The figure of the malcontent, the man who stands and considers the world, as it were through the opposite of rose-coloured spectacles, is a familiar one in Renaissance drama, and is used in a variety of ways by different playwrights. Although Webster’s use of the idea of this discontented observer is original in many ways, Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi comes from a long tradition and a wider context than we might at first think. Hamlet, Iago, Jaques from As You Like It, even the merchant Antonio in The Merchant of Venice share in something of his moods and his concerns.

The most important thing about the malcontent, is that he is malcontent—unhappy, unsettled, displeased with the world as he sees it—not at ease with the world of the play in which he finds himself, eager to change it somehow, or to dispute with it. He is an objective or quasi-objective voice that comments on the concerns of the play and comments as though he is somehow above or beyond them

In some ways this aspect of the malcontent can make him a bridge between audience and actors. Variously seen as a spoil-sport, a wise man, a philosopher, a fool, the malcontent becomes the representative of the audience in little: the man who knows that there is a play in progress, who although inside the drama, can step outside it in order to comment upon it.

In The Duchess of Malfi, Bosola is presented to us as a malcontent even as he enters—‘Here comes Bosola, the only court-gall’—a man who is on the outside of the cosy society that Antonio shows to Delio.

Bosola galls, or irritates, the court in a variety of ways. In the first scene of the play he creates an awkwardness as the Cardinal enters, pursuing him and reminding him of his past service, and of past murders. He is a rub, an irritant, both because of the way that he pesters his old patron, and also because he extrapolates his complaints to include the world in general. Old soldiers, he suggests, are not well treated because the world does not like to think about how they earned their money. Assassins, like soldiers, are part of the oil that greases society’s wheels, used and then neglected. (later on in Act 1 Ferdinand, longing to fight in a war, is warned by Castruchio that this is a rather vulgar taste.)

Antonio and Delio seem uneasy under Bosola’s battery of protest. He complains about the corruption of the Cardinal and his brother, accusing them of encouraging flatterers and pandars and misusing their wealth, in a series of extravagant and vivid images. He is clearly an irritant to the smooth world of courtesy in which his hearers exist. On his exit, we see Delio immediately breaking into malicious gossip, as though to downgrade Bosola’s comments: ‘I knew this fellow seven years in the galleys for a notorious murder…’ and Antonio similarly suggests that Bosola’s anger stems not from a sense of honour, but from his envy of the court.

… I observe his railing
Is not for simple love of piety:
Indeed he rails at those things which he wants;
Would be as lecherous, covetous, or proud,
Bloody, or envious, as any man,
If he had means to be so.

Bosola, in other words, cannot be a true critic of the society of The Duchess of Malfi, at least as far as Antonio and Delio are concerned, because he criticises out of jealousy, not detachment. Antonio is concerned about this—and concerned, it would seem, about the whole fashion of being a malcontent, of resisting the current of society and embracing melancholy.

 Although Antonio criticises the court at times—and contrasts it with the perfection of the French court that he has lately left—he does so from a position of strength. He does not wish to destroy the court, or to gain his revenge upon it, he merely wishes to improve it. He resists melancholy, and disapproves of it in others, because it seems for him to run counter to that life of virtuous action that is his ideal. He speaks of his own melancholy, during his absence from Italy, as a negative and unappealing thing.

Attacking Bosola in this way also allows his hearers in the play to ignore the truth behind what he says, and Antonio’s words follow a recognisable pattern in criticising a malcontent or melancholic figure. The two easiest defences against this sort of critic of society seem to be that he is either jealous of those that he castigates, and would not be above the vices himself if he had the chance to practice them, or else that he is trying to get attention by his outcries. Society, in other words, judges its critics and refuses to accept that those who are less than pure themselves may yet speak the truth.

Looking at Shakespeare’s plays, we can see similar reactions to malcontent figures. For instance, in As You Like it, Jaques famously laments the state of the world of the play, looking at the ease and pleasure of life in the forest as somehow retrograde. He yearns to go back into the world and chastise corrupt society:

Invest me in my motley; give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will through and through
Cleanse the foul body of th'infected world,
If they will patiently receive my medecine.

