Abstract
English playwrights were fascinated by Italy both in a positive and a negative way: they were drawn to Italy as a symbol of culture and refinement, but also as a nest of corruption and bloody conspiracies. Italy had the function of offering a foreign background in which dramatists could safely address their hostility against the English court. This article highlights this fascination with the darker side of Italy in the revision of the trial of Vittoria Accoramboni in John Webster’s The White Devil (1612). The story of Vittoria Accoramboni was so famous that many writers appropriated it and re-wrote it centuries after the fact: Stendhal, among others, reproduced the records of the time to offer a historical narration of the events in his Chroniques Italiennes – Vittoria Accoramboni, une oeuvre du domain public (1855). In his turn Webster seized the story, changing some elements such as the setting (he replaced Gubbio with Venice, probably because this town was better known to the audience), fictionalizing the love relationship between Victoria and Duke Brachiano, emphasizing the pandering influence of her brother Flamineo and especially adding his own view of the trial and how it was conducted.
Early modern English figurations of the Italian draw on a tradition of English veneration for Italy, imagined as a culture which exports humanism, Petrarchism, courtiership, and literary sophistication; but alongside veneration, these figurations express English fascination and contempt. (Bovilsky, 2003: 626)
People have long been fascinated by crime, now as in the past, and in Renaissance England murder was an intriguing subject. ‘Murder was a crime that ordinary people were intimately affected by, and one in which they were expected to intervene, in terms of capturing culprits, giving evidence and witnessing the punishment’ (McMahon, 2004: XIV). It may be argued that beside crimes of heresy or treason against the crown, common people were fascinated by murders, to which they were drawn by a sort of morbid fascination. If we connect the pleasurable thrill experienced in the narration of a crime with the ambiguous attraction for Italy, we may understand why the famous trial held against Vittoria Accoramboni inspired John Webster and enticed the curiosity of Elizabethan audiences: ‘What Italy mainly signified in Renaissance England was another country, a country of others, constructed through a lens of voyeuristic curiosity through which writers and their audiences explored what was forbidden in their own culture’ (Jones, 1987: 101).
English playwrights were fascinated by Italy both in a positive and a negative way: they were drawn to Italy as a symbol of culture and refinement, but also as a nest of corruption and bloody conspiracies. Italy had the function of offering a foreign background in which dramatists could safely address their hostility against the English court. The accusation of corruption against Italian society, Italian government and the Italian justice system was a not-too-veiled allusion to the misdeeds of the English upper society of the time.
This fascination with the darker side of Italy is evident in the revision of the trial of Vittoria Accoramboni that John Webster re-reads in The White Devil (2008 [1612]). The White Devil graphically enacts an ample number of similar English stereotypes of Italianness—of which adultery, consummated onstage, is hardly the most dramaturgically outrageous. The play also features the ascension of a Cardinal to the Papacy, acts of sorcery, betrayal, murder, and arcane poisoning—in this case, a painting poisoned so that a faithful wife dies upon kissing the lips of her painted husband in a ritual which, for all its marital devotion, is redolent of Catholic image worship. These plot elements certainly present and further a view of Italy as steeped in religious, sexual, and criminal license, that is, as a world in which Catholicism, atheism, and ‘nigromancy’ seamlessly blend through their manifestation in homologous sexual and violent crimes. (Bovilsky, 2003: 638)
In his turn Webster seized the story, changing some elements such as the setting (he replaced Gubbio with Venice, probably because this town was better known to the audience), fictionalizing the love relationship between Vittoria and Duke Brachiano, emphasizing the pandering influence of her brother Flamineo and especially adding his own view of the trial and how it was conducted.
This event in the Italian chronicles was not the only one that influenced Webster. In the same period another famous trial against a young woman of a noble family echoed all over Italy, the trial of Beatrice Cenci. Together with her mother, Beatrice (1577–1599) was accused of having killed her father, a violent and brutal nobleman who had frequently raped her and kept her a prisoner. The conviction and unjust execution of Beatrice has been considered across the centuries as an example of inequitable application of the law. In the case of Beatrice Cenci the trial also had recourse to torture, which is not the case in Webster’s play. So there are differences between the two cases: Beatrice really did commission the murder, even if she did not commit it herself, while Victoria Accoramboni had no direct involvement in the killing of her husband and of Brachiano’s wife, even if she reported to Brachiano a dream she had where the two spouses came to a bad end. These are two notorious cases of murder where the fault fell upon the women.
