Abstract As members of a family, siblings act important roles for their family prosperity in both literary works as well as the real world. Conventionally, sibling cordial love and harmonious interactions are extremely respected and advocated by society. This kind of sibling motif was also frequently seen in plays, fairly tales and folk tales. Moreover, prohibited not only by society but also by the one in the literary works, the theme of the sibling incest becomes a caution for those having too intimate sibling interactions. Similarly, adopting sibling motif as the structure of his two tragedies, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, John Webster applies different sibling interactions from those traditional ones. Both of The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil end with the tragic ends--their families become devastated and all brothers and sisters are dead. Applying completely different sibling interactions within his two tragedies, John Webster who abandons all the depictions of harmonious sibling interactions may have his own motivation of presenting this kind of sibling conflict and rivalry. For this reason, the main concern of this thesis is to investigate Webster's motivation of adapting the sibling motif in his two tragedies, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil and to comprehend his intention of writing this kind of sibling motif. The first chapter introduces a brief introduction of some critics' comments on Webster's plays, the social contexts of Webster's time and the Renaissance plays, fairy tales and folklore applying the sibling as its motif. The second chapter sketches how the family order was reinforced in the house manuals in the sixteenth century, how John Webster altered the historical events to present the sibling conflict and rivalry instead of the revenge plays. What John Webster presents is the complex sibling relationships, which are based on the marriage, the patriarchal figure and family members, property and the class system. The sibling relationship in The Duchess of Malfi obviously establishes the physical concern more than the psychological concern. The third chapter also points out how Webster elaborates the self-concerned brothers utilize his sister to confirm their social status without care as those in The Duchess of Malfi. After comprehending the sibling relationship based on the physical concern due to the social milieu, we may conclude that Webster¡¦s motivation to arrange the sibling motif not only manifest the evilness of human nature but also satirize the reinforcement of the patriarchal family and family order of Webster¡¦s time. On the whole, the morbid society Webster lived resulted in his depiction on the sibling conflict and rivalry in his two tragedies.

This thesis investigates the ways in which Webster’s Duchess of Malfi has been framed and interpreted, selecting various case studies from the four hundred years of the play’s history. It analyses the way in which a number of discourses have been brought to bear upon the play to delimit and shape its meanings, in the absence of a powerful determining author-figure such as Shakespeare. The investigation is organised around three “strands”, or elements which reappear in the commentary on the play. These are “pastness”, the sense that the play is framed as belonging to an earlier era and resistant to being completely interpreted by the later theatrical context being used to reproduce it; “not-Shakespeare”, the way in which Malfi has been set up in opposition to a “Shakespearean” model of dramatic value, or folded into that model; and “the dominance of the Duchess”, the tendency for the central character to act as a focus for the play’s perceived meanings. It identifies and analyses the co-opting of these elements in the service of wildly varying cultural politics throughout the play’s history. Sited within the assumptions and practices of Early Modern performance studies, this thesis constitutes an intervention in the field, demonstrating the possibility of a radically decentred approach. Such an approach is freed from either a reliance on Shakespeare as a prototypical model from which other works are imagined as diverging, or from the progressive narrative of theatre history in which twentieth century scholars “discovered” the true inherent meaning of early modern drama which had been “obscured” by the intervening centuries of theatre practice. It reveals blindspots and weaknesses in the existing Shakespeare-centred conception of the field, and opens up new possibilities for understanding Early Modern drama in historical and contemporary performance.

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The purpose of this thesis is to examine Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, a representative example of the Jacobean "horror" play, in terms of its possible relationship to Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, a dramatic theory chiefly propounded in The Theater and its Double. The introductory section outlines the basic aims and principles of a Theatre of Cruelty as postulated by Artaud, and attempts to show why, in view of recent theatrical experiments, Webster's play might profitably be investigated within this twentieth century context. The first two chapters proceed to a discussion of Webster's complex theatrical form, attempting to show how and why he makes full use of any available dramatic and theatrical device and convention to aid in the presentation of his personal vision of man and society. The play is thus first examined in the context of Total Theatre, a principle basic to a Theatre of Cruelty. The central chapters of the thesis investigate the thematic lines in The Duchess of Malfi, and attempt to show how in spite of the many components from which the play is constructed, there nevertheless emerges a unified and coherent dramatic vision. This vision is seen as being developed in three ways, separable for purposes of discussion but ultimately closely inter-related, namely visual imagery, verbal imagery and characters-in-action. Thematic presentation through visual and verbal imagery is discussed in Chapter III, while Chapter IV deals in more detail with aspects of characterization. The argument advanced in Chapter IV is that Webster's method of characterization is based on what is basically a simple Good and Evil contrast, with the characters developed as opposed Forces or symbols. The characters in action, seen as opposed Forces, constitute a third presentation of the central themes, working with and strengthening the presentation of the themes as explored in the visual and verbal imagery. The final chapter of the thesis examines the play in somewhat more general terms. An attempt is made to relate The Duchess of Malfi to more traditional genres—tragedy, comedy and satire. Webster's particular use of certain features of these traditional forms is discussed. Because the play is imperfect if measured against the accepted conventions of tragedy, the theory is advanced that it might be viewed as related philosophically to the contemporary Theatre of the Absurd, on which the Theatre of Cruelty has had considerable formative influence. Throughout the discussion of themes and characterization, references to Artaud and interpretations of Artaud's ideas are included wherever possible to point out the closeness of the relationship between The Duchess of Malfi and Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. The thesis advanced throughout is that the play contains within itself elements which were not formally advanced as an approach to drama until this century. In effect, a Jacobean Theatre of Cruelty is being suggested as existing in fact if not in name. Concluding remarks suggest that if the felt relationship between The Duchess of Malfi and the Theatre of Cruelty is seen to be a valid one, an investigation of other works by Jacobean dramatists might prove of use in giving meaning and significance to much of the violence, horror and grotesquery which appears in the plays of the period. The response of the Jacobean dramatists to their times can be seen as in many ways analogous to the response to the human condition in the dramas of the contemporary avant-garde. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