The Duke fears that his desire to chastise corruption stems from shallower grounds. Like Antonio in The Duchess of Malfi, he looks at the melancholy man and sees only his vices. He replies doubtfully:

In other words, the duke suspects that Jaques’s motives are less pure than he affects, that he is in effect working out his own feelings about his own sins, and by chastising others will fail to recognise those same failings in himself. It’s another take on the gospel admonition not to be a person who points out a splinter in someone’s eye, yet ignores the beam of wood in their own.

When Jaques asks to be invested in ‘motley’—the fool’s colourful costume—he is surely thinking of a fool such as the one in King Lear, where apparent nonsense proves to have real perception behind it. The wisdom of the fool, of the madman, is also touched on in Hamlet, where Hamlet’s supposed madness gives him licence to comment on Polonius in a way that even Polonius suspects is meaningful:

Pol.  [Aside.] Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t. Will you walk out of the air, my lord?
 Ham.  Into my grave?
Pol.  Indeed, that is out o’ the air. [Aside.] How pregnant sometimes his replies are! a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of.

The supposed wisdom of the random utterances of a madman is akin to the wisdom of the fool.  Both the madman and the fool are freed from the normal constraints of polite social intercourse. They may say what they like and act as they like without fear of reprisal, because people feel free to ignore what they say. So Hamlet can bait Polonius under the guise of madness, and the fool can chastise Lear’s actions in a way that few others dare to do. (The converse of the freedom is, of course, that they fail to be believed)

The fool and the malcontent, though, are sharply separated. The first is separate from the world and is meant to be so. He is outside polite society by virtue of his low rank and his calling. As a result he can legitimately comment upon the inadequacies of society—his historic function, indeed, was sometimes to remind the king of the fragility of his own state. (This was echoed in the game of ‘The Lord of Misrule’, where masters and servants changed places in a ceremony that the duchess aligns to Antonio’s condition as unacknowledged husband in III i).

The malcontent, on the other hand, is separate from society, but should be involved with it, and his failure to integrate is something that other characters desire to remedy. Hamlet’s melancholy concerns the whole court; his mother and stepfather earnestly try to woo him out of it. Jaques in As You Like It is frequently mocked and teased in an attempt to cheer him up, and Antonio, in The Merchant of Venice, similarly cannot be allowed to be melancholy, because it disturbs the pleasure of his friends. It is one thing for a fool or a madman to criticise society—to have a member of society do the same might imply that there is some truth in the criticism.

When Antonio opens The Merchant of Venice by speaking of his sadness, his friends jokingly accuse him of running the risk of looking like someone whose aim is to get attention. Gratiano warns him that his sadness looks contrived. He evidently thinks that if Antonio gets attention or praise for his seeming sadness, that this might lead him to become habitually melancholy. He warns Antonio that silence and seriousness can sometimes be the mask to emptiness as well as to thoughtfulness, and in doing so warns him off a melancholic pose:

Gratiano’s teasing masks a very real concern—Antonio’s sadness threatens the frivolous and pleasure-loving society which he inhabits.  If Gratiano can dismiss it, or persuade Antonio that his feelings are something selfish or foolish, then he will not have to address the real concerns that lie behind it. It is notable that once they canvass the key areas of love and money, where their own interests are rooted, Antonio’s friends can see no reason for his melancholy. They shy away from any further investigation.

Later in the same play, one of Portia’s suitors, the county Palatine, is similarly characterised as being a person who affects to be sad in order to impress. Portia scorns him for this—to her it is a false affectation, following a fashion of which she disapproves:

 He doth nothing but frown, as who should say, ‘An you will not have me, choose.’ He hears merry tales, and smiles not: I fear he will prove the weeping philosopher when he grows old, being so full of unmannerly sadness in his youth. I had rather be married to a death’s-head with a bone in his mouth

It is interesting that here, as elsewhere, melancholy is depicted as the enemy of love. The Duchess of Malfi’s cry to Antonio “This is flesh and blood, sir! / ‘Tis not the figure cut in alabaster / kneels at my husband’s tomb’ echoes Gratiano’s imagery above. The Merchant Antonio responds “fie!” to the suggestion that he is in love, and Gratiano implies that this disinterest leads to the sort of melancholia for effect that he delineates. In other words, the withdrawal from normal society that is the mark of the melancholic disposition, the disapproval of normal human behaviour, leads also away from the civilising influence of love.

In Malfi, Antonio is anxious to prevent this sort of thing happening to Bosola. He also describes how melancholy frustrates and atrophies the good energy and vitality in a man, turning him towards inaction, and perhaps towards wrong action. The malcontent, who wishes to disrupt society, springs from the melancholic who does not partake in it.