Penal trials have always had a strong impact on literature: this is especially evident in our time where major literary production is centred on thrillers, murders, trials and on how the law operates to redress the violation of social order. In the Renaissance these two notorious murder cases created a kind of penal mythology. Literary myths may develop out of law courts and legal narrations. In fact, the trial and execution of Beatrice Cenci caused the rise of a number of myths concerning the structure of penal law both within the Church and in general during the Renaissance, which greatly contributed to the creation of a dark legend of Italian sadistic justice as an aftermath of the Counter-Reformation (Mazzacane, 2010). Beatrice is actually the protagonist of an endless series of literary and theatrical works across the centuries, including recent cinematic adaptations.
The Accoramboni trial is therefore at the centre of Webster’s play as it was at the centre of the historical events cited above. How was it conducted? Was it a fair trial? Did justice prevail? From his text the trial emerges as biased, initiated on false premises, rooted in religious and social prejudice. Moreover the trial is misrepresented even in its formal procedure: the judge and the prosecutor are the same person; arbitrary decisions remained (for a long time) a regular feature of foreign judicial processes (Schott Symes, 2012). The Court is intrinsically and structurally flawed. The lack of a jury, typical of the Common Law’s way of doing justice, probably serves the function of creating a foreign background to the trial. ‘The Common Law procedure functions less as a marker of nationality […] than as an abstract signifier of judicial righteousness’ (Schott Symes, 2012: 75).
Reaching incontrovertible truth was the king’s duty, which he delegated to a judge as his alter ego. The judge had to reach the truth by examining the evidence and by a formal demonstration of the premises. The juridical system tried to establish fixed rules for judgment, but in reality the whole penal process was rooted in arbitrium iudicis. The arbitrary nature of Victoria’s trial is evident in the fact that the judge in the play is a Cardinal: Victoria is directly judged not by the State but by the Church, which particularly stigmatizes sexual sin. We have the impression that the actual murder itself is secondary compared to the accusation of whoredom. Let us consider the long debate on the term ‘whore’ in Act III, Scene 2, v. 80 ff.: Monticelso: shall I expound whore to you? They are first Sweetmeats which rot the eater: in man’s nostril Poisoned perfumes …. The true material fire of hell ….. They are those brittle evidences of law Which forfeit all a wretched man’s estate … They are worse, Worse than dead bodies, which are begged at gallows And wrought upon by surgeons, to teach man Whereon he is imperfect. What’s a whore? She’s like the guilty counterfeited coin Which whosoe’er first stamps it brings in trouble All that receive it. (III, 2, 80 ff.)
Victoria’s trial begins, as it should, as a judgment about a slaughter, but there is no evidence that it was Victoria who committed the crime; as Victoria herself correctly stresses during the debate, we have the impression that the murderers are not on this side of the court but on the other, on the judge’s side. What is slaughtered is Victoria’s good name, her own personhood. The Cardinal is the key to the situation: as he cannot prosecute her for murder, because no irrefutable evidence can be brought against her, he swerves the accusation to her moral conduct. In other words, justice fails because the real cause of the trial is forgotten for the sake of an abstract and vague accusation of immorality. So much so that it can be argued that the real punishment of the culprit takes place outside the court when finally the real culprit, Brachiano, is killed by her revengers. Justice is done, but outside the court.
Justice is a vain shadow, and the court only triggers private revenge, unleashes personal resentment and gives voice to the judge’s own prejudices. The Cardinal stigmatizes Victoria’s adulterous action because he is fascinated by the sin itself and is sexually drawn towards Victoria. His harshness exposes his own sinful tendencies, which he wants to attribute to the woman. In the play, this is what the trial actually represents. The true history of these murders, for instance, shares this aspect with the case of Beatrice Cenci: the extenuating circumstances of her being raped by her father are not taken into consideration. Sexual abuse of a woman is part of her fate: being a pawn for her family’s commercial interests (representing the means of a profitable marriage) annuls her rights as a legal person, who has her own dignity and need for protection.
