John Webster

Early modern English playwrights often portrayed Italy as a place where there is a tolerance of vice and jealousy, a joy in mischief and plotting, and a desire for revenge. 1 John Webster's The White Devil, on the surface, seems to fit this simplistic categorization of Italy as a place of disorder and deception in stark contrast to English society; and the play certainly participates in the common use of exaggerated Italian stereotypes as a dramatic convention of revenge tragedies. 2 However, Webster builds from Italian newssheets, or avvisi, in his portrayal of crime, and his central trial scene is more akin to an English trial by jury. This article examines the cross-border dynamics inherent to Webster's play in order to reveal the ways Italian materials gave voice to legal concepts and expectations of law in early modern England. My comparative approach to the play illustrates how Webster develops a transnational legal perspective within his portrayal of a jury trial, the perceived core of English common law practices.

This essay asks how the boy players of the early modern English public stage and the aristocratic female performers of the early modern English court masque might have considered, and perhaps even affected, one another’s arts. Neither an aristocratic lady dancing in a masque nor a boy performing the role of such a lady on the public stage could have afforded to lose sight of the codes of elegant feminine behavior. Is it possible, then, that women’s and boys’ portrayals of elite femininity employed similar theatrical tactics? This essay proposes one methodology by which we might tease out potential relationships between boys’ and women’s performances. It begins by considering the conceptions of boy players and noble ladies inscribed in the texts of Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens (1609) and Love Restored (1612), comparing them to the scandalous behavior of Frances and Catherine Howard at the end of the latter masque’s performance. It goes on to suggest that these contexts may help us better to imagine how the boy who first played the eponymous heroine of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (c.1612-13) portrayed her noble yet transgressive femininity. Such a comparison between the verbal and physical rhetoric of masques and those of public theater dramas may allow us to glimpse shared codes of class and gender embodiment across a range of performance cultures.

The term 'lycanthropy' carries multiple meanings in the early modern mind on account of different fields such as theology, demonology, medicine and folklore crossing one another. To begin with, lycanthropy is defined by the reality of the werewolf, meaning the physical metamorphosis from human-being to wolf. However, this term also refers to the delusion that one is capable of such transformation whether it is the result of madness, melancholy, or witchcraft. Today, the werewolf pertains to the domain of fiction and folklore, whilst the latter definition belongs to what is called clinical lycanthropy. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the boundaries between the two terms were blurred as it seems the words werewolf and lycanthrope could be interchangeable. Lycanthropy is tackled in John Webster's (1580-c.1625) Jacobean play entitled The Duchess of Malfi, written between 1612 and 1613 and was first privately performed at the Blackfriars Theatre around 1613 and 1614. Webster's play dramatises historical events discussing the life at the court of Malfi, in Italy, from 1504 to 1510. Webster drew inspiration from the Italian novella Novelle written by Matteo Bandello in 1554. Webster's principal source was William Painter's The Palace of Pleasure (1567), which was a translation of François de Belleforest's French adaptation of Novelle.

Although the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction was pretty much dominated by female authors like Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, and even though the genre continues to produce plenty of contestants for the unofficial title of ‘Queen of Crime’, detective fiction has also been traditionally known for its patriarchal, misogynist bias. This concerns the institutional level of writing and publishing as much as it does the ideological subtexts of many detective novels, which frequently focus on male investigators protecting a patriarchal system of inheritance against interlopers and reformers. This means that female detectives often find themselves caught in a double-bind, what with their investigations helping to sustain the very system that discriminates against them.
This article highlights this conundrum by examining the oeuvre of the late P.D. James (1920-2014). James produced nearly twenty highly successful whodunits, yet she famously retired her only female investigator, Cordelia Gray, after a mere two adventures ("An Unsuitable Job for a Woman" [1972] and "The Skull beneath the Skin" [1982]). By subjecting James’s second Cordelia Gray mystery to a close reading, the article shows how she exposes the genre’s patriarchal bias and how she juxtaposes her heroine with the tragic protagonist of John Webster’s tragedy "The Duchess of Malfi" (1613) in order to highlight her protagonist’s lack of agency, resulting in a deconstruction of the genre’s very foundations.

