Il malcontent e la recita del sé: per uno studio della figura nel teatro rinascimentale inglese

The aim of this thesis is to build on critical recognition of the malcontent as a key figure in early modern drama. I focus mainly on the ways the dramatists use and manipulate the character-type in tragedies in order to structure specific discourses around a new, emergent awareness of a private self which develops during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the next. Even though it is too early to treat these characters as examples of the individualism one associates with Hobbes or Milton’s Satan, the malcontents of this period epitomize the struggle of an age which is torn between the acceptance and the refusal of a socio-cultural determinism which considers identity as a form of imitation (see Characters). Critics are no longer content to view the malcontent merely as a plot-mechanism or a means of introducing sensational effects, and the character’s appeal, psychological, theatrical, and thematic, is now better understood. Progress on this front has brought problems, however. A greater sense of the character’s importance has triggered a readiness to label increasingly diverse figures as ‘malcontents’, so that it is possible to find political schemers, melancholics, satirical expositors, grudge-bearers and cynics all being treated as examples of the type. A category as inclusive as this threatens to become meaningless, and I therefore begin with the term itself, its development in critical discussion, and its origin and employment in late sixteenth-century English. The first attempt to define the character was by Elmer Edgar Stoll in 1906. Since Stoll described the malcontent as “a melancholy figure conceived in the Elizabethan ‘humorous’ manner, a professional fantastic meditator, a professional cynic and censor” , many critics have treated the malcontent accordingly, as a by-product of the fashion for melancholia in the period. Harrison (1929) , Spencer (1948) and Bridget Gellert Lyons (1971) retain this association, but add to it a political component. “Political” not in the sense of representing or alluding to real-life political figures, but of embodying the resentment and sense of alienation of those who feel themselves to be undervalued in or excluded from the social system. Lawrence Babb’s The Elizabethan Malady (1951) includes a socio-political dimension but offers as well a series of sub-categories which are an early sign of how critics will expand the definition in later decades: I shall characterize four species of malcontents as I find them represented in Elizabethan and early Stuart literature. The primary malcontent type, which comprises the melancholy travelers and their imitators, is the melancholy man who resents the world’s neglect of his superior abilities. The other three are derivative malcontent types appearing principally in the drama: the melancholy villain, the melancholy cynic, and the melancholy scholar . Babb’s divisions are one of many arbitrary categorizations by these early critics who approach the malcontent as a product – in varying proportions – both of literature and of existing social conditions. The different criteria adopted in the definitions demonstrate that the dominants in the representation of the type are not stable or self-sufficient: the malcontent may be viewed as a foreign traveller, as politically disappointed, or as a ‘humour’ character, according to the critical approach one prefers. One common element, melancholy, recurs as a defining characteristic of the malcontent in these early accounts, though there is variation as to how extreme the symptoms need to be. This is why The Alienated Figure in Drama: from Shakespeare to Pinter (1991) by Christine Gomez is as a turning-point in the definition of the type. Describing the malcontent as the alienated man of the Jacobean age, she does not analyze the character as a product of melancholy, even though she concedes the possibility that “two intellectual attitudes prevalent in the Jacobean age may also be related to the emergence of the malcontent character. They are the intellectual tradition of melancholy and Machiavellian cynicism about human weakness” . Gomez regards the malcontent as an outsider, alienated from men as well as from society, from life as well as from himself. James Keller, in the only book-length study of the early modern dramatic malcontent, follows Gomez in his desire to remove the character “from the tangled and ever-burgeoning mass of qualities which have come to be associated with Elizabethan melancholia” . However, his Princes, Soldiers and Rogues: The Politic Malcontent of Renaissance Drama (1993) suffers from divided aims. In this study, the malcontent is treated as a kind of sub-species of the melancholic, so diminishing the importance of a figure who is conceived of as not simply melancholy, though he may suffer some of the symptoms: “It is perhaps true”, says Keller, “that many, most or even all malcontents are melancholy, but all melancholiacs are not necessarily malcontents” . Despite the contributions of Gomez and Keller, and the