So, after all, what is the function of this trial? In The White Devil the trial is the means through which society gives vent to its superstitious hatred of women. As the woman cannot be eliminated physically, she is eliminated morally: the attempt is to bar her from the world by imprisoning her into a House of Convertites. Her metaphorical assassination is here evident. Therefore the trial reveals that the actual murderers are not considered guilty: they are not the ones who stand on trial; indeed they stand for the law.
The structure of this trial is still very much rooted in the practice of torture (here moral rather than physical), as an inquisitio peccatorum: the discovery of truth represents grounds for expiation of the sin and a condition for the culprit’s redemption. In other words, it is a negotiated and personalized justice, rooted not in the centralization of public power, but in the circulation of values and prejudices acting as discipline and punishment, a control system that exposes its own weakness and instrumentalization (Mazzacane, 2010: 958). The trial represents an attempt at a legal murder. Here the judge, rather than embodying the law and applying it, uses the law for his own personal aims, for the application of his own prejudices.
To stress the importance of the trial in The White Devil I will have recourse to what Salvatore Satta (1949) asserted concerning the mystery of the trial as far back as 1949. Given the turmoil of the events in the play, with two murders, the scheme being plotted by different villains, the adulterous love affair bringing about an acceleration of events, the trial marks a break. The action turns upon itself and becomes focused on the sentence. Indeed, the whole of our existence revolves around a judgment, in particular the final verdict when Christ will come back to judge humankind. The concept of nulla poena sine iudicio is not only a practical necessity of justice, but it is an ontological necessity (Satta, 1949: 281). So judgment becomes its own payment, its own reward. Satta correctly reverses the concept with the folmula nullum iudicium sine poena. As in The White Devil the trial is ambiguous, mixing penal law with religious law; we may even argue that religious law takes the place of penal law. The trial fails. The aim of punishing murder is substituted by a moral judgment against a woman’s wrongdoing. Certainly the decision to imprison Victoria in a House of Convertites is an unjust verdict, whereas the real culprit of the murders goes unpunished by the trial. Judgment therefore becomes ineffective: it is a judgment without punishment, or at least, without the expected or right punishment. At this point anyone can feel entitled to punish, and in fact Brachiano – the real culprit – will be penalized outside the trial, when the revengers will rely on action and ignore judgment.
At any rate, the trial is a conflict: the lawyer against the judge, the judge against both the lawyer and the prosecuted, the prosecuted against the judge. In Webster’s play this agonistic perspective is underscored because Victoria does not even have a lawyer to defend her: all the characters involved in the trial are against her. The lawyer’s jargon makes the events even more obscure, so much so that Victoria rejects the magistrate’s intervention and decides to speak for herself. Indeed the vicious side of the trial comes to the fore in the text: it does not judge guilt, but constructs it. The trial results in an act of shaming and public humiliation: it does not represent the restoration of a disrupted order. The aspiration of the common man to see a trial as the place of neutral judgment, almost as a metaphysical place where justice materializes in a sort of religious rite (see Carpi, 2007, 2010; Garapon, 2001), is baffled here by the exploitation of the court as a place where one can vent one’s own personal, selfish and subjective enmity, staging someone’s shame as a public spectacle. The iconic ritual of the trial seems to aim at defeating sin in a collective act of purification: in this way the real story of Vittoria should be transformed into a warning paradigm of the dissonance between human and divine justice, while leading to the rise of ancestral archetypes, such as viewing woman as evil, being a descendant of Eve.