The drama of Renaissance England was truly remarkable and The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster has long been recognized as one of the crowning glories of the English Renaissance. The play begins as a love story, with a Duchess who marries beneath her class, ends as a tragedy as her two brothers take revenge of disobeying their authority and destroying themselves in the process. In this drama, John Webster mainly glorified the renaissance spirit in women during the 16th and 17th century. Webster created in the character Duchess of Malfi what Shakespeare never did, a tragic female protagonist who represents a challenge to social hierarchy and “natural” order.

The Duchess of Malfi’s heroic self-assertion in Act 4 of John Webster’s tragedy (‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’) closely echoes Seneca’s Medea (‘Medea remains still’), pointing to some deeper but hitherto unexplored thematic and structural resonances between early modern tragedy and Roman literature. Dido and Medea, classical exemplars of female independence, were deeply divided between their impulses toward revenge and Stoic patience. Webster replicates their self-division both within the Duchess’ own character and across his play’s protagonists in ways that bore meaning to his educated Blackfriars audience. While the Duchess’ outrage at her persecutors approaches Senecan furor, her serene death expresses a grace surpassing Medea’s apotheosis. Afterwards, however, her brother Ferdinand and murder/avenger Bosola serve as her textual surrogates, driving the action to an uneasy conclusion that reworks classical revenge conventions, questions the possibility of attaining Senecan independence in Jacobean society, and represents the allures and dangers of reading classical texts from an early modern perspective.

Considering the early modern arras as a third place means considering the full experience of theatre: its dramaturgy, poetics and reflexivity. It enables us to envisage an object in terms of both its material and poetic existence on the stage and on the page. This agency is deployed on the stage and page through Webster’s use of the extended metaphor of fabric in The Duchess of Malfi. This chapter analyses the role of fabrics in the play’s performance and development as the basis of Webster’s dramaturgical reinvention of revenge tragedy into a genre that might not be that interested in revenge. To discuss how Webster revisits revenge tragedy through a material prism requires observing first how Webster lures the spectator into a deceptive spectacle of intimacy redolent of conventional comedy. The tragic manipulation of the comic topos of love thanks to the arras leads us to consider it less as a dramaturgical instrument than as a mode of writing. Webster relies on the arras and its avatars to create a paroxysmal dramaturgy of cruelty successfully fusing the conventional and the realistic to switch the focus from revenge to injustice.

This study fills a lacuna in Bavinck-studies, presenting the first full-length treatment of Herman Bavinck's conceptualisation of a theological system. Through a careful examination of Bavinck's sources, Pass sheds new light on a range of issues which have remained unresolved in the secondary literature, such as the influence of German Idealism on the organic motif, the increasingly christocentric orientation of Bavinck's theological method, and the relationship in which modernity stands to orthodoxy. In closing, Pass considers the abiding significance of Bavinck's christocentrism by exploring John Webster's reception of his thought.

Over the last two decades, John Webster produced a flurry of essays which, both friends and critics agree, ignited a movement of Protestant ressourcement. Webster's early death and the unfinished status of his magnum opus-a multi-volume systematic theology-leave his future influence uncertain, but this volume is a compelling testament to his ongoing relevance.

Renaissance English revenge tragedy enacts a cycle of violence that often culminates in an ambivalent purgation of lawlessness. This circular movement is evident not only in the plots of many revenge tragedies but also in the gestures that characterize this genre. The staging of return in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the circular choreography and masque in John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and the language of poison, contagion, and cure in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi reflect the range of circular movements that bring together the form and performance of Renaissance English revenge tragedy. At the same time, this cyclical narrative structure and recursive embodied effects extend beyond the revenge tragedy form, for example, informing William Shakespeare’s tragicomic The Tempest, and beyond its performance, as when Sir Philip Sidney in An Apology for Poetry theorizes tragedy’s restorative effects on the audience.

This chapter reads John Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" as a response to changing ontologies suggested by Galileo's lunar observations that reads them as strong evidence for a universe devoid of occult sympathies and influences; indeed almost completely devoid of supernatural interference, whether of demons or of God.

