Vendetta to the very end
Anne Somerset
THE MYSTERY OF THE DUCHESS OF MALFI by Barbara Banks Amendola Sutton Publishing, £20, pp. 250, ISBN 0750928409 1 n the film Shakespeare in Love, the young John Webster is portrayed as a malevolent boy who delights in the sufferings of others. His obsession with inflicting pain supposedly foreshadows the subject matter of his plays, which are steeped in gore and every sort of horror. However, as Barbara Banks Amendola shows in this admirable study, far from springing from Webster's bloodthirsty imagination, his tragedy The Duchess of Ma/fl faithfully reflected events which had taken place in Italy 100 years earlier.
Webster's play, probably first performed in 1613, told the story of Giovanna d'Aragona, the widowed Duchess of Amalfi who enraged her princely family by contracting a clandestine second marriage with her steward, Antonio Bologna. Having borne him several children without being discovered, in 1510 Giovanna precipitated her ruin by announcing that Antonio was her husband. After the couple had been driven from the city where they sought refuge, Giovanna and two of her children were taken captive. Although their fate cannot be proved, it was widely believed that all three were strangled on the orders of her brother, Cardinal Luigi d'Aragona.
The Cardinal's vengeance did not end there. Unaware that his wife had been killed, Antonio Bologna was lured to Rome after being assured that her family wanted an accommodation. In October 1513 he was fatally stabbed on his way to church by a hired assassin, Daniele da Bozzolo.
The Duchess would have been well
aware of the risks she ran, for as an eightyear-old girl she had seen how ferociously her family regulated their marital affairs. Giovanna's grandfather was the wily and ruthless King Ferrante I of Naples. In 1486 he had dealt with a baronial revolt by volunteering to match another of his granddaughters to the son of the leading rebel. The offer was accepted and the wedding festivities were in full swing when the party was interrupted by an announcement that the king had been coerced by traitors into authorising this demeaning union. All the nobles present who had conspired against him were then arrested, along with their wives and children. Among those hustled to the dungeons, never to be seen again, was the bridegroom.
It might have been more sensible for Giovanna to have confined herself to having a secret affair with her steward. On the other hand, if she had been found out the consequences would probably have been equally disastrous, for brothers at the time were apt to act fiercely against anyone who compromised the family honour. When Francesco Maria della Rovere discovered that his sister was sleeping with his friend Giovanni Bravo, he invited Bravo to compete against him in a light-hearted fencing contest. Then, having arranged for servants to pinion the young man's arms, he ran him through repeatedly with his sword.
Giovanna's story was played out against a background of appalling political and military upheaval. In 1503 Naples lost its independence after Giovanna's uncle King Federico was ousted from his throne by the Spaniards. In the ensuing years Italy was plunged into turmoil as the French and Spanish struggled to gain control of the peninsula and the papacy sought to protect its own interests by manoeuvring between the two rivals. Throughout this period Giovanna's brother Cardinal Luigi d'Aragona loyally served successive popes as a diplomat and a soldier. Nevertheless, amid all the mayhem of foreign invasions, civilian massacres and military reverses, he still begrudged his sister her domestic happiness and obsessively pursued his vendetta.
Barbara Banks Amendola is a thorough researcher, but the sources for Giovanna's life are not very full. While there are times when one feels the author is eking out her material in a slightly desperate fashion, in general she makes magnificent use of the limited resources at her disposal. Giovanna's personal tragedy is skilfully intermeshed with the turbulent history of 16th-century Italy. The complexities of her family history (Giovanna had no less than three namesakes who feature in the story) are resolved by providing the reader with a comprehensive list of principal characters, and the narrative is enlivened by tales of scandal and foul play at Renaissance courts and the Roman curia. It is not just fans of Webster who will find it entertaining.
Previous page