However, the suggestive power of both historical figures, Vittoria Accoramboni and Beatrice Cenci, is strongly re-echoed in Webster’s play. Beatrice Cenci’s fame spread among the people: she became the symbol of a beautiful and victimized young woman who died heroically, without complaining, setting the example for a sense of dignity and will-power. In the same way Webster’s Victoria shows manly fortitude in adversity, fighting skillfully and courageously against a patriarchal society, trading word for word, refusing to be crushed by an inimical legal situation, by the power structures aligned against her. Generally, the Italian settings of Jacobean tragedy and tragicomedy allow the English to depict disturbing tendencies toward immorality, religious errancy, and sexual license as the native province of national others. [….] Webster’s The White Devil presents just such a dense combination of dis- and cross-identification, English and Italian, nation and race. (Bovilsky, 2003: 637)
As for the trial itself, how is it conducted? From the very opening of the process, Monticelso asserts: … we have nought but circumstances To charge her with, about her husband’s death; Their approbation therefore to the proofs Of her black lust, shall make her infamous To all our neighbouring kingdoms. (III, 1, 3–7)
The jury is the most typically English aspect of penal trials. The presence of the petty jury in trials goes back to the 13th century: the petty jury consists mainly of witnesses; their verdicts (vere dictum) are used by the King’s judges as means of proof and the judges conform their sentences to those verdicts. The petty jury implies the presence of neighbours who are acquainted with the events. To reach its verdict the jury can use the information it has acquired concerning the crime and can debate with the judge, being allowed to speak as well as to listen. But this medieval system entailed a static and organized society. In the course of time, and particularly in the 15th and 16th centuries, the jury could ignore the facts and its members could no longer be considered witnesses. The fact that the jury is a neutral organ, silent and passive, that must base its verdict only on the proofs presented and discussed during the trial happens much later, during the 18th century and in full in the 19th century. It is at the end of the 18th century that the modern configuration of the jury, with its particular relation with the judge, takes place (see AAVV, 2012; Dezza, 2009; Sorrentino, 1999).
Do we have a jury in Webster’s play? Literally not, but Victoria, rejecting the lawyer’s jargon, explicitly mentions the impossibility for the audience to understand and judge the accusations against her: Victoria: Pray my Lord, let him speak his usual tongue. I’ll make no answer else. Francisco: Why you understand Latin. Victoria: I do sir, but amongst this auditory Which comes to hear my cause, the half or more May be ignorant in’t … I will not have my accusation clouded In a strange tongue: all this assembly Shall hear what you can charge me with. (III, 3, 12–20) One explanation for the absence of onstage juries is that the period conceived of the theatre itself as following the structure of a quasi-legal process, with the audience adopting the part of the jury […] [it] plays the jury’s role in the early modern theatre: witnessing some of the crimes, and hearing some of the evidence, theatregoers were encouraged to engage in probabilistic thinking and pass moral judgment. (Schott Symes, 2012: 78)
The judge focuses his accusations mainly on the violation of customary behaviour: a widow should be in mourning attire, her attitude subdued and not ‘armed with scorn and impudence’, with cunning. ‘She scandals our proceedings’, Monticelso asserts (III, 2, 129). So all the judge can do is to stigmatize the rebellious attitude in the woman who does not conform to the socially required behaviour. The modernity of her outlook, demonstrating the woman’s very independent character, is actually taken from history, because historical documents describe a similar demeanour both in Beatrice Cenci and in Vittoria Accoramboni.
Victoria is sentenced by a prejudiced judge, who had beforehand decided what sort of punishment to inflict upon her. The trial attempts to corner her, to degrade her and deprive her of any dignity, thus ‘disarming her’. This trial demonstrates the unpredictability and uncontrollability of judgments; the verbal ignorance of lawyers who love to stand out as ‘famous’ and ‘cunning’, losing sight of the dignity of the profession; the difficulty of knowing the res judicata; the impotence of the individual before the law and its process. Victoria: So entangled in accursed accusation That my defence, of force, like Perseus Must personate masculine virtue to the point. Find me but guilty, sever head from body: We’ll part good friends; I scorn to hold my life At yours or any man’s entreaty […] These are but feigned shadows of my evils, Terrify babes, my lord, with painted devils. (III, 2, 135–147)
The law has always been an important tool of government. Trials very often stage political matters: the central authority wants issues to be solved in a way that does not damage society. In a penal trial the whole community is called into question because some social order has been violated. Therefore in the penal trial the social equilibrium is particularly evident, as well as the balance between authority/repression and freedom. In the case of Webster, Brachiano is present at the opening of the trial but as he belongs to the powerful aristocracy nobody dares accuse him of murder or involvement in the crime. He is beyond judgment or, if necessary, at least he should be judged by his peers: the Magna Carta of 1215, having been produced by a medieval hierarchical society, stated exactly this principle. Therefore, as the crime cannot be traced back to Brachiano, the judge attributes it to the woman, a weaker subject: a responsible agent must be found, the people must be satisfied. This is why if revenge is achieved, it must happen outside the court: Brachiano will be killed clandestinely, according to a medieval, private and family law. People must be reassured that if an upheaval takes place, order will be restored: they need reassurance and truth. In the Renaissance the world still seems intelligible. However, the fact that the involvement of Victoria in the murder cannot be proven and that the trial fails in ascertaining truth anticipates the problematization of justice that is theorized nowadays.
