Only to number in her funeral train.
Come, I’ll be out of this ague. I will not
Save myself. Now Justice do thy worst.
Enter Count Malatesta and his train, Delio and Duchess’ eldest son.
My lord, a sad disaster!
MALATESTA
Why? How’s this?
BOSOLA
The Duchess of Malfi lies within
Murdered by her brother, the Lord Ferdinand, dead, too,
Myself an actor in the main of all,
Much against my better nature and in the end
Neglected.
MALATESTA
Let him be bound. Good Delio,
We come too late.
DELIO
I heard so and
Was armed for’t ere I came. Let us make noble use
Of this great ruin and join all our force
To establish this young and hopeful gentleman
In his mother’s right.
MALATESTA
Yet I have heard
He is not wholly of noble birth.
DELIO
An idle rumour,
As ill founded as all which hath befallen
Within these ancient and too firmly mortared walls.
And, were it true, if here should spring
A new shoot from a hundred-year-old tree
Whose trunk too long hath twined upon itself
It were a hopeful portent.
MALATESTA
So let us now
Convey to burial these unhappy brethren.
From hidden causes their misfortunes grow;
We’ll pity when the cause we can not know.
Notes and Variants
Texts by Brecht
BRECHT’S VERSION OF WEBSTER’S ‘DUCHESS OF MALFI’
1. Backed by his brother the Cardinal, the Duke of Aragon, prior to going to war on her behalf, forbids his widowed sister ever to remarry, and places a spy in her household.
2. Hardly has her brother left than the Duchess tells her steward that she loves him, and they go to bed.
3. The spy discovers this when she becomes pregnant, and he sends a letter to the Duke.
4. The Duke gets the letter just before a battle. Confused by the idea of having to hurry back, he fights badly and is taken prisoner. (Evasion.)
5. After spending some years in captivity the Duke returns and finds that his sister has remarried. He bombards her with threats. The Duchess turns down the steward’s offer to fight for her, seeing this as an interference in her dispute with her princely brother; she decides to take refuge with her brother the Cardinal. (Evasion.) None the less she is moved to confide her plan to the spy by his praise for her beloved.
6. The Duke denounces his sister to the Cardinal as a whore. The Cardinal decides to excommunicate her and confiscate her duchy. He recommends a cooler approach to his brother, whose passion astounds him.
7. Having fled the Cardinal, the Duchess and her family are excommunicated by him and banished.
8. Fleeing once more, and free as a bird, the Duchess comes to realize that her brother the Cardinal acted out of avarice, but fails to understand the Duke and his motives. A letter from him shows her what a deadly hatred he bears her husband, and she sends the latter ahead with one of the children. She is arrested. (The Duchess’s uncertainty about the Duke is an evasion.)
9. In his flight the steward complains to his young son about the fate of those who let themselves be persuaded not to fight. (Evasion.)
10. The Duke has the dead bodies of her husband and little son shown to the Duchess. Deeply wounded by her despair, he decides to use the surgical knife to cut deeper. (Evasion.)
11. On seeing her executioners, the Duchess realizes that her brother’s pronouncement of the death sentence is a declaration of love, and expresses her sympathy with him. Over her coffin the Duke threatens the executioner for having put his sentence into effect. (The Duchess’s realization, an evasion.)
12. Arriving posthaste after hearing of the Duchess’s murder, the Cardinal finds the Duke close to madness. During a memorial service organized by the Duke, the Cardinal, to stop him blaming himself, reminds him that the Duchess was no better than a whore, and the Duke kills him for the insult. He in turn is killed by his lieutenant, who has provoked his hostility by a cynical remark. (Evasion.)
[BBA 500/47-49.]
HOW ‘THE DUCHESS OF MALFI’ OUGHT TO BE PERFORMED
The model to be followed is the Broadway musical which, thanks to certain fiercely competing groups composed of speculators, popular stars, good scene designers, bad composers, witty if second-rate songwriters, inspired costumiers, and truly modern dance directors, has become the authentic expression of all that is American. Alienation effects are extensively used by the designers and dance directors, the latter deriving theirs from folklore. The painted backdrops which constitute the main scenery reflect the influence of modern painting, including good surrealist ideas. In the dance numbers, some of them intelligently worked-out mimes, one now and again finds gestic elements of the epic theatre. The plot is strongly outlined and provides a sturdy scaffolding for the various insertions.