This foul melancholy
Will poison all his goodness; for, I'll tell you,
If too immoderate sleep be truly said
To be an inward rust unto the soul,
It then doth follow want of action
Breeds all black malcontents, and their close rearing,
Like moths in cloth, do hurt for want of wearing.

Melancholy is therefore something that Webster’s Antonio is concerned about, and something he is anxious to identify—and not only in Bosola.

When, in Act I scene ii Delio describes the Cardinal as a worldly man, a fighter, dancer, wooer and gambler, Antonio responds “some such flashes superficially hang on him, for form: but observe his inward character: he is a melancholy churchman”. He describes Ferdinand in similar terms: “what appears in him mirth, is merely outside,/If he laugh heartily, it is to laugh/All honesty out of fashion”.  Insincerity and melancholy here go hand in hand.

This link is reinforced almost immediately in the scene, as the melancholy of Bosola rapidly becomes a mask. On recruiting Bosola as a spy, Ferdinand advises him: “Be yourself: /Keep your old garb of melancholy: ‘twill express/ you envy those that stand above your reach, yet strive not to come near ‘em” In other words, he is to become more like the Cardinal or Ferdinand; someone who hides his deepest feelings and poses as something that he is not. The advice to “be yourself” is profoundly ironic in this context. To be himself, Bosola would have to have the courage to reject Ferdinand’s offer, as he strives to do, and refuse to become a spy. Declaring how he knows that he has made the wrong choice, he becomes at the start of the play a pitiable and ambivalent figure, declaring himself a ‘devil’, and by that very declaration demonstrating how different he is in kind from the other villains of the play, in that he recognises that goodness that he has chosen to reject.

Bosola reminds us, at this point, of Shakespeare’s other great Malcontent, Iago. When Iago, in Act I scene I of Othello, remarks about Cassio’s appointment:

  Iago.  Why, there’s no remedy: ’tis the curse of the service,
Preferment goes by letter and affection,
Not by the old gradation, where each second
Stood heir to the first.  

He sounds much like Bosola lamenting how old soldiers don’t get a proper reward, and only flatterers are valued. Later in the same scene, he says ‘I am not what I am’—just as Bosola is to pretend, so does he.

During the course of The Duchess of Malfi all the major characters are described as melancholy. The Cardinal tells Julia that he has taken her off her ‘melancholy perch’. Ferdinand observes that his sister’s melancholy ‘seems to be fortified / with a strange disdain’ Ferdinand’s lyncanthropia is ascribed to the influences of a ‘melancholy’ humour, the cardinal, after his sister’s death, is described by Bosola as ‘wondrous melancholy’, and Bosola himself continues to ascribe his penitence to his ‘melancholy’. Nonetheless, Antonio is the only one who seeks eagerly to throw this off. He persists in regarding it as a fashion, something that hides the real character. As he says to Bosola:

Because you would not seem to appear to th' world
Puff'd up with your preferment, you continue
This out-of-fashion melancholy: leave it, leave it.

He is right in seeing Bosola as a pretender, but perhaps not altogether right in thinking that his melancholia is a thing of fashion. Like that other great melancholic, Hamlet, Bosola’s satiric bitterness is not something that he can easily throw off.

 Hamlet’s melancholy is unfeigned: he attacks the idea that outward shows of grief can show what he really is:

 Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not ‘seems.’
’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, modes, shows of grief,
That can denote me truly; these indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

There are many parallels between Hamlet and Malfi. The centrality of the melancholic malcontent is only one. Nevertheless, it is interesting how often Hamlet himself seems to have concerns that are akin to Bosola’s. Perhaps it is no more than that Webster had in mind the great model of the melancholy observer, and makes Bosola imitate him. Like Hamlet, Bosola rails against make-up and concealments. At the start of Act 2, his exposure of the duchess is prefaced by a disquisition about cosmetics, but it is a strangely stagy one, demanding the introduction of a character (only delineated as ‘Old Lady’) apparently with no other purpose than to give his attack some object:

BOSOLA: You come from painting now?

OLD LADY: From what?

BOSOLA: Why, from your scurvy face-physic.
To behold thee not painted inclines somewhat near
A miracle. These in thy face here, were deep ruts,
And foul sloughs, the last progress.
There was a lady in France that, having the small-pox,
Flay'd the skin off her face to make it more level;
And whereas before she looked like a nutmeg grater,
After she resembled an abortive hedgehog.

