Swimming Through the Fires: The Lucretian Beast Fable in The Duchess of Malfi

ABSTRACT In this article, I investigate the operative force of the insufficiently studied beast fable in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi in light of the physics-poetics of the Lucretian clinamen and by bringing together theoretical perspectives from Michel Serres, Jacques Derrida, and Louis Marin. The Duchess’s fable is a radical intervention capable of arresting the drama’s tragic structures. The genre of fable marks a declining toward void, toward the loss of husband and children, that speaks what is looming — death, the wolf at the door — even as it forestalls loss through such telling.