Unless the groupings in Malfi have as much meaning as the dispositions in a musical, and the delivery of the verse arias the …
[From Schriften zum Theater 4, p. 196. The typescript ends thus at the foot of a page, so that it is not clear if Brecht left it unfinished or if the rest has been lost.]
LETTER TO PAUL CZINNER
Dear Dr. Czinner,
Herewith a few points as to essential alterations.
1. The lighting needs to be much brighter, since long passages spoken in verse are virtually unintelligible.
2. The grouping of the actors should at least be changed so as to prevent them having to deliver scarcely intelligible (and sometimes imperfectly spoken) passages with their backs to the audience.
3. It is essential to return to the adaptation provided by Auden and myself. No cuts should be made without the agreement of both of us. Nor should additional passages from Webster be introduced without our being consulted, since the adaptation consists in a series of carefully considered cuts which were thoroughly and frequently discussed with Elisabeth Bergner, who approved them.
4. Not enough thought has been given to the casting of Ferdinand, as Elisabeth herself says. What is more, the director’s conception of the part is a wrong one, as you and Elisabeth both say—so wrong as effectively to obscure and distort the whole sense of the play. You must engage a different Ferdinand.
5. Almost every scene needs to be redirected so as to make the story intelligible to the audience. I suggest that for this you should engage a fresh director. The present director has ignored the adaptation and seems quite incapable of directing in such a way as to allow the audience to follow the plot. (I understand that the London critics likewise complained of the ‘obscure plot’ in his direction of the original Webster version.)
Would you let me know by Monday, 30 September, what you propose to do about these points?
Yours,
Bertolt Brecht
[BBA 1175/01-02. Copy of a letter dated ‘Boston, 26 September 1946’. These appear to represent the changes which Brecht felt were needed before the Boston production could move on to New York.]
ATTEMPTED BROADWAY PRODUCTION OF ‘THE DUCHESS OF MALFI’
The adaptation of John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi was undertaken at the request of an émigré German actress who had had success on the English stage. The additional verses were translated by Auden, who also saw to it that the original was not unduly maltreated. The actress feared that the New York critics might be provoked by the amputation of a literary monument. However, it turned out that the critics in question were little concerned about careful restoration and largely ignorant of the work (not a single comparison being made with any passage of the original). The production was supervised by an English director and involved old-style declamation in
accordance with that so-called Shakespearean tradition whose style derives from the nineteenth century and has of course nothing to do with the Elizabethan theatre. The shortcomings of this tradition could be clearly observed. The story narrated by the play was not performed; wherever it came through none the less everything possible was done to damp down its startling twists. The characters were flattened out by the pernicious practice of stressing the ‘eternally human’ element, while the shabby attempt to make each event a typical case purged of any operation of chance, so that the audience might blindly follow the workings of ‘fate’, stripped those events of all reality. The actors clung to their purple passages, their arias, for dear life, but without being able to ground them in the action (and for that matter without knowing how to sing). The leading actress refused to let the Duchess’s experiences determine her character, nor on the other hand did she stick to one kind of character throughout; thus up to a given scene it was Countess Mitzi and thereafter Mary Queen of Scots. The line taken in the adaptation was that the Duchess’s brothers were using her bourgeois love affair as the rope with which to hang her (the Duchess embarks on a bourgeois marriage), but the production saw the ‘master of the Duchess’s household’ as a comely princeling and cut the scene where she tells her bourgeois husband not to interfere in the dispute between her and her noble brothers. The steady aggravation of the tortures to which she is subjected by Ferdinand, himself in love, lost all meaning because his helplessness was not portrayed; while in the final act the actress rejected a scene where the Duchess sees that her death sentence is also her brother’s declaration of love. This sprang from a lack of intelligence and stature, and still more from a technical inability to play such episodes. This was something which she shared with the American Antonio and the English Ferdinand. Trained at the Munich Kammerspiele at the end of the First World War and subsequently at Reinhardt’s and Barnowsky’s theatres in Berlin, she did not command the technique of the German epic theatre. As for the rest of the cast, they lacked (and no doubt despised) that of the American musical, which may be entirely phony and provide nothing but empty entertainment in greedy obedience to the fashions of the day, but has nevertheless managed to evolve certain primitive epic methods which could at least serve to present the great Elizabethans in something halfway resembling a contemporary manner.
