The apricots episode in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (2.1.104-158): an anti-Catholic farce. L'épisode des abricots dans La Duchesse d'Amalfi de John Webster (2.1.104-158): une farce anticatholique. En Fr

Résumé En

Before the eponymous heroine of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi makes her second entrance on the stage at 2.1, the dramatist is careful to have his choric character Bosola, the “intelligencer” (1.1.254) secretly commissioned by the Duchess’s two brothers to spy on their sister, prepare the audience for a shocking change in her habits, physical appearance and dress style. Bosola’s description is a far cry from Antonio’s encomium in 1.1. Initially praised “[f]or her discourse […] so full of rapture” (1.1.183), and a “sweet countenance” that would “raise one to a galliard | That lay in a dead palsy” (1.1.189-90), the Duchess is now noted for puking, belching, looking drawn in the face and large at the waist. The contrastive diptych highlights the extent to which the paragon of elegance and virtue has deteriorated, her physical appearance now calling for a language that dispenses with decorum.Suspecting a pregnancy the Duchess is hard put to hide, he comes up with a “trick [that] may chance discover it” (2.1.69): presenting the Duchess with “some apricots” (2.1.70) as one baits a prey. The rationale behind Bosola’s fruit strategy is nowhere spelled out, and it has prompted scholarly investigation of early modern pharmacopoeias for alleged abortive properties in apricots. The scene, however, invites alternative routes of investigation, focusing not so much on the fruit’s properties as on Bosola’s gesture and the Duchess’s response to it.By introducing an element of nature in a courtly environment, Bosola’s gift puts into relief the artificiality of palatial life. But the fruit is itself a product of man’s transformation of his natural environment, and appears in the scene as a visual emblem crystallizing the various ramifications of a larger reflexion on the nature/culture dichotomy, a familiar topic of debate here carried out in two brief exchanges, one on horticultural techniques, the other on sartorial conventions. But for an audience customarily exposed to Christian iconography, Bosola’s present of a fruit to a woman soon to give birth to a son would have immediately recalled the combined images of the Temptation of Eve and the Annunciation to Mary. The simultaneous references reflect the contradictory evaluation of the Duchess between sinful woman and saintly heroine in the text as in critical literature. The Biblical intertext alerts to the scene’s cryptic involvement in contemporary religious polemics between Reformers and Roman Catholics. Bosola’s charged gesture is ultimately turned by Webster into an occasion for staging a fierce burlesque of Catholic sacraments, dogmas and practices.