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• W2935532094 abstract "THE CRUEL MATHEMATICS OF THE DUCHESS OF MALFI R IC K B O W E R S University of Alberta Since the time of Euclid, the principles of mathematics have been estab­ lished as the principles of truth in enlightened European thought. Mathe­ matical truths are deduced logically and relied upon with complete confi­ dence. Their interrelationships allow us to perceive, locate, and establish structures in the world — structures that provide physical as well as moral comfort, because once proven they must be forever true. Even before Euclid, as demonstrated in the pre-Christian Greek drama, the workings of fate dic­ tated human experience in the same way as the workings of deductive reason­ ing dictate rigorous mathematical conclusions. Later, Renaissance scientists such as Kepler and Galileo held that the true causes of natural phenomena could be formulated in accordance with mathematical laws. God, therefore, was the ultimate mathematician who had founded a vast and complex uni­ verse of mathematical relationships wherein nature acted according to His perfect and inexorable law. But there is a self-consciousness in human na­ ture that recoils from such determinism; a self-consciousness that conceives moral truths as in fact human choices that are made in the face of an in­ tolerable and ever-present sense of extinction. It is this existential concern that Webster dramatizes in The Duchess of Malfi-, and he does it through the language and implications of mathematics.1 The twentieth-century version of Webster’s concern is set forth by Albert Camus: “No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our [human] condition” (16). Webster, of course, could not have known about the twentieth-century existentialist philosophies of Camus or Sartre, and such terms as “absurdist” or “dread pour soif en soi” would have meant nothing to him. But the sensibility that these terms describe is expressed by Webster in such terms as “melancholy,” “speculative philosophy,” or even “fantastical scholarship.” This is a time­ less sensibility having to do with subjective truth, irrational action, human responsibility, and certain death. Indeed the “cruel mathematics” of which Camus speaks seems to be grasped quite clearly by the Duchess of Malfi: I know death hath ten thousand several doors For men to take their exits; and ’tis found They go on such strange geometrical hinges, You may open them both ways, (iv.ii.219-22) English Studies in Canada, x v i, 4, December 1990 She thus explicates the central fact of relativistic human experience: innu­ merable possibilities double themselves at once because their opposites may be equally true. The insight here is one of subjective arithmetical absurdity within a social context, not — as some critics would have it — theological consistency within a moral one.2 Things simply do not add up in Webster’s vision. If they did, moral consolation would be a possibility, and the play would not exercise the enduring fascination that it does. Instead Webster remains, as T.S. Eliot so instinctively conceived him, “a very great literary and dramatic genius directed toward chaos” (117). This is not to say that Webster himself was chaotic, but that his most famous play tends toward confounded nullification — a mathematical reduction unto zero in structure, style, and dramaturgy — at the same time as the characters within the play strive for the most precise actions and discriminations. The pointlessness of all their actions, however, is emphasized by the “cruel mathematics” that governs Webster’s play throughout. Historically, the study of mathematics in England had been unstructured at best, at worst retrogressive. The “New Statutes” instituted at Oxford in 1564-65 de-emphasized science to favour the subjects of the trivium, namely grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The Reformation in England had clearly priv­ ileged the use of the “Word” over the speculation of number or symbol, moving the quadrivial subjects — arithmetic, music, geometry, and astron­ omy — to the Master of Arts degree. For the reformed Oxford don of the mid-sixteenth century, the danger of advanced scientific and mathematical technique was located in its very certainty, in its inarguable self-evidence once proved. Thus, the universities of England dissociated themselves from..." @default.
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• W2935532094 title "The Cruel Mathematics of The Duchess of Malfi" @default.
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• W2935532094 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.1990.0001" @default.
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