[From Schriften zum Theater 4, pp. 194-6. Not included in GW. The Broadway production opened on 15 October 1946.]
Editorial Note
1. GENERAL
The U.S. Copyright Office contains three complete adaptations of the Duchess by Brecht and his collaborators: Brecht-Hays (1943); Auden (1945); Brecht-Auden (1946). The Brecht Archive, Berlin, contains no fewer than five complete or near-complete texts of the adaptation, as well as more entries for subsidiary materials than for any other of Brecht’s works apart from Galileo. Two of these texts (BBA 144 and 146) predate the 1943 copyrighted version or belong to that immediate period; a third (BBA 1167) has a notation by Elisabeth Hauptmann, ‘Auden’; a fourth (1177) is a major revision of the 1943 copyrighted text and has manuscript additions and changes most of which have been incorporated in the typed text called ‘Exemplar Barbara B’ (BBA 1419). This last text, then, in the possession of Brecht’s daughter, seems to be the one most likely to summarize Brecht’s contribution; it shows many signs of his revision, mostly in deleting and adding lines and speeches, tightening scenes and shortening them. The mass of material numbered 1174, however, contains more than two acts of a freshly typed text which includes all of Brecht’s changes in 1419 and which apparently was meant to depend upon 1419’s unchanged portions to form a complete play. In this text (1174), the manuscript modifications are fewer, though single sheets and groups of sheets following the coherent revised section (1174/01-64) reveal subsequent modifications and/or alternate versions of material in earlier parts of 1174 or in the formerly unchanged parts of the Barbara Brecht script.
Although no certain dates can be put on these last two texts (they are demonstrably later than mid-1943 and were typed by the same New York firm which typed the 1945 and 1946 copyrighted texts), both show careful work by Brecht and represent his continued, perhaps his conclusive, work on the play. Significantly, neither relies very extensively on The White Devil: whether this situation indicates that both texts date from a period before (or after) such insertions were contemplated or that Brecht decided not to attempt the amalgamation cannot be judged. Certainly the inclusion of material from The White Devil, having been considered by the collaborators part way through their work, was eventually dropped. Possibly the Barbara Brecht script and more probably BBA in a date from the latter part of the oeriod durino which Brecht worked on the play (i.e. 1945 and 1946). A reconstructed text using the coherent portions of BBA 1174 supplemented by BBA 1419 appears as an Appendix to Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays, Vol. 7 (New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 330-450. Here we have chosen to print the chief adaptation preceding W. H. Auden’s entry into the work—a text based on the 1943 copyrighted version but incorporating subsequent changes by Brecht and H. R. Hays. Brecht and Auden made significant revisions in their further work, and these have been cited in the notes through reference to the Random House text.
The draft plan entitled ‘Brecht’s version of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi’ (pp. 419-20) gives a general view of Brecht’s design for the play and his attitude towards his work on it. Although this story cannot be directly linked with any of the surviving texts (for example, paragraph 5 describes Ferdinand’s captivity whereas all the surviving texts account for the passage of time by delaying Bosola’s arrival with news of the Duchess’s activities), most of the major points of Brecht’s adaptation appear in the list. Brecht apparently criticizes Webster, and perhaps himself, with the word ‘evasion’, specifically the muting of Ferdinand’s incestuous jealousy of the Duchess. Each time the action provides an opportunity for explicit recognition or statement of this motive, the characters turn aside. The very basic decision to emphasize this motive (in the original it remains implicit and one among several possibilities) eventually led to the introduction of a prologue (partly from John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore) in the Barbara Brecht script and to many other interpolations throughout the play. Brecht also decided to give both the Cardinal and Ferdinand an economic motive (possession of the Duchess’ estates), and there are increasingly frequent references to this mercenary incentive from the time of the 1943 copyrighted version forward.
