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The Moral Paradox of Webster's Tragedy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Robert F. Whitman
Robert F. Whitman*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
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Abstract

Over the years, Webster criticism has been haunted by a tendency to see the essential conflict in the tragedies as a struggle between the forces of good and evil. In recent years, critics have scarcely approached the possibility that his vision may be a paradox in which both sides of an apparent contradiction are equally “true.” The antitheses in Webster may not be good and evil so much as two irreconcilably opposed impulses of human nature that can be identified with the Nietzschean terms “Apollonian” and “Dionysian.” From this perspective Francisco, Monticelso, Ferdinand, or the Cardinal is not so much representative of evil as of the Apollonian obsession with obedience, responsibility, sexual restraint, and punishment. Vittoria and the Duchess, freed from moralistic quibbles, are Dionysian rebels. Flamineo and Bosola, like the rest of us, are caught between the demands of equally imperative but mutually exclusive ways of seeing reality.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 90 , Issue 5 , October 1975 , pp. 894 - 903
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975

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References

Notes

1 In Certain Elegies Done by Sundry Excellent Wits (London, 1617), quoted in The Complete Works of John Webster, ed. F. L. Lucas (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1937), i, 55.

2 A valuable survey of Webster criticism, to which I am myself indebted, is provided in Don D. Moore, John Webster and His Critics: 1617–1964 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1966).

3 My own survey of more recent Webster criticism appears as “Fifteen Years of Webster Criticism,” prefaced to a volume titled Beyond Melancholy: John Webster and the Tragedy of Darkness, Jacobean Drama Studies, No. 4, ed. James Hogg (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1973).

4 “The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi,” in Jacobean Theatre, Vol. I of Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1960), hereafter cited as Jacobean Theatre; “Webster and the Uses of Tragicomedy,” in John Webster, ed. Brian Morris (London: Ernest Benn, 1970); and the Preface to The White Devil, ed. J. R. Mulryne (London: Arnold, 1970), hereafter cited as The White Devil.

5 The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan (London: Ernest Benn, 1964), i.ii.91–92. Further citations from this edition will be indicated in the text.

6 The White Devil, ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan (New York: Hill, 1968), v.vi.238–39. Further citations from this edition will be indicated in the text.

7 This article was one of several projects completed under the generous terms of a research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. My expression of gratitude should not, however, be taken as committing the Endowment to an endorsement of my views.