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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

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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)

My dissertation, Inside Out: Cavendish on Self-knowledge, Perception, and Figure explores the works of philosopher, poet, and playwright Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673). Cavendish wrote extensively on natural philosophy and argues that nature is one material substance imbued with reason, perception, and self-motion. Her theory of matter is novel for her time since her contemporaries, the mechanical philosophers, such as Hobbes and Descartes, frequently claim matter is unfeeling, unthinking, and passive. The orderly mechanisms of the natural world, for them, are explained through matter in motion, specifically collisions from contiguous bodies. For example, billiard balls striking one another explains all natural phenomena. For Cavendish, the order of the natural world is similarly explained through matter in motion, but rather than bodies moved by collisions from contiguous bodies, bodies move themselves guided by their own sense and reason. Nature for her is “entirely wise and knowing” (OEP 2001: 48).One major recurring theme in both Cavendish’s works and the secondary literature is how mind-like and agential nature is given Cavendish’s description of nature’s knowledge and its ability to perceive and reason. The existing interpretations either assign Cavendishian matter robust mind-like qualities akin to contemporary panpsychism, or they naturalize her theory so that all matter’s qualities have a metaphysical explanation based on the nature of bodies. The goal of my dissertation is to provide an alternative interpretation that does not view matter through a panpsychist lens but retains its important mind-like quality, which is knowledge. I aim to show that Cavendish’s theory of nature does not explain nature’s qualities in terms of human cognition; instead it explains sense and knowledge that is unique to matter. This unique sense and knowledge is what produces the “peaceable, orderly and wise government” that is nature according to Cavendish (OEP 2001: 232). I argue that this is a viable interpretation by discussing three important phenomena in her theory: perception, self-love, and self-knowledge. We can understand these phenomena as more metaphysical or naturalized, and less mental, by viewing them through two important concepts in Cavendish’s theory: sympathy and the nature of bodies, which Cavendish calls “figures.” In my first two chapters, I explain human perception (i.e., patterning) and Cavendish’s principle of individuation (i.e., self-love) as metaphysical sympathy. I argue that sympathy for her is naturalized and is constituted by the attraction of figures to each other or the imitation of a figure’s actions, behaviors, or properties. The difference between these two phenomena is how much of the figure each imitates: patterning only imitates sensible qualities while self-love imitates the whole figure. Patterning and self-love as sympathy explains these mind-like qualities metaphysically, rather than as mind-like phenomena. Matter does, in my interpretation, retain a mind-like quality, which is self-knowledge. In my third chapter I explain what self-knowledge is for Cavendish, arguing that it is a mental state. I discuss the features of self-knowledge as a mental state and its content, arguing that self-knowledge, for her, is as much about what a subject’s body is doing as it is about a subject’s mental state. In my fourth chapter I return to visual perception in humans and animals and discuss a potential problem in Cavendish’s theory. I argue that given Cavendish’s commitments concerning causation and the self-motion of matter, light plays seemingly no role. Yet, Cavendish must explain how we see external objects in the presence of light but not when it is absent. To solve this problem, I argue that our perception of external objects is mediated by light: light produces copies (i.e., patterns) of external objects and we see these patterns. By discussing these details of Cavendish’s theory and offering metaphysical or naturalized interpretations, I aim to show that my macroscopic view of Cavendish’s theory is plausible. My interpretation restricts mentality rather than removes it entirely from Cavendish's theory of nature. / Philosophy

This paper explores the depiction and function of madness on the Renaissance stage, specifically its development as trope of the English revenge tragedy from its Elizabethan conception to its Jacobean advent through a representative engagement of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Madness in these plays selectively departs from popular conceptions and archetypal formulas to create an uncertain dramatic space which allows its sufferers to walk moral lines and liminal paths unavailable to the sane. “Madness” is responsible for and a response to vision; where the revenger is driven to the edge of madness by a lapse in morality only visible to him, madness provides a lens to correct the injustice. It is the tool that allows them to escape convention, decorum and even the law to rout a moral cancer, and, in this capacity, is enabling rather than disabling.