more recent essay by Burnett, which has the merit of discussing the type in terms of the cultural context which brought it into being , there are important aspects of the type which remain unexplored. Before analyzing the dramatists’ use of the type, my first aim is to try and gain a clearer idea of what the dramatists themselves might have understood by ‘malcontentment’, by the psychological condition or posture which they sought to dramatize in their malcontent characters. A necessary question is therefore, when and how did ‘malcontent’ enter the language? Although Italian malcontento and French malcontent had been current for some two hundred years, there is good evidence that the English word did not come into use before the last quarter of the sixteenth century, at the same time that the malcontent as a literary and pathological type appeared in prose, satiric poetry, and drama. Nor does the word seem to have arrived simply as the result of influence by one or other of these two languages. When, in his 1578 textbook on translating between Italian and English, John Florio wished to render ‘mal contenti’, he offered merely ‘not contented’ . Conversely, when George Pettie used ‘mal contents’ in his 1581 translation of the French translation of Stefano Guazzo’s La Conversazione Civile, the word was his own: the French version speaks of men gripped by ‘l’indignation’ and the Italian by ‘lo sdegno’ . Pettie’s is OED’s first example of ‘malcontent’. It notes a succession of derivative forms straight after this: malcontented in 1582, then malcontent as an adjective (1583), malcontent as a verb (1584), malcontentment (1587), malcontent meaning ‘state of discontentment’ (1591), and malcontentedness (1594). Such a rapid proliferation is evidence that the term was at this date both novel and appealing, and there is more. The 1587 revision of Holinshed’s Chronicles uses ‘malcontent’ (in various forms) more than 40 times, including one occasion when it turns ‘rebels’ into ‘malcontents’, whereas the original of 1577 does not use it at all; and William Rankins’s 1588 satire The English Ape suggests that those who are ‘never content...or their estate holdeth above their deserte’ be branded ‘Malecontents’, which is ‘the newe found name’ . Four early uses of malcontent have escaped notice. Three, in two works by different authors, antedate OED’s first example, and have the additional interest of indicating why the word arrived into English when it did, and where it came from. The fourth antedates OED’s first example of an adjectival use, and is probably the first occurrence of the word in a play, thus marking the beginning of its association with the drama ten years earlier than the OED listings suggest, and some 23 years before Marston gave that association special status with The Malcontent (1604). The three pre-OED instances, in probable chronological order, are these: 1. Thomas Churchyard, The Miserie of Flaunders (1579), A4r: The Pater Noster men, or Mal content, thei saie: Hath brought our people suche a plague as breeds their whole decaie. 2. John Stubbes, The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf Whereinto England Is Like To Be Swallowed by Another French Mariage (1579), D4v: more faythfull ayders...then ever Monsieur could bring into the field when he joined himself with the Malcontents eyther in Fraunce or the lowe countries. 3. Stubbes, The Discoverie, E7r: why then doth he [Monsieur] not joyne and conferr with us all thys whyle, rather then under hand seeke to trump both them of the religion there and the malcontent? Churchyard’s poem was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 20 January 1579. Stubbes’s pamphlet is dated August 1579 on its title-page, its publication timed to coincide with the visit to London of the Duke of Alençon (‘Monsieur’, as he was known in England) to renew his offer of marriage to Queen Elizabeth. Her annoyance at its contents cost Stubbes his right hand, and almost his life . These uses of ‘malcontent’ are closely linked by date, and something else connects them: the revolt against Spanish rule then underway in the Low Countries. Churchyard’s “Pater Noster men, or Malcontent” were a group of Catholic Walloon soldiers, nominally part of the anti-Spanish alliance, who styled themselves ‘the Malcontents’, and who were also called ‘Paternoster soldiers’, ‘Paternoster men’, and ‘Paternoster jacks’. They had mutinied because of Protestant domination of the States-General and Protestant persecution of Flemish Catholics. Given its date, Churchyard’s poem was probably prompted by a notorious incident in October 1578 when the Malcontents turned on their Protestant allies and sacked the town of Menen . Stubbes’s pamphlet refers to another threat, to English eyes, posed by the Malcontents: their support for the Duke of Alençon, who was currently based in Flanders, and the possibility that it might lead to a Catholic Union of the southern provinces with France. Alençon himself had been the leader of a faction in Paris three years earlier who had called themselves ‘Les Malcontents’, which was perhaps what suggested the name to