tragic madness. Characters
often waver between stable and unstable mental health and there is a constant pushing and
testing of boundaries between characters. Primary focus is given to Ferdinand who, above all
others, appears to push the boundaries the most as he descens into deep madness. In this
exploration I expose Ferdinand’s motivation for his increasingly bizarre actions and answer
questions regarding the true nature of his apparent mental illness. Consideration will focus
largely on two main issues: Ferdinand’s incestuous desire for his sister and his subsequent lapse
into lycanthropy. These areas are significant in answering questions concerning Ferdinand’s
mental health but, more importantly, their overlap implicates how these two tie together.
At the fore of all of Ferdinand’s monstrous instability is his overwhelming and insecure
need for control. This need is established early in Act I, Scene I:
Ferdinand:
Why do you laugh? Methinks you that are courtiers should be my
touchwood: take fire when I give fire, that is, laugh when I laugh,
were the subject never so witty. (1.1.124-126)
Having entered the play a mere 36 lines earlier he is immediate to chastise his lower courtiers,
reminding them that they should be his “touchwood.” It is clear from this scene that there is an
imbalance between how Ferdinand thinks others should think of him and how he is actually
perceived. This is further validated by Antonio’s summation of his character: “He speaks with
others’ tongues and hears men’s suits/ With others’ ears;” (1.1.173-174). This line also
foreshadows Ferdinand’s later duality in his lycanthropic transformation—note how Antonio
uses the term “others.” Ferdinand does not “speak” or “hear” with the tongues and ears of other
men but with an obscure “otherness” Antonio leaves unexplained. An “otherness” that suggests
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his existence resides outside the normative boundaries. As Barbara Correll notes in her essay
“Malvolio at Malfi: Managing Desire in Shakespeare and Webster,” Webster thematically
focuses on a “sustained attention to mobility” (69). However, unlike Correll, I believe this is seen
most dramatically in Ferdinand rather than Bosola and Antonio. Antonio’s reluctant attitude
negates his concern for social climbing, while Bosola’s desire for social mobility is unmatched
by Ferdinand’s obsessive need for status.
Ferdinand’s need is not simply limited to control and status over his courtiers. His
introductory scene with them is merely a set up to ease the audience into the more complex and
troubled relationship with his sister, the Duchess. As a new widow, the family must reorganize
their hierarchal order and both brothers, but especially Ferdinand, seem keen on preserving their
male authority and preventing the Duchess’s agency. However, given this status change to a
wealthy, landed widow without direct male authority, she assumes a station that equals if not
rivals theirs, entitling her to a degree of freedom and power over her own life that threatens the
brothers. The brothers plan to suppress their sister’s agency derives through the forced control
over her body. By denying her the right to remarry they remove her sexual authority and negate
the possibility of the inheritance structure changing through the birth of new children, and thus
maintaining their own place in the structure.
I suggest that this breakdown of patriarchal norms and hierarchy catalyzes in
Ferdinand’s quest to seek alternative ways to restore the norm and, to control the Duchess.
Employing Bosola as his intelligencer marks the beginning of his scheming to penetrate her
private life. During their initial meeting, Ferdinand’s concern for his sister seems more than
fraternal and his insistence that she not remarry suspicious:
Ferdinand:
I would not have her marry again.
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Bosola:
No sir?
Ferdinand:
Do not you ask the reason, but be satisfied I say I would not.
(1.1.257-260)
His tone is threatening and guarded while his refusal to give a reason for his desire to keep his
sister unwed acts as a poor defensive mechanism to conceal his agenda. A later exchange
between himself, the Duchess, and the Cardinal further develops his control issues as he
reiterates his decision that his sister not remarry: “Marry? They are most luxurious/ Will wed
twice” (1.1.299-300). The conversation between the three attempts to remain light as the siblings
banter wittily over the brothers’ “terrible good council” (1.1.314). However, Ferdinand’s
preoccupation with his sister’s marital status takes on a distinctly hostile quality that turns
overtly sexual and violent after the exit of the Cardinal:
Ferdinand:
You are my sister.
[Showing his dagger] This was my father’s poniard. Do you see?
I’d be loath to see’t look rusty, ‘cause ‘twas his.
I would have you to give o’er these chargeable revels;
A visor and a mask are whispering rooms
That were nev’r built for goodness. Fare ye well—
And women like that part which, like the lamprey,
Hath nev’r a bone in’t.
Duchess:
Fie, sir!
Ferdinand:
Nay,
I mean the tongue. Variety of courtship!
What cannot a neat knave with a smooth tale
Make a woman believe? Farewell, lusty widow.
(1.1.332-341)
The imagery of Ferdinand moving closely to the Duchess, unsheathing his poniard and
threatening her with the penetration of the blade, followed by his speech about women who like
“the boneless lamprey”—an obvious sexual innuendo, highlights Ferdinand’s sexual tension for
his sister that is manifesting in his desire to control her.
