Webster's anti‐antimasque in The Duchess of Malfi

Abstract

The masque of madmen in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi probably originated as an antimasque in Thomas Campion's The Lords' Masque, staged at court in February 1613 to celebrate the wedding of Princess Elizabeth Stuart. In recent years, Elizabeth's brother, Henry, had used masques and other forms of courtly display to make himself the face of a dissenting militant Protestant movement in England. And, following his death in November 1612, devastated supporters like Webster transferred their hopes to Elizabeth, whose marriage to a Protestant prince seemed to preserve the possibilities of reform at home and religious intervention abroad. However, the pacifist King James commissioned The Lords' Masque to extinguish such hopes, defining the marriage's significance as conciliatory rather than confessional and reestablishing his sole authority over the court stage Henry had tried to usurp. Thus, Webster's use of Campion's antimasque is deeply ironic, allowing him to criticize the King's suppression and censorship of his son's cause, and to lament both the bastardization of Henry's memory and the uncertain future of the movement he had represented. Moreover, reading the masque of madmen alongside Webster's elegy for the Prince, A Monumental Column, highlights Webster's deepening pessimism across this period.