A second, more structural, change comes with the very end of the play. Webster’s controversial decision to place the Duchess’s death in the fourth, rather than the final, act is replaced by a conclusion in which the deaths of brother and sister occur closer together and nearer the play’s end. This second modification meant recasting material from the original fourth and fifth acts and also required several adjustments in earlier scenes. Webster’s Act IV (all citations in roman numerals refer to J. R. Brown’s ‘Revels’ edition of The Duchess of Malfi, Methuen, 1964) consists almost entirely of a powerful scene in which Bosola half-tortures, half-comforts the Duchess before executing her. In Act V, interest shifts to Bosola and to an extraordinary series of ironic reversals, unintentional murders, and plans gone astray. The 1943 copyrighted text and its subsequent revision given here have a crescendo of deaths: Ferdinand murders the Cardinal (2, 7); Bosola, acting for the Duke, poisons the Duchess (3, 4); Ferdinand commits suicide (3, 4).
Carrying out this second decision had two chief effects: it greatly reduced Bosola’s part and led Brecht to create a new scene (2, 7) in which Ferdinand kills his brother out of an irrational rage at the excommunication which he himself had proposed and engineered. Through Brecht’s drafts, this scene develops from a crudely direct murder (in BBA 1177) to a complicated statement of the Cardinal’s remorse and Ferdinand’s insane jealousy. The proper use of Webster’s extensive psychological analysis of Bosola puzzled Brecht throughout his work. Eventually, Bosola becomes a much less fully developed char
acter, almost purely the Duke’s tool; lingering traces of Webster’s treatment occasionally blur his characterization in Brecht’s versions. An example will clarify Brecht’s difficulties and decisions. Immediately after Webster’s ‘excommunication scene’ (III.iv), Bosola makes two entrances, the first with an equivocal letter from Ferdinand, asking for Antonio’s ‘head in a business’, and the second (after Antonio has escaped) as the leader of a military guard come to arrest the Duchess and her commoner-husband. Brecht appears to have liked the letter episode, and BBA 1177 shows him employing first one of the entrances and then the other, trying to simplify the scene and yet retain Ferdinand’s duplicity. Ultimately, in a part of the Barbara Brecht script which shows signs of continued indecision (2, 6), Brecht retains Webster’s organization, though Bosola’s double entrances clearly distressed him. How to dispatch Antonio also posed a problem. In Webster’s play, Bosola kills Antonio unintentionally (V.iv), having mistaken him for Ferdinand. This solution Brecht could not use, for it had been decided that the Duchess must receive (as Ferdinand’s gruesome ‘gift’) a chest containing the bodies of her husband and child (see 3, 2; Webster’s analogous scene, IV.i, uses wax-works). Moreover, a remorseful or partially penitent Bosola was not part of Brecht’s conception. Many early versions (1177, for example, and the Barbara Brecht script until a manuscript cancellation by Brecht) conclude the ‘echo scene’ (3, 1) with Bosola’s pursuit of Antonio. In the version printed here, Antonio’s death is not shown, though our text implies Bosola’s responsibility (see 3, 1 and 3, 2).
Having diminished Bosola’s role, Brecht could write a first act much less complicated than Webster’s, although the introduction of set-speech portraits of the major characters still provided problems; the various versions reveal Brecht’s experiments in conveying this material. Brecht was more interested than Webster in Duke Ferdinand’s foreign wars, and he uses them to explain the curiously long gap (more than two years) between Bosola’s discovery of the Duchess’ pregnancy and the Duke’s return to Malfi. Webster actually mentions two series of battles (in I.i and III.iii), but shows neither; Brecht amalgamates these occasions and suggests a parallel between the Duke’s making war for his sister and making war on her. Act two, scene 2, later rather truncated, here concludes with an elaborate discussion of war’s significance and of Ferdinand’s attitudes towards both it and his sister. Brecht’s anger at Antonio’s portrayal as a ‘comely princeling’ (see ‘Attempted Broadway Production of The Duchess of Malfi’, pp. 422-3) indicates another of his significant modifications: Antonio gradually recognizes that his social status, or his acceptance of it, oppresses him and restricts his actions. While Webster remained content to show the perhaps ‘bourgeois’ and quite private pleasures of the Duchess’s marriage, Brecht found Antonio a means to convey the social consciousness of those ‘too small to live with greatness’ (3, 1). Thus, ‘greatness’ becomes less a moral and tragic quality, as it had been for Webster, and more a sense of social class and prerogative, a sense shared by the Duchess and her brothers (see 2, 3 where the Duchess forbids Antonio to fight back).