ill, like some that live in court,
And sometimes when my face was full of smiles Have felt the
maze of conscience in my breast.

The scholar's scepticism, which lies at the root of his perversity,
finds utterance in this meditation upon death:

Whither shall I go now? O Lucian, thy ridiculous purgatory!
to find Alexander the Great cobbling shoes, Pompey tagging
points, and Julius Caesar making hair-buttons!

Whether I resolve to fire, earth, water, air, or all the
elements by scruples, I know not, nor greatly care.

At the last moment he yet can say:

We cease to grieve, cease to be Fortune's slaves, Nay, cease
to die, by dying.

And again, with the very yielding of his spirit:

My life was a black charnel.

It will be seen that in no sense does Flamineo resemble Iago. He is
not a traitor working by craft and calculating ability to
well-considered ends. He is the desperado frantically clutching at an
uncertain and impossible satisfaction. Webster conceives him as a
self-abandoned atheist, who, maddened by poverty and tainted by
vicious living, takes a fury to his heart, and, because the goodness
of the world has been for ever lost to him, recklessly seeks the bad.

Bosola, in the 'Duchess of Malfi,' is of the same stamp. He too has
been a scholar. He is sent to the galleys 'for a notorious murder,'
and on his release he enters the service of two brothers, the Duke of
Calabria and the Cardinal of Aragon, who place him as their
intelligencer at the court of their sister.

_Bos_. It seems you would create me
One of your familiars.

_Ferd_. Familiar! what's that?

_Bos_. Why, a very quaint invisible devil in flesh,
An intelligencer.

_Ferd_. Such a kind of thriving thing
I would wish thee; and ere long thou may'st arrive
At a higher place by it.

Lured by hope of preferment, Bosola undertakes the office of spy,
tormentor, and at last of executioner. For:

Discontent and want
Is the best clay to mould a villain of.

But his true self, though subdued to be what he quaintly styles 'the
devil's quilted anvil,' on which 'all sins are fashioned and the blows
never heard,' continually rebels against this destiny. Compared with
Flamineo, he is less unnaturally criminal. His melancholy is more
fantastic, his despair more noble. Throughout the course of craft and
cruelty on which he is goaded by a relentless tas