Vittoria’s Yew – The White Devil (1612)

Elizabethan dramatist John Fletcher’s The White Devil (1612) skillfully weaves social satire with the kind of courtly intrigue narrative typical of the era’s revenge tragedies. Like Shakespeare, Fletcher sets his drama in one of the many Italian city-states which had by this point been enshrined in dramatic tradition as seats of corruption and violence, so as to disguise his critique of contemporary English society. The labyrinthine web of murders and subterfuges that comprises the play’s plot is set in motion in part by the above exchange, wherein the wily Vittoria attempts, not without success, to subliminally influence the Duke Brachiano to murder her husband, Camillo, and his own wife, Isabella, so that they can be free to pursue their extramarital affair. In her (fabricated) dream, Camillo and Isabella accuse Vittoria of attempting to corrupt the well-bred Brachiano (symbolised by the yew, homophonous of course with the pronoun ‘you’) and to make a ‘withered blackthorn’ of him. Vittoria’s description certainly does justice to the physicality of the yew. Referencing the ‘massy arm’ of ‘that strong plant’, Vittoria gives the impression of a kind of musculature to the tree, faithfully rendering a sense of its characteristic imposing stature. The yew asserts itself; it takes up space – this is seen earlier too when it is described spreading its ‘large root in ground’. The yew does in fact have one of the most robust root systems of all trees.

Vittoria’s coupling of the yew with a churchyard is an obvious choice; by the seventeenth century, the two had become indissociable. Symbolically at least, the yew was a mere extension of a churchyard, a mere excrescence of death emerging out of, even feeding on, the corpses interred below. ‘[L]ike the black and melancholic yew-tree’, the Cardinal Monticelso later sermonises to another homicidal courtier, ‘Dost think to root thyself in dead men’s graves/ And yet to prosper?’ That yews and churches typically came in pairs led to a kind ambivalence in its reception. The yew’s reputation was one ennobled by its proximity to divinity even as it was muddied by its implication in offal and necrophagy. Vittoria’s deployment of yew imagery, then, constitutes a highly economical manoeuvre. The yew straddles connotations of death (‘black and melancholic yew’) and sanctity (‘sacred yew’), and so by mobilising all this symbolic baggage, Vittoria automatically evokes two seemingly disparate ideas for the price of one. Vittoria capitalises on the yew’s ambivalence as she attempts to justify, even sanctify (or at least sanction) the deaths of her political rivals by making them seem somehow natural and right. The yew spells death – such was its reputation – and yet the yew is also a fixture of any churchyard. Surely whatever death it brings about, then, is in a way a church-approved death, a death essentially greenlit by Christendom – is the ‘grave’ not then Camillo’s and Isabella’s ‘due’? So runs Vittoria’s internal logic. Vittoria’s dream-narrative is thus a masterclass in the shifting blame and abdicating responsibility. Her positioning of herself as an innocent victim is a piece of inspired artifice very typical of the sort of double dealing everywhere observable in The White Devil.

- Spandan Bandyopadhyay