In the film Shakespeare in Love, the young John Webster is portrayed as a malevolent boy who delights in the sufferings of others. His obsession with inflicting pain supposedly fore- shadows the subject matter of his plays, which are steeped in gore and every sort of horror. However, as Barbara Banks Amendola shows in this admirable study, far from springing from Webster’s bloodthirsty imagination, his tragedy The Duchess of Malfi faithfully reflected events which had taken place in Italy 100 years earlier.
Webster’s play, probably first performed in 1613, told the story of Giovanna d’Aragona, the widowed Duchess of Amalfi who enraged her princely family by contracting a clandestine second marriage with her steward, Antonio Bologna. Having borne him several children without being discovered, in 1510 Giovanna precipitated her ruin by announcing that Antonio was her husband. After the couple had been driven from the city where they sought refuge, Giovanna and two of her children were taken captive. Although their fate cannot be proved, it was widely believed that all three were strangled on the orders of her brother, Cardinal Luigi d’Aragona.
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