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Early literary criticism was hesitant to name Ferdinand’s desires as sexual or incestuous,
however, in John Webster: A Critical Study, Clifford Leech had this to say:
The grossness of his language to her in Act I, the continued violence of his
response to the situation, his holding back from identifying her husband and,
when that identity is established, from killing him until the Duchess is dead, his
momentary identification of himself with her first husband, his necrophilia in Act
V—all these things…seem to point in one direction. (57)
This gross and violent language is repeated in what the Cardinal calls “so wild a tempest”
(2.5.18) as Ferdinand rages violently over the news Bosola brings him that the Duchess has had a
child. He begins to imagine her with various lovers: “some strong-thighed bargeman,/Or one
o’th’ woodyard, that can quoit the sledge/Or toss the bar, or else some lovely squire/That carries
the coals up to her privy lodgings” (2.5.43-46). Ferdinand’s psychological fear of being tainted
through an association with the lower class drives these lines as well as the motivation behind his
desire to control his sister. He is not voyeuristically fantasizing about her with others of the same
social standing, but with the lowest of the low in his estimation. He imagines her space and body
being penetrated by lowly workers who he is careful to describe in terms of physicality but never
in the language of wealth or title as he and others of his station would be described. Just as he
describes these lower class lovers in terms of physicality, the ways in which they penetrate the
Duchess’ space is also physical. This imagined ability for others, especially those of such low
rank, to penetrate the Duchess only reinforce his own failures as Ferdinand has so far been
unsuccessful and impotent to penetrate his sister. Up to now he has only managed to threaten her
with a poniard, a phallic symbol which is not even his own but which was inherited through his
father, as well as an attempt to penetrate her castle’s interior through his secret investigator,
Bosola—gaining access to her, ironically, through someone of lower class.
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He responds to this fear by the over compensation given to the protection of his own
social rank and further projects this onto the Duchess. My assertion is validated by Frank
Whigham who adeptly identifies this behavior in “Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of
Malfi;” “Ferdinand’s incestuous inclination towards his sister is a social posture, of hysterical
compensation—a desperate expression of the desire to evade degrading association with
inferiors” (169). For him, the taboo of incest is negated by the need to maintain pure blood lines.
Additionally, sexual control and the physical penetration of her is the ultimate form of power,
neither of which is he able to attain by the end of the play, leaving him an impotent character in
terms of both sex and power. Over the course of Acts III and VI Ferdinand’s behavior becomes
not only erratic and disturbing but monstrous as any control he thought he had slips away from
him as he learns the extent of the Duchess’s actions.
Psychologically, Ferdinand has lost power in his imstability to control his sister—he
descends into a heightened state of madness and contrives a series of events that perform like the
nightmarish revenge of a jilted lover. The rational punishment her brother the Cardinal enacts:
banishment, separation from her husband, and imprisonment in her duchy, are not enough to
satisfy the lunatic Ferdinand. Instead, he creates a grotesque spectacle that he hopes will erode
her authority allowing him to gain access into her interiority. He fanaticizes penetrating her
physically, reducing and humiliating her bodily. Impotent to effect these bodily injuries however,
he wages full scale psychological warfare on her. This war is dramatically waged by bringing her
a severed hand bearing her husband’s wedding ring, showing her life-like wax figures of her
dead husband and children, and surrounding her with “mad folk” (4.1-4.2). When Bosola asks:
“Why do you do this?” (4.1.118), Ferdinand responds: “To bring her despair” (4.1.119). Through
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it all though, right up to her strangulation, the Duchess retains her sense of self—her famous line:
“I am Duchess of Malfi still” (4.2.138) resounds beyond her death and haunts the rest of the play.
As an impotent character, Ferdinand hands off the murder of his sister to Bosola and
when presented her dead body he indulges in a remorseful response typical of an unstable person
disassociating themselves from responsibility. Disassociating himself from the acts he
masterminded gives him license to fully explore the madness that he has unsuccessfully hidden.
What is unusual for this Jacobean drama is Webster’s use of lycanthropy as the platform for that
madness—“The Duchess of Malfi” is the only play of this time to use the disorder, however,
Brett Hirsch notes that while “Ferdinand is the only genuine werewolf; a staged werewolf
appears in Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy [and] Shakespeare presents characters with “wolfish”
desires and “wolfish visages” (“Italian Werewolf,” 13). Incidents of and popularity for the belief
in lycanthropy reached its peak by the end of the sixteenth century (Fahy, Lycanthropy, 37),
furthermore, in 1603 it was decided by the courts during the trial of Jean Grenier that
“lycanthropy was nothing more than an insane delusion” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 525). Thus
to incorporate lycanthropy into the play, while interesting, would have been out of fashion if not
downright unpopular with the audience.
What then would motivate Webster to use the lycanthropic transformation? I argue that
Webster uses lycanthropy two fold: one, it acts as an escape/coping mechanism for Ferdinand,
and two, it questions the criminality of his actions. During Nandor Fodor’s investigation of
lycanthropy in dreams she concluded that:
The old, savage lycanthropic beliefs…are still active conditions and are exploited
for the representation of criminal motives, while the transformation is used
symbolically as self-denunciation for secret deeds, fantasies or desires (Psychic
Mechanism, 310-11).
