Webster’s Horse-Play

Horses were everywhere in John Webster’s worlds – both the “real” world of early modern London and the dramatic world of his early seventeenth-century revenge tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi. This essay focuses on Webster’s equine and equestrian imagery in Duchess, especially in the play’s opening scene. Drawing on animal studies in the early modern period, this essay argues that relations between humans and animals, in particular horses, are pivotal to Webster’s world-making and construction of character. Duchess invites audiences to listen for not only equestrian activities and equine bodies but also horse-related literary allusions and socio-political symbolism. In this way, Webster’s horse-play engages early modern ideas about animals and humans, service and use, harmony and hierarchy. The sounds of horses and horsemanship in Duchess produce a sensibly familiar if inexorably tragic world in which Webster generates characters as embodied, ethical, and social creatures.