the Walloon soldiers . The evidence thus strongly suggests that it was these political and military events across the North Sea in the 1570s, and English anxieties about them, which caused the sudden arrival of ‘malcontent’ at the end of the decade. In the two decades or so from 1580 malcontents (both the character and the term) are more frequent in non-dramatic literature than in the theatre. Greene , Nashe , Harington and Lodge offer detailed portrayals of the type which are earlier than the only description of the Malcontent as a Character given by Joseph Hall in his Characters of Virtues and Vices (1608). In his “Characterism of the Male-Content” Hall describes a ruthless, calculating political schemer, who is far from being rendered immobile by melancholy: “Nothing but fear, keeps him from conspiracies; and no man is more cruel, when he is not manacled with danger” . The threatening and aggressive malcontent of Hall and the melancholy depressive of other depictions come together twenty years later, in John Earle’s portrait of “A Discontented Man” in Microcosmography (1628): [He is] one that is fallen out with the world, and will be revenged on himself. Fortune has denied him in something, and he now takes pet, and will be miserable in spite. The root of his disease is a self-humouring pride, and an accustomed tenderness, not to be crossed in his fancy; and the occasion commonly of one of these three, a hard father, a peevish wench, or his ambition thwarted. (…). He is the spark that kindles the common-wealth, and the bellows himself to blow it: and if he turn any thing, it is commonly one of these, either friar, traitor, or mad-man . Here Earle assumes a synonymity between the terms “malcontent” and “discontent”, commonly confused by some of the dramatists of the period . But when did the word begin to appear in drama? OED is again somewhat misleading. It offers no example from a play before 1591 (1 The Troublesome Reign of King John) whereas there is one which is ten years older. It occurs in Thomas Newton’s translation of Seneca’s Thebais (now usually entitled Phoenissae), when Jocasta begs her sons not to fight one another: She Motherlike seekes how to linke their hartes in one assent, With brynish teares she wettes the cheekes of him thats malcontent . The original, which Newton expands and perhaps misunderstands, is ‘rogat abnuentes, inrigat fletu genas’ (‘she beseeches them as they refuse, and floods her cheeks with weeping’). His ‘malcontent’ was therefore not encouraged by any related Latin form. A few years later the word finds its way into the repertoire of the London theatres, occurring first in Lyly’s Sappho and Phao (1584). Around this date the spelling ‘malecontent’ becomes frequent, permitting punning allusions to questions of gender and what might be taken to characterise “male” behaviour. One other notable feature of the progress of ‘malcontent’ through the drama is that its use goes into decline at the end of the century, just before the character-type to which modern criticism most commonly applies the term achieves its most powerful embodiment. A simple comparison of frequencies indicates the change: between 1581 and 1603 the word occurs 50 times in 31 plays; between 1604 and 1625 it occurs 33 times in 22, despite the larger corpus of extant texts . The distribution in the Jacobean sample is also very uneven: older dramatists cease using the word, and many younger ones never use it at all. Shakespeare is a striking case. He uses ‘malcontent’ in very early work (Venus and Adonis, 3 Henry VI, Edward III, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour’s Lost), but after that only in The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1598); he never uses it in tragedy. Among his younger contemporaries, it is never used by Jonson, Chettle, Ford or Shirley, and in all the plays of Dekker and Middleton it appears only once, in a comedy, 1 The Honest Whore, which they wrote together. In consequence, ‘the Jacobean tragic malcontent’ of critical depiction is hardly ever called a malcontent in Jacobean tragedy. The first and only time the term is used as a character name in the whole of the period is in the anti-catholic pageant Descensus Astraea by George Peele (29 October 1591), where two malcontents menace Astraea’s reign: 1. Malecontent: What meaneth this, I strive and cannot strike, She is preserved by miracle, belike: If so then, wherefore threaten we in vaine, That Queene, whose cause the gracious heavens maintain. 