SOURCE: Rowe, Katherine. “‘That Curious Engine’: Action at a Distance in The Duchess of Malfi.” In Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern, pp. 86-110. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999.

In this essay, part of a larger study of the repeated image of the dead hand in literature, Rowe discusses the image of the hand as it represents both marriage and the occult in The Duchess of Malfi. Rowe focuses on the scene in which Ferdinand offers the Duchess a dead man's hand in place of his own, considering it within contemporary discourse and beliefs about witchcraft.

The question of whether human agency is something that can be located, fixed, and attributed properly to individual actors pervades the plays of the early seventeenth century. Metaphors of bodily shape and physiology that served well to ground earlier political allegories unravel the social and political fictions that define persons...