The aim of this paper is to prove that there is a pattern in Webster’s use of imagery, at least in the two great plays. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries / Department: English

This dissertation argues that in Renaissance discourses of the body the body is progressively evacuated of the spirit, as we move from texts of the late Medieval period to texts of the Jacobean period. Where New Historicists have suggested that the practice of “self-fashioning,” which dictates behaviour, speech and dress, takes place in the Renaissance, I argue that there was a material self-fashioning of the body occurring simultaneously. Such corporeal fashioning, motivated by desire for physical improvement, frustrates the extent to which the soul shapes the body. My Introduction lays theoretical and historical groundwork, situating the body/soul relationship in relation to Christian theology, Senecan-Stoicism, Epicureanism and philosophical materialism. Discourses of artistic creation, informed by neo-Platonism, also influence corporeal fashioning in that the most radical bodily modifications are imagined through literature, where artificers are often privileged as creators. Chapter One examines “The Miracle of the Black Leg,” a transplant, by the doctor-Saints Cosmas and Damian, of a Moor’s black leg to a white Sacristan, whose gangrenous leg is amputated. In written and pictorial representations Cosmas and Damian, initially figured as Saints, are later presented as doctors who perform a medical procedure. Alongside the doctors’ increasing agency, the black leg itself, inflected by Renaissance notions of Moors and Moorishness, troubles the soul’s immanence in the body. Chapter Two examines Elizabeth I’s practices of bodily fashioning through her wigs, dentures and cosmetics. I argue that Elizabeth’s symbolic value, which includes components of monarchical rule, as well as attitudes toward female beauty, is always already pre-empted by her body. In Book III of The Faerie Queene, moreover, Edmund Spenser writes an alternative history of England through Britomart’s body to provide an heir to Elizabeth’s otherwise heirless throne. Chapters Three and Four perform close readings of Book II of The Faerie Queene, Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua, Thomas Middleton’s The Maiden’s Tragedy and Revenger’s Tragedy, and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. I argue that both the allegorical and theatrical modes demand a level of materialism that paradoxically makes the body the centre of attention, and anticipates Cartesian mechanistic dualism. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-25 22:59:31.67

This dissertation attempts to fill a void in early modern English drama studies by offering an in-depth, cross-gendered comparative study emphasizing representations of women’s discursive agency. Such an examination contributes to the continuing critical discussion regarding the nature and extent of women’s potential agency as speakers and writers in the period and also to recent attempts to integrate the few surviving dramas by women into the larger, male-dominated dramatic tradition. Because statements about the nature of women’s speech in the period were overwhelmingly male, I begin by establishing the richness and variety of women’s attitudes toward marriage and toward their speech relative to marriage through an examination of their first-person writings. A reassessment of the dominant paradigms of the shrew and the silent woman as presented in male-authored popular drama—including The Taming of the Shrew and Epicene—follows. Although these stereotypes are not without ambiguity, they nevertheless considerably flatten the contours of the historical patterns discernable in women’s lifewriting. As a result, female spectators may have experienced greater cognitive dissonance in reaction to the portrayals of women by boy actors. In spite of this, however, they may have borrowed freely from the occasional glimpses of newly emergent views of women readily available in the theater for their own everyday performances, as I argue in a discussion of The Shoemaker’s Holiday and The Roaring Girl. Close, cross-gendered comparison of two sets of similarly-themed plays follows: The Duchess of Malfi and The Tragedy of Mariam, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Love’s Victory. Here my examination reveals that the female writers’ critique of prevailing gender norms is more thorough than the male writers’ and that the emphasis on female characters’ material bodies, particularly their voices, registers the female dramatists’ dissatisfaction with the disfiguring representations of women on the maledominated professional stage. I end with a discussion of several plays by women—The Concealed Fancies, The Convent of Pleasure, and Bell in Campo—to illustrate the various revisions of marriage offered by each through their emphasis on gendered performance and, further, to suggest the importance of the woman writer’s contribution to the continuing dialectic about the nature of women and their speech.

This thesis argues that there is an enigma at the heart of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi; a disjunction between the critical history of the play and its reception in performance. Historical disquiet about the status of the play among academics and cultural commentators has not prevented its popularity with audiences. It has, however, affected some of the staging decisions made by theatre companies mounting productions. Allied to other practical factors, these have impacted significantly – and occasionally disastrously – upon performances. It is argued that Webster conceived the play as a meditation on degree and, in aiming to draw out the maximum relevance from the social satire, deliberately created the multi-faceted performative role of Bosola to work his audience in a complex and subversive manner. The role's purpose was determined in response to the structural discontinuity imposed upon the play by the physical realities of staging within the Blackfriars' auditorium. But Webster also needed an agent to serve the plot's development and, in creating the role he also invented a character, developed way beyond the material of his sources. This character proved as trapped as any other in the play by the consequences of his own moral choices. Hovering between role and character, Webster's creation remains liminally poised on ‘the dangerous edge of things.' Part One explores the contexts in which Webster created one of the most ambiguous figures in early modern drama - subverting stock malcontent, villain and revenger - and speculates on the importance of the actor, John Lowin in its genesis. It includes a subsequent performance history of the role. Part Two presents the detailed analysis of a range of professional performances from the past four decades, attempting to demonstrate how the meaning of the play has been altered by decisions made regarding the part of Bosola.