2. Malecontent: No marvell then, although we faint and quaile, For mightie is the truth and will prevaile. (Descensus Astraea) Peele’s malcontents demonstrate how undeveloped the expressive potential of the type is at this date. They are flat and aimless figures, motivated by nothing more than a vague scepticism about Astraea’s right to rule, and incapable of providing the kind of focus for questions concerning the individual’s relation to the state, the limits of state power, and personal versus political identity which the malcontent persona permits in John Marston’s The Malcontent (1604). In this tragicomedy Malevole, Altofronto’s alter-ego, is a particular kind of malcontent, different from any noticed so far: he is described, for example, as not ambitious or determined to gain power for himself . Consistently satirical in his language and attitude, Malevole is content to act the fool, and to be taken to be one. His malcontent credentials are limited to the fact that he casts himself as an outsider, and thinks badly of the world. The result is that the audience begins to identify Altofronto, the deposed duke, as the real malcontent of the play’s title, who adopts his fake malcontent persona in order to regain the power and status he has lost. Taking Altofronto, the protagonist, as the play’s real malcontent makes it easier to understand why Marston created Malevole. It enabled him at once to preserve the Guarinian tragicomic model, which forbids any on-stage deaths, and to complicate it, since the play ends with the elimination (and thus metaphorically the killing) of Malevole, whose cynical persona is absorbed alarmingly into Altofronto’s in the play’s closing moments, when ‘Malevole’ remains on stage wearing Altofronto’s clothes. Typically in some form of disgrace, the malcontent in the drama is, or sometimes poses as, an unhappy and neglected man whose distinctive qualities can include a disruptive and sarcastic verbal idiom, thwarted ambition, poverty, and academic failure. Even applying the definition fairly strictly, one is faced with a large number of malcontents in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, and with characters with sufficient ‘malcontent’ qualities to be admitted to the group. To make the discussion more manageable I have made a distinction between malcontents whose malcontentedness is a settled and permanent mental condition, and those for whom malcontentedness is (at least initially) a pose or an assumed role which they intend to exploit. A large number of the first group are younger brothers or bastards. This is not surprising, given the economic and social penalties that younger brothers and, even more acutely, illegitimate male offspring laboured under throughout the period, and the feelings of inferiority and exclusion which these stigmas generated. Bastards and younger brothers were viewed as ‘natural’ malcontents, and if they exhibited bitterness or hostility in response to such labelling, that only confirmed the rightness of the label. The important thing is that there is a clear connection here between the drama and prevailing social reality. The ‘stage malcontent’ is a product only partly of theatrical tradition: he could and often did express the sense of alienation and rejection experienced in specific forms by members of the audiences who watched these plays. Already in the decades before ‘malcontent’ itself enters the language, the drama begins to introduce characters whose resentment to such social pigeon-holing anticipates the behaviour and mental complexion of the malcontent proper. Gorboduc is an example. This play, performed at the Inner Temple during the Christmas festivities of 1561/1562, features a mother, Videna, who loves her elder son, Ferrex, as much as she hates her younger, Porrex. Already marginalized, the younger brother is driven by this further rejection to couple vindictiveness with ambition: “not content”, he “aspires to more...above his native right” (III, 1, 53-4). Gorboduc’s themes of the maternal misrecognition and the warping effects of being a younger son and brother reappear in Richard III (c. 1592), where the protagonist carries in addition the visual sign of his own unnaturalness in the form of physical deformity. He is, he says, therefore “determined to be a villain” (I, 1, 30), the pun on “determined” (resolved, but also ordained, destined) expressing the malcontent’s simultaneous acceptance of his socially prescribed identity as moral outcast and his desire to embrace it because it is willed, chosen and created by himself . The same determinism operates in the case of bastards, whose legal illegitimacy was thought of as at once reflecting and causing the moral illegitimacy that their behaviour and personalities were programmed to exhibit. In addition, the lustfulness and stealth that attended their conception was sure to reappear: bastards could be expected to be both lustful and deceitful. Edmund in King Lear (1605-1606) and Spurio in The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606) embody all these traits. The connection between Edmund’s character and his conception are suggested at the beginning of Lear, where Edmund is forced to listen to his father’s boastful account of it, and to hear himself described as a “whoreson”. In the following scene Edmund reveals his resentment towards his father and the society of which he is a part, but also not a part. He copes with it by resorting to a form of fatalism: “I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing” (I, 2, 131-133). His bastard identity existed from the moment of his conception and is inalienable; he cannot conceive of himself – of his self – apart from it. Only when his father is dead does any alteration become possible, and