The Book/Body in The Duchess of Malfi

For Helen Smith, in “Embodying Early Modern Women’s Reading,” “the text enacts a physiological change” on the reader.1 In this essay, I should like to revise this statement to suggest that this “change” is actu-ally an exchange between text and body. The marginalia left behind by early modern readers are visible traces of their bodily imprints upon the text and suggest that by their reading, the text becomes an extension of the reader’s body. Such exchanges need not be limited only to such vis-ible marks. Recent scholarship has begun to study the often slightly less visible marks left behind by book users; Katherine Rudy’s work employs the use of a densitometer to examine these marks, which include oils from fingerprints, food stains, tears, and even blood stains that help to create a better idea of what parts of a text a reader read and how often that text was read.2 It is not just that “[t]he process of accessing the text was a cor-poreal one . . . impressing key content on the reader’s memory,” but that the text itself also becomes embodied, taking on features of its reader.3 Te x t and reader exchange properties. To say only that “[r]eaders’ bodies were molded and altered by the texts they read” is to ignore the other side of the equation.4 The reader is not only imprinted by the text but imprints the text itself (both literally and figuratively). The relationship between book and reader proves symbiotic, an example of facultative mutualism (where two entities are interdependent but not completely dependent upon each other), something, as I shall show, is illustrated perfectly in the figures of the Cardinal and his Bible in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. The Cardinal’s overpowering, poisonous character — he would be “able to possess the greatest devil, and make him worse”5— is both altered by his (mis)reading of the Bible and other religious texts (see 5.5.1–10), as well as being able to infect the book itself, allowing it to literally become poisonous, thereby killing Julia. In the play, the use of the book as murder weapon demonstrates how the boundary between book and body (of the reader) become blurred as both the permeability of the page and of the body is emphasized throughout the play.