OLD LADY: Do you call this painting?

BOSOLA: No, no, but you call't careening of an old
Morphew'd lady, to make her disembogue again.
There's rough-cast phrase to your plastic.

OLD LADY: It seems you are well acquainted with my closet.

BOSOLA: One would suspect it for a shop of witchcraft,
To find in it the fat of serpents, spawn of snakes, Jews' spittle,
And their young childrens' ordure; and all these for the face.
I would sooner eat a dead pigeon, taken from the soles of the feet
Of one sick of the plague, than kiss one of you fasting.
Here are two of you, whose sin of your youth is the very
Patrimony of the physician; makes him renew
His foot-cloth with the spring, and change his
High-priced courtesan with the fall of the leaf.
I do wonder you do not loathe yourselves.

This is reminiscent of Hamlet’s similar exclamations against cosmetics when he speaks to Ophelia, but it lacks the personal edge of Hamlet’s speech. Hamlet’s words are savage—and demonstrate also the way in which he feels that marriage is utterly at odds with his mission to chastise the Danish court—but they are also telling with regard to his relationship with Ophelia:

Ham.  I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nickname God’s creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I’ll no more on’t; it hath made me mad. I say, we will have no more marriages; those that are married already, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery, go.  

In V I the imagery recurs, when Hamlet addresses Yorick’s skull, telling it ‘Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that’. Again, for Shakespeare, the image must have a purpose—in this case to chastise the Queen. Hamlet does not come out with these remarks simply for show—they are integrated more closely into his characterisation and into the whole movement of the play.

Hamlet is also given to philosophising more generally about mankind. The observations are born out of his disillusionment with the court, and again, they are part of a discussion with Rosencrantz and Guildernstern:

"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so."

Bosola does likewise, but again, it is a piece of performance: ‘observe my meditation’ he warns his audience.  His words are a strange half-echo of Hamlet’s, but a contradictory one.

Observe my meditation now:
What thing is in this outward form of man
To be belov'd? We account it ominous,
If nature do produce a colt, or lamb,
A fawn, or goat, in any limb resembling
A man, and fly from't as a prodigy.
Man stands amaz'd to see his deformity
In any other creature but himself.
But in our own flesh, though we bear diseases
Which have their true names only ta'en from beasts,
As the most ulcerous wolf and swinish measle;
Though we are eaten up of lice and worms,
And though continually we bear about us
A rotten and dead body, we delight
To hide it in rich tissue; all our fear,
Nay all our terror, is, lest our physician
Should put us in the ground, to be made sweet.

Bosola has lost something of the freshness of Hamlet’s disillusionment with the world—for Hamlet, half the charm is that others, his mother and the king, still relish the pleasures of the world. He is able to distinguish himself from them through his melancholy, while still admiring the beautiful things that he has lost. He is aware, in other words, that his state of mind is at odds with society.

Bosola, by contrast, links himself with those that he condemns. He does not speak of himself as being apart from the society that he condemns, but rather as a part of it. ‘all our terror is’. He is one of those who is afraid of death.

Bosola is a step beyond Hamlet: The good man, the man with much of virtue in him, corrupted ‘out of horse-dung’, corrupted in other words, through money and patronage and his inability to earn a living honestly. He is realistic about the demands of nobility and honesty. When Ferdinand first gives him money, he almost eagerly asks ‘whose throat must I cut?’—this at least is an honest hire—he knows the rules for this kind of job. When he is told that he is to become an ‘intelligencer’, he is profoundly uneasy.

Take your devils,
Which hell calls angels: these curs'd gifts would make
You a corrupter, me an impudent traitor;
And should I take these, they'd take me to hell.

Hamlet almost eagerly embraces the idea of acting a part, of pretending to be mad. Bosola is apparently concerned that to act the part of the Duchess’s faithful servant while serving her brother would make him a ‘traitor’.  Yet although he accepts the part—and carries it though faithfully—his reservations about his role, and his constant bitter remarks about spies and spying, make him an intriguing and engaging character, one who because he is better than his chosen role, because he is aware of what virtue and honesty can be, remains truly malcontent—dissatisfied both with the world of the Duchess and Antonio, which he seeks to disrupt, and the world of her brothers, whose consciences he tries to awaken.