even then the good he attempts to do is “in spite of mine own nature” (V, 3, 242). Spurio, Middleton’s discontented bastard, is even more in thrall to a false (both dishonest and counterfeit) identity. His vindictiveness is presented as entirely produced by his illegitimacy and his conviction that it makes him not fully human, an “uncertain man” (I, 2, 133). The personal and to some degree defensible grounds for vengefulness accorded to Edmund, in the form of Gloucester’s moral complacency and unfeeling remarks, are absent here: we are given no sense of the nature of Spurio’s relationship with his father the Duke. The treatment is flatter, and bleaker. Spurio comes close to being an ambulating symbol of his own counterfeit identity (“adultery is my nature”, I, 2, 177). Middleton withholds any sense of emotional complexity in his character, so that the old Duke’s death does not trigger any promptings of repentance – and one could say that the play itself endorses Spurio’s own conviction that he is a surplus quantity: he serves no particular dramatic function, apart from being briefly useful to Vindice’s revengeful plans . At the same time – and this is true of malcontents in many other plays – his cheerful cynicism and verbal wit are a source of considerable theatrical energy, so while he is in terms of the plot virtually redundant, he contributes significantly to the play’s black humour and its satiric vision. If the illegitimate sons and the younger brothers are in various degrees natural and involuntary malcontents, because their condition guarantees exclusion from all forms of social and political life, many other characters consciously assume a malcontent persona in order to pursue some secret agenda of their own. A complex example of this is Hamlet. Hamlet confesses to “my weakness and my melancholy” (II, 2, 597), perhaps viewing these traits as a settled part of his temperament rather than as having arisen only recently because of his father’s death and mother’s remarriage. At the same time, he consciously simulates other standard components of the malcontent personality, “putting on” an “antic disposition” (I, 5, 180), and telling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that the reason for his “discontent” (this is the Bad Quarto’s term, the Good reads “distemper”) is that he lacks advancement. Calculation is at work here, rather than genuine self-description: the meaning of “advancement” he intends for his false friends is “ambition”, but the private meaning he intends for himself is that he is discontented because his plans to revenge his father’s death are not advancing as fast as he would like. A key source of the complexity of this play is thus that Hamlet is a genuine malcontent while simultaneously pretending to be one, and the dividing line between the reality and the role is constantly open to question. Shakespeare’s next tragedy, Othello (1602), offers in Iago another character who plays the malcontent while also being one. In his manipulation of Roderigo, he explains his hatred of Othello as a response to the promotion of Cassio, and bitterly denounces a world where “Preferment goes by letter and affection / And not by old gradation, where each second / Stood heir to th’ first” (I, 1, 34-37). Iago’s soliloquies, however, tell a different story, laying bare a tormented psychopathology involving sexual obsession and compulsive jealousy: “I hate the Moor / And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets / He’s done my office” (I, 3, 385-387). Iago consciously uses the stock characteristics of the malcontent – ambition, resentfulness, a conviction of having been inadequately rewarded – to reassure Roderigo, and perhaps to some extent, himself. As in Hamlet, the character adopts a mask to provoke reactions, but here the adoption of the role works in a different way. Hamlet’s “antic disposition” is projected at everyone but Horatio, whereas Iago plays the malcontent only to Roderigo; for everyone else he creates another role, that of “honest Iago”. In The Revenger’s Tragedy this double-layering of malcontent identities, fake on top of real, reaches a high point of complex elaboration. The gap – and the overlap - between inner, perceived and outward identities, between what people are, what they take themselves to be, and what they contrive to make others think they are, is a paramount concern of the play. Vindice, in order to pursue his revenge on the murderer Duke, disguises himself as Piato, one meaning of which is “plated”. This should be a temporary disguise (“I’ll put on that knave for once”, I, 1, 93) but the play reveals that Vindice is actually Piato, since the elements from which Vindice constructs Piato’s identity reduplicate his own, and plot details corroborate this dovetailing: both characters have been socially demoted, and Vindice prostitutes Gloriana just as Piato seeks to prostitute Vindice’s sister . Middleton complicates the use of the character-type as a catalyst for a discourse on identity by creating a triple division of Vindice’s self. Vindice not only assumes the role of Piato, but later in the play he “plays” Hippolito’s melancholy and embittered brother whom Hippolito introduces to Lussurioso as someone he can employ as a knavish hireling – his task being to kill Vindice’s other fake (and true) self, Piato. This produces an ingenious short-circuiting: Vindice plays the role of the Vindice which his social betters impose on him, that of “a man / In whom much melancholy dwells” (IV, 1, 55-56), “of black condition, suitable / To want and ill content” (IV, 1, 70-71), possessing “a parlous melancholy” (IV, 2, 105) and a “ill-moneyed” man (IV, 2, 107). The dizzying ambiguities generated by this chain of duplicate selves are noted, appropriately, by Vindice: “Oh I’m in doubt / Whether I’m myself or no!” (IV, 4, 24-25). The mask of the malcontent at once conceals and expresses his identity. In Hamlet, Othello and The Revenger’s Tragedy true and pretended malcontents fold into one another so that the supposedly fake role expresses a degree of truth about the identity the role is meant to camouflage. In Webster’s The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1614) this layering technique is largely absent: Flamineo and Bosola perceive themselves and are recognized by others as malcontents in a more straightforward way, without any metatheatrical dimension being involved. Whereas Hamlet, Iago and Vindice benefit (if that is the term) from a certain fluidity in the way the self is understood in their plays, so that they can move in and out of alternative personalities, these two Websterean characters are trapped in an oppressively punitive world governed by a social, economic and religious determinism. Here the malcontent is more victim than agent, and the limiting impact of low birth and poverty are more strongly registered. The struggle against these conditions gives these two malcontents a theatrical dynamism and energy which complicates our response to them. It also implies that simple condemnation of these discontented men who reject or invert all moral norms and social values (as in Flamineo’s wish to have “plurality of fathers”) may not be sustainable. As regards their treatment of the malcontent character, The White Devil is the more pessimistic play. Flamineo knows that social and economic constraints have made him what he is, but this knowledge does not give him the power to reshape his life. His dying words (“I do not look / Who went before, nor who shall follow me; / No, at myself I will begin and end”, V, 6, 254-256) declare the impossibility of growth or change. In no sense can the malcontent identity be regarded as energising or liberating, yet, for himself, he envisages no alternative to it. In The Duchess of Malfi, however, Bosola does at the end succeed in discarding his socially imposed role of malcontent and affirming his own subjective will. At the beginning of the play, Bosola’s status as a malcontent is undisputed . It is taken to be his essential identity: “Be yourself: / Keep your old garb of melancholy” (I, 2, 201-202), and he becomes Ferdinand’s “creature” (I, 2, 211). But in Act IV the play begins to suggest the presence of a different self, one which accepts the existence and the relevance of moral choices and the guiding power of conscience. The result is a conflict of impulses, as Bosola begins to pity the Duchess but feels simultaneously tied to Ferdinand (and by extension to his own malcontent side), and then takes shelter in a sequence of disguises designed, absurdly, to distance him from her murder (he is first “like an old man”, then “a tomb-maker”, then “the common bellman” (IV, 2, 115, 147, 172). Ironically, it is through another role, that of revenger, that he pursues justice and access to a new, morally aware self, and this role, too, fails, since he kills not Ferdinand but Antonio, the only person that he wants to save. Yet in spite – or perhaps because – of this failure Webster is able to dramatise the successful rejection of coercive social patterning in the formulation of the self, so that Bosola’s final verdict on himself is not undercut by irony or pessimism: he is of “good nature, yet i’th’end / Neglected” (V, 5, 86-87). What prompted Webster to modify the characterization of the malcontent in The Duchess, and with it his dramatic function? The answer lies not with a belated attempt at moralism or Webster’s supposed inconsistency and inability to create a coherent dramatic structure. One is dealing here with a deliberate use of sources, a use not previously noticed. In Matteo Bandello’s twenty-third novella Il signor Antonio Bologna sposa la duchessa di Amalfi e tutti due sono ammazzati, published in his Novelle of 1554 and translated by William Painter in 1567 in The Palace of Pleasure, Daniel de Bozola is a Lombard captain who kills Antonio Bologna. However, before the author mentions this murderer, we are told of a Neapolitan gentleman who was first asked to kill the Duchess’ husband and, “having chaunged his minde, and differing from day to day to sorte the same to effect” , was substituted by the Aragonian brothers with a man “of larger [i.e. less scrupulous] Conscience than the other, inveigled with Covetousnesse, and hired