Another element that is called into question in Webster’s play is the concept of mens rea (evil intent). This became an issue of great importance during the Early Modern period. It was generally connected to actus reus (the criminal act), but as Victoria’s actual involvement in the murder cannot be demonstrated, she is accused of whoredom, which suggests mens rea. Adulterous behaviour shows an evil intent, a murderous act in potentia, a mental intent to commit the crime.
‘There is little evidence that, until the seventeenth century, anything but moral turpitude was considered in determining mental guilt in felonious endeavours’ (Barleben, 2017: 34). The fact that the Renaissance era saw the emergence of a class of legal professionals and of the increasing significance of the Inns of Court is made evident by the presence of a lawyer on the scene, with all the specialized language pertaining to the profession. Crime began to be considered as a threat to the whole society; trials became an instrument of class dominance. The principle of mens rea implies that which might endanger public interest; therefore the judgment against Victoria is focused on this principle. Her immoral behaviour can pave the way for an actus reus. The mens rea was […] a prominent characteristic of modes of criminal enquiry for English Courts as far back as the Sixteenth century[…] It was the movement towards delineating […] the interiority of the civil subject on trial with which modern courts […] became so preoccupied. (Barleben, 2017: 35)
The violence of the courtroom trial against the individual, who is made to appear more guilty than he/she really is, is also underscored by the lawyer’s obscure jargon, as argued earlier: the lawyer’s intent is to turn Victoria into a criminal, thus violating her ontological status as a civil subject. The attempt at a forced confession fails; she demonstrates a strong character, as strong as that of Beatrice Cenci, who died a noble death, robbing fate of its victory against her (in the Aeschylean sense).
Another interesting aspect of the failure of justice in the trial is the psychological torture of Brachiano’s mind in Act V, Scene 2, v. 140 ff. Gasparo and Ludovico undertake the action of destroying Brachiano, who had gone unpunished from the trial against Victoria: they disguise themselves as capuchin monks in order to be able to approach Brachiano’s death bed. This pseudo-juridical judgment must be set within the realm of private revenge taking on a religious perspective. Brachiano is threatened with spiritual damnation and metaphysical death. The Church’s economic exploitation of peoples’ hopes and fears about the afterlife was merely one particularly scandalous aspect of an entirely self-contained legal and penal system, administered through the Church courts and the confessional, with limitless reach beyond this life into the next. (Hutson, 2002: 297) In their explorations of ways to distinguish the punishment due to sin from the state of mind of the sinner, theologians established a difference between the guilt (culpa) that might be forgiven through contrition and confession and the punishment (poena) that remained payable to God in the form of penance. (Hutson, 2002: 309) Gasparo: Brachiano Lodovico: Devil Brachiano, Thou art damned. Gasparo: Perpetually. Lodovico: A slave condemned and given up to the gallows Is thy great lord and master. Gasparo: True for thou Art given up to the devil. […] Gasparo: This is count Lodovico Lodovico: This Gasparo. And thou shalt die like a poor rogue. Gasparo: And stink like a dead fly-blown dog. Lodovico: And be forgotten Before thy funeral sermon. Brachiano: Victoria! Victoria! (V, 3, 148–165)