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This succinctly describes Ferdinand: he fears the taint of lower class inferiors and so desires
power and control above all else, this desire manifests in his sexual fantasies and incestuous
behavior towards his sister and his human to animal transformation removes his “humanness”
from the crimes as well as the “secret deeds” he plotted and enacted.
The moment of human to animal transformation is suggested during his brief vigil and
eulogy over his sister’s body. He twice makes references to wolves—upon seeing the strangled
children he says: “The death/Of young wolves is never to be pitied” (4.2.257), he remains
unmoved by their murders and denies them their humanness, marking them inhuman and
undeserving of pity due of their lower class parentage. He is then made to look into the eyes of
the dead Duchess and becomes repentant asking: “Why didst not thou pity her?” (4.2.272).
Whigham proposes that in looking into her death dazzled eyes he faces his own death too (171).
He further notes that Sartre’s discussion of sadistic torture is applicable to Ferdinand for the
reason that once the execution of the Duchess is consummated he realizes that it was her freedom
he wished to enslave; further, by the Duchess choosing her death: “Dispose my breath how
please you” (4.2.228) she retains this freedom and denies his further attempts at ownership (183).
The second reference to wolves takes place after he argues with Bosola over his payment.
Seeking to remove all guilt he shifts the blame to Bosola who asks: “Who shall dare/To reveal
this?” (4.2.308-9) to which he replies:
Ferdinand:
Oh, I’ll tell thee:
The wolf shall find her grave and scrape it up,
Not to devour the corpse, but to discover
The horrid murder.
(4.2.310-13)
It is here in this second reference to wolves that he undergoes a psychic transformation. He
becomes the wolf that shall find her grave, and unlike his human self, his animal self does not
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desire to control her in his former obsessive, and all consuming devouring of her—instead, it will
be the animal that discovers the murder—as in, sees the truth, Antonio’s early character
assement, “He speaks with others’ tongues and hears men’s suits/ With others’ ears” (1.1.173-
174), now consciously “sees” with his “other” eyes. The transformation that has been building up
since Act I is now complete as the psychological pathology festering in his subconsciousness
manifests outwardly and the newly sympathetic Ferdinand-as-wolf can escape mentally,
physically, and of criminal responsibility from his human desires, fantasies and secret deeds.
For the remainder of the play Ferdinand dissolves beyond any hope of stability, he
attacks his shadow, rages nonsensically, and in his last scene joins a scuffle where he wounds his
brother the Cardinal and fatally attacks Bosola who launches back with his own lethal strike.
Ferdinand’s death reinforces all of his fears—he is stabbed, penetrated physically by the servant
Bosola—in effect tainted by the lower class he obsessively attempted to avoid. He dies at the feet
of Bosola crying out for his sister with his last words forming a rhyming couplet: “Whether we
fall by ambition, blood, or lust,/Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust” (5.5.87-88). The
clarity and culmination of this death line brings the play to its climax as Ferdinand makes his last
human to “other” transformation. The remaining characters with any significance die shortly
after Ferdinand and the play finishes awkwardly with minor characters attempting to reconcile
the social and power hierarchy left defunct by Ferdinand.
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Works Cited
Chisholm, Hugh . "Werwolf". Encyclopaedia Britannica. New York: The Encyclopaedia
Britannica Company, 1911. Print.
Correll, Barbara. “Malvolio at Malfi: Managing Desire in Shakespeare and Webster.”
Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 58. Spring 2007. Print.
Engle, Lars, Eisaman Maus Katharine, and Rasmussen Eric. English RENAISSANCE Drama A
Norton Anthology. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002. Print.
Fahy, T.A.. "Lycanthropy: A Review". Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine Vol. 82 January
1989: 37-39. Print.
Fodor, Nandor. "Lycanthropy as a Psychic Mechanism". The Journal of American Folklore, Vol.
58, No. 230 October-December 1945: 310-316. Print.
Hirsch, Brett D.. "An Italian Werewolf in London: Lycanthropy and The Duchess of Malfi".
Early Modern Literary Studies 11.2 September, 2005: 21-43. Print.
Leech Clifford. John Webster: A Critical Study. London: Hogarth, 1951. Print.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness, Trans. Hazel Barnes, New York: Pocket, 1966. Print.
Whighm, Frank. "Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi". PMLA, Vol. 100. No. 2
March 1985: 167-186. Print.
Additional Works Consulted
Hirsch, Brett D.. "Werewolves and Severed Hands: Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and
Heywood and Brome's The Witches of Lancashire". Notes and Queries March 2006: 92-
94. Print.
Maryanski, Alexandra, and Turner Jonathan. Incest Origins of the Taboo. Boulder: Paradigm
Publishers, 2005. Print.
Orenstein, Catherine. Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a
Fairy Tale. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Print.
Pollak, Ellen. Incest and the English Novel, 1684-1814. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University
Press, 2003. Print.
Sidky, H.. Witchcraft, Lycanthropy, Drugs and Disease An Anthropological Study of the
European Witch-Hunts. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.