for ready Money” , namely Bozola. Bosola’s hesitation and repentance in the play clearly derive from Bandello’s description of this Neapolitan gentleman whose “Conscience” makes him reluctant to kill Antonio. It occurred to Webster that he could fuse the two historical figures (the Gentleman and Daniel de Bozola) and this in turn induced him to intensify the restorative and life-enhancing impact of the Duchess on those around her, as it is her responses to Bosola’s malcontent side which prompts the awakening of his conscience. Webster reshapes the malcontent in this play, but his plays remain part of the progressive pessimism of Jacobean literature. The decisive shift from agents to victims and the increasingly negative and satirical tone affect the portrayal of the character in Jacobean tragedy, a shift boosted in Webster by his nihilism, his inclination to depict a world without meaning or direction, where there is no coherence visible in either the human mind or the sequence of events. The pessimism is hardly diminished if one regards Webster instead as a social and political commentator, preoccupied with the power of ‘great men’ and with the idea that identity is a product of power-relations and the individual’s economic circumstances. After The Duchess of Malfi, the malcontent figure becomes flatter and less of a vehicle for the exploration of identity and subjectivity (the only exception is De Flores in Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling). In Massinger’s The Unnatural Combat (1624-1625), for example, Captain Belgarde is defined as a malcontent because of his social and economical position, but he is mainly a comic figure who, at the end of the play, is rewarded for his services. In the Restoration drama, Thomas D’Urfey frequently uses the word “malcontent”, and he offers a portrait of this figure in a non-dramatic work (The Malecontent: A Satyr, 1684). Here the author describes a hermit, “A forlorn uncomfortable wretch, / Grizzled with hair, by Sorrow and by Years, / His Sullen face bedew’d with Tears, / [who] Look’t like the Figure of Mortality, / Or Man in his first State of misery” . His function is simply to denounce the vices of the world. With the end of the reign of James I the malcontent had lost his expressive potential and imaginative appeal, an appeal summed up by Demetrius’ comment as reported by Seneca in his De Providentia, and translated by Thomas Lodge in 1614: “There is nothing, saith he, more unhappy then that man that hath never beene touched with adversitie: for he hath not had the meanes to know himselfe”

Il malcontent è un tipo epocale le cui dominanti caratteriali emergono in vario modo nella rappresentazione di alcune figure dello scontento di epoca elisabettiano-giacomiana. Nella prima parte di questo studio abbiamo rilevato che la parola “malcontent” su un piano discorsivo e culturale 1) individua un nucleo semantico che riguarda genericamente uno stato di scontentezza e si sovrappone in certa misura con altri termini (“discontent”); 2) viene attribuita ad alcune persone in particolare: si veda la questione religiosa e politica legata a figure storiche (quali, ad esempio, d’Alençon, i nobili cattolici delle Fiandre e Leicester) 3) viene utilizzata da Hall nella sua descrizione del malcontent che, sebbene non si identifichi con quelle appena menzionate, configura comunque un tipo culturale che verrà poi fissato da Earle. Su un piano drammaturgico, essendo storicamente determinata, questa figura non deriva da alcuna tradizione letteraria precedente. Quella del malcontent è infatti una categoria sfuggente, che nasce nel modo che abbiamo evidenziato e i cui tratti distintivi sembrano sfumare e quindi favorire una certa convergenza con varie figure tipologiche. Si tratta evidentemente di un personaggio storico e culturale, ma anche teatrale; quest’ultimo non coincide del tutto con quello storico (avvicinandosi anche al malinconico) e presenta alcune caratteristiche fisse (se non altro una generica scontentezza determinata dalla perdita di un ruolo e dal desiderio inappagato di un avanzamento di carriera) e altre variabili (politiche, religiose, umorali e così via), dominanti di volta in volta nelle rappresentazioni discorsive e letterario-teatrali che ne vengono date. I drammi presi in considerazione nel corso di questo studio, pur non presentando necessariamente allusioni topiche a personaggi storici esistenti, propongono dei personaggi, quasi mai definiti in modo esplicito malcontenti, che assumono caratteristiche rapportabili alla figura tipologica del discorso culturale (l’essere ambiziosi, colti ma caduti in disgrazia, il sentirsi immeritatamente esclusi dalla società, e così via). La ricorrenza pur non sempre omogenea di queste dominanti nella caratterizzazione di alcuni personaggi dimostra la non accessorietà e, anzi, l’importanza dei malcontents ai fini delle problematiche centrali dei testi. Considerare questi characters, in alcuni casi secondari solo per necessità d’intreccio, vuol dire anzitutto indagare la natura sociale e politica di alcune opere, nelle quali gli autori sembrano articolare e rappresentare