明視の欠如―『モルフィ公爵夫人』における闇と霧

抄録

John Russell Brown made a suggestive assumption that Webster fashioned The Duchess of Malfi with Blackfriars playhouse in mind, on the ground that dramatic effects of light and darkness are fully exploited in the play. Blindness in the pitch-dark, sometimes thoroughly obstructing eyesight of characters, is also symbolic of fatal lack of human sensibility and perceptiveness. Ferdinand with his incestuous fixation on his sister grows furious at her secret remarriage. Full light of recognition of his own perverseness is unendurable, so he imprisons her into darkness, torments and kills her without casting a momentary glance at her. Constantly turning away from his irretrievable folly until the last moment of his life, he dies, as it were, in psychic blindness. His agent of evil, Bosola who eagerly pursued advancement at court, falling into a perilous predicament with slight hope for survival, finds what he thought he saw was nothing but an illusory image. Realization of his own inner blindness, however, does not lead him to a penetrating insight into himself nor the world that surrounds him. All he can discern is boundless and thick mist shrouding the play's world, far more horrifying than the artificial darkness Ferdinand makes.

There is little intimation of illuminative hope perceivable beyond the darkness in the play. And for the audience full light of recognition of the play's world was unattainable until they stepped out of the dim playhouse and found themselves to be exposed to the light outside.