Words of Wisdom

"My sister, oh my sister! There's the cause on't.
Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust,
Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust."
(V.v.86-88)

It was not really until Ferdinand uttered these words that I completely believed in his remorse. Obviously Ferdinand has a hint of madness going on, which our class seems to think did not really come up until after he realized that the Duchess was dead. However, I wonder if this was truly AFTER the Duchess's execution and AFTER he saw what he had done. In scene II when the doctor is describing Ferdinand's condition, he says that people with his diagnosed disease "imagine / Themselves to be transformed into wolves, / Steal forth to churchyards in the dead of night and dig dead bodies up" (V.ii.9-12) and also goes on to say that they found Ferdinand with the leg of a dead man. If these are signs of his madness, did he not already begin to show these signs in the previous act when he brings a dead person's hand and gives it to his sister to shake in the darkness? Taking this into consideration sheds a little light on his character throughout the play. If he was mad from the start, that makes his actions and reactions to anything related to the Duchess a bit more understandable. I may be reading into this way too much, but if he was the mad one, and if he and the Duchess were, in fact, twins, then the Duchess represented the "sane" or "normal" part of him, which would explain why he wanted to keep her at bay. In a way this reminds me of Coriolanus and Aufidius, where there was so much anger and frustration until one of them died, then the one remaining was full of remorse. In a way that is what happened here.

Anyway, to get back to the quote that I quoted above, those lines seem to be the sanest thing that Ferdinand said throughout the entire play. He finally seems to realize that he was the only one who brought this misery upon himself. It is just weird to me how one of the biggest douches in the play was also the one who delivered such an enlightened statement.