specifici discorsi intorno al conflitto tra la costruzione identitaria – intesa in chiave socio-culturale – ascritta al soggetto e le prime, acerbe percezioni del sé da parte di alcuni malcontents. Nel terzo, quarto e quinto capitolo, abbiamo infatti indagato i modi attraverso i quali questa figura tipologica interviene nei drammi riflettendo sul ruolo sociale assunto e su una soggettualità sempre più emergente. Nella caratterizzazione dei figli cadetti, deformi o illegittimi – Porrex, Richard, Edmund e Spurio – la categoria del malcontent si insinua confondendosi nelle maglie di figure alla cui condizione dislocante nel nucleo familiare corrisponde per analogia un’esclusione dal sistema politico e sociale. Questo fa di loro dei malcontenti ‘naturali’, la cui etichetta sociale risulta determinante ai fini di una percezione dell’io che sembra uniformarsi totalmente alla costruzione dell’identità attribuita loro. Nel caso, invece, di personaggi che sono per antonomasia più complessi e irriducibili quindi a qualsiasi fissa stereotipizzazione – Hamlet, Iago, Vindice –, la categoria del malcontent è relegata primariamente alla dimensione metateatrale: il personaggio è consapevole del ruolo sociale che sta recitando e che, tuttavia, finisce con il modificare irrimediabilmente anche l’idea che ha di sé. L’assunzione della maschera funziona da catalizzatore del conflitto dicotomico tra identità personale e identità sociale, tra quello che una persona è, quello che crede di essere e l’idea di sé che vuole dare agli altri. Questi malcontents epitomano infatti le contraddizioni di chi da un lato manovra le identità attribuitegli dalla società, mentre dall’altro deve fare i conti con un processo di elaborazione del sé che affiora anche in relazione all’adozione del ruolo. Nell’ultimo capitolo, quello che riguarda le due tragedie websteriane, la categoria del malcontent si funzionalizza nei personaggi di Flamineo e Bosola superando i limiti del metateatro e risolvendo, almeno inizialmente, la dicotomia tra la percezione del sé e l’adozione di un’identità ascritta che, infine, Bosola sarà in grado di rifiutare. Questi due malcontenti sono, tuttavia, profondamente diversi tra loro: le fugaci osservazioni autoriflessive di Flamineo non sono mai davvero propulsive ai fini dell’azione drammatica e il personaggio indugia ineluttabilmente in una visione nichilistica del mondo e nel suo ruolo di malcontento in cui resta, infine, imbrigliato. In Bosola, invece, i tratti di questa figura tipologica emergono nella rappresentazione di un personaggio che, da malcontent, assume anche la maschera del tipo, in un gioco metateatrale assurdo in cui lo scollamento tra essere e apparire si risolve in una prima paradossale e irrealizzabile fusione, destinata tuttavia a fallire. L’assunzione della maschera modifica anche in questo caso la percezione dell’io da parte del personaggio, ma è questa una modifica che giunge a compimento consentendo a Bosola di liberarsi da un ruolo sociale che non gli appartiene più, fondendo così nel suo personaggio due figure già presenti nella fonte del dramma. Dopo Webster, la figura del malcontent non scompare dalle scene, ma non ha più quel dinamismo teatrale e quell’energia che ha, invece, caratterizzato i malcontenti di questo periodo. Il senso dell’io che sembra emergere in questi drammi proprio grazie all’impiego di questa categoria da parte dei drammaturghi – e che si pone come spartiacque tra la cultura ancora stereotipata, e in parte di stampo medievale, che percepisce l’identità come imitazione, e la filosofia individualistica di fine XVIII secolo – non riaffiora più nelle rappresentazioni teatrali del tipo. In Massinger, ad esempio, nella seconda scena del quarto atto di The Unnatural Combat (pubblicato nel 1639 e probabilmente scritto tra il 1624-1625), il “poore captain” Belgarde viene definito “malecontent”, ma è questo un personaggio comico piuttosto stereotipato, che soffre della “barbarous ingratitude” (III, 3, 87) da parte di una società che non riconosce più i meriti dei soldati e che, tuttavia, alla fine ricompensa il capitano dei servigi resi. Nel teatro della Restaurazione, Thomas D’Urfey è l’autore che impiega più volte il termine “malcontent”, addirittura proponendo una descrizione del tipo nella sua opera non drammatica The Malecontent: A Satyr (1684). Malcontent è un uomo ritiratosi dalla società perché, come dirà a Error, disgustato dagli affari del mondo. La figura del malcontent finisce qui per assolvere l’esclusiva funzione di denunciare i vizi dell’epoca; non c’è più alcuna investigazione, seppur breve, dell’io, né viene dato conto di una complessità psicologica del personaggio. Con la fine del regno di James I, la grande stagione dei malcontents sembra così giunta inevitabilmente al termine. Ma il fascino di questo personaggio resta indelebile nei secoli seguenti e fa da eco alla citazione di Demetrio riportata da Seneca nel suo De Providentia e poi tradotta in inglese da Thomas Lodge nel 1614: “There is nothing, saith he, more unhappy then that man that hath never been touched with adversity: for he hath not had the means to know himself”