Wooing Scene
The marriage scene, in addition to contrasting the Duchess’s
vivid personality with Antonio’s rather passive one, foreshadows the tragedy to
come. It opens with the Duchess telling Antonio she wants to write her will,
immediately evoking the thought of death. The Duchess’s metaphors and
allusions, too, often invoke death she is into an alabaster statue kneeling a
her husband’s tomb; she refers to her marriage to Antonio as a Gordian knot, a
knot that could not be untied unless cut with “violence”; and she says they can
put an
unsheathed sword between them in bed to keep them chaste, which introduces a weapon into their intimacy. Thus while this end of the act is largely happy, Webster gives the audience plenty of warning that such happiness will not last. The contradictions in the Duchess’s character between her valiant refusal to bow before social mores and her willfulness on directly and imprudently countering the protestations of her brothers are summarized in Cariola’s final soliloquy, which questions whether the Duchess is a model of greatness or simply a madwoman.
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