John
Webster loved portraying disturbing sibling relationships in his plays. His
first tragedy, The White Devil, is
notable in that the beautiful adulteress Vittoria (the titular White Devil of
the piece) is aided in her crimes by her brother Flamineo.
When
all their plans go sour, Flamineo even proposes a suicide pact with his sister,
suggesting she shoot him with a pistol and then kill herself. Vittoria
dutifully shoots her brother, but not herself, only to be surprised when Flamineo rises from the ground, announcing he had not loaded the pistols he gave her.
This
darkly comic twist turns tragic, though, when the enemies of the sister and
brother arrive to dispatch them. Vittoria goes bravely to her death, and
Flamineo quickly forgives her betrayal of him, remarking “Thou’rt a noble
sister: / I love thee now.” United in life by their sinful actions, they unite
in death, as Vittoria’s stoic resolve helps reconcile Flamineo to his fate.
The
siblings in Webster’s next play, TheDuchess of Malfi, instead are at odds from the very beginning. In the first
scene, the title character’s twin brother Ferdinand places a spy in the duchess’s
household. He also sternly warns his sister, who is recently widowed, that she
shouldn’t remarry. “They are most luxurious / Will wed twice,” he tells her,
though he appears to be most concerned with losing her inheritance should she
have children with a second husband.
Ferdinand
schemes together with his elder brother, the Cardinal of Aragon, who also seeks
to prevent their sister from marrying. The cardinal’s moralizing about the
lusts of women is contradicted by the fact that he keeps a mistress himself.
When the still youthful countess arranges a secret marriage to her steward, the
play portrays it as the most natural thing in the world, and the murderous
obsessions of the brothers with their sister’s sex life appear sick and perhaps
even quasi-incestuous.
After
completing The Duchess of Malfi, Webster
wrote a third tragedy, The Guise,
which sadly has been lost. Presumably, the play was about recent French
history, so it might have resembled Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris. Fashions were changing, though, and
tragicomedy was on the rise. Webster’s fourth and final solo play (he also had
written and would continue to write numerous collaborative works) was one such
tragicomedy, The Devil’s Law Case.
Like
The White Devil and the Duchess of Malfi, the tragicomedy The Devil’s Law Case features siblings
with a problematic relationship. Romelio, the villain of the piece, might have
a name that resembles Romeo, but unlike Shakespeare’s hero, Romelio simply
wants to use love and marriage to advance his own material ends. His sister
Jolenta (whose name echoes Juliet) is courted by two different men, the noble
Contarino and the valiant Ercole. However, Romelio can’t even fathom that they
could be interested in her for love.
Romelio
disparages Contarino in the opening scene, declaring: “He makes his colour / Of
visiting us so often, to sell land, / And thinks, if he can gain my sister’s
love, / To recover the treble value.” Other characters can recognize
Contarino’s honest motives, but being a villain himself, Romelio can only see
villainy in other men. He arranges for Jolenta to marry Ercole instead, though
she clearly returns Contarino’s affections.
In
the second act, the two rivals for Jolenta’s love quarrel and fight a duel,
both receiving grievous injuries. Ercole appears to die, and Contarino, on the
verge of death, writes his will, naming Jolenta his heir. Learning this,
Romelio resolves to kill Contarino before he can recover, hoping to secure the
inheritance for himself. As in The
Duchess of Malfi, a scheming brother is more concerned with his sister’s
property than her happiness.
Romelio’s
villainy goes even further though, since he has gotten a nun pregnant, and is
hoping to pass off his bastard as Jolenta’s child by Ercole. That way, Jolenta
will receive not just Contarino’s estate, but through her child, Ercole’s
estate as well. Though he badgers Jolenta into cooperating at first, she
ultimately flees from him, attempting to escape to Rome together with the poor
nun her brother got knocked up.
Because
this is a tragicomedy, Ercole turns out to still be alive, and Contarino
recovers from his wounds (ironically, because
of Romelio’s assassination attempt). Romelio’s villainy is so great,
though, that his own mother files a law suit claiming (falsely) that she
cheated on her husband. This could get Romelio declared a bastard, ensuring
that all inheritances stay with Jolenta.
That
isn’t necessary in the end, and order and justice are restored in the fifth
act. Still, if this is how Webster portrays siblings in his plays, one hopes he
was an only child!