I begin by describing how the play subtly dramatizes the process of surveying the moon by using the concepts and imagery of the lunar observations to articulate the plot’s overt investigation of women. While the play’s metaphorical translation between the surfaces and substances of the moon and women is licensed by theories of lunar influence over women’s bodies, the disenchanting conclusion of the lunar investigations throws this license into doubt. Moreover, the new post-Keplerian theories of vision, involving the elimination of visual species bearing occult (and potentially lunar) influences, reinforce a sense of epistemic uncertainty and disenchantment.. As a result, the unstable epistemic and visual assumptions of the lunar investigations are juxtaposed with the misogynist assumptions of the investigation of women, grounding both not in metaphysical or theological certainties but in practical skepticism and dirty court politics.

Moreover, these investigations reveal a series of misogynist ethical double standards. The male investigators in the play, Ferdinand and Bosola, are prosecutors; they repeatedly attack women for deceitful inconstancy, usually marked as a form of hysteria, sexual or emotional incontinence linked to uterine disease and lunar influence. Men justify their own deceitfulness under the rubric of Neostoic constancy, an emotional and epistemic impermeability serving practical political ends, reflecting the popularity of Neostoic thought in England after the 1590s.    In one sense the male characters dramatize Richard Tuck’s description of the “new humanism” combining Tacitean politics, Neostoic theory, and philosophical skepticism, and flesh out some of Tuck’s arguments about the connection between the abandonment of virtue ethics and new theories of vision and non-essentialist physics. But the play ultimately constructs a theological and affective critique of Neostoicism. While Charles Taylor has argued for Neostoicism’s centrality in the 17th-century phase of secularization, providing a new sense of a “buffered self” free of impinging external forces which can work to achieve human good in the world, the play presents a much darker view. Its denouement presents Neostoicism as a kind of madness, a male melancholy equivalent to a newly psychologized female hysteria.  In Taylor’s terms, the epistemic buffering of Keplerian vision and the suppression of moral feeling counteract any activist benefits of a physical buffering.

Yet, despite accusations of hysteria, the women in the play are better able to balance the new moral philosophies of Neostoicism and Neoepicureanism with a morally salutary deference to their feelings. The play also presents women’s feeling as a mark of spiritual superiority. The Duchess in particular has a moment of religious conversion, marked as rejection of Neostoic consolations or contempt for the world, which enables her to accept both her attachments to the world and a particularly Protestant form of anti-materialist spirituality.  Yet the Duchess’s spiritual feelings only emerge in her captivity, and merely ease her through her inevitable death.

Indeed the play’s presentation of the male world of politics, service, and friendship repeatedly plays with the Renaissance discourses of friendship, using the play’s philosophical movement with Galileo towards a theory of matter without qualities to undercut any possibility of friendship, service, or love based on essential likeness. Though the plot dramatizes a weakening of all secular relationships of love, service, or friendship, which become only incompletely calculable through newer ideas of interest, the play’s movement towards an affective rather than substantive understanding of love suggests a glimmer of hope.

This hope is particularly tied up with the play’s stress on religious feeling.  Though not particularly Calvinist, the play’s setting in Italy on the eve of Reformation and anti-clerical tone give it a generally Protestant stance. The play contains several rich explorations of affective responses to images despite their material inertness. Similarly, the emotionally vivid details of the Duchess’s conversion, which involves a subtle rejection of the Catholic system of indulgences and martyrdom, and the similarly gripping failure of Ferdinand and Bosola to accomplish the penance and justice they desire, except as revenge, are all written in particularly anti-materialist terms. Together these explorations of religious feeling suggest that Protestantism provides the theological resources to cope with the double disenchantments of the lunar observations and the new politics.

Therefore, as an example of the resacralizations Alexandra Walsham describes, the sphere of supernatural activity in the play moves, as far as we can tell, to the realm of feeling. The world of the play seems mostly devoid of demons or miracles; demons are suggested only in passing and in association with melancholic delusions. The one or two suggestions of providential interference are similarly confined to private, potentially salutary visions. This movement may reflect the developing theological topic of the “discernment of spirits,”  in which affective and moral criteria rather than scientific ones were often determinative in discerning between spiritual experiences due to God or the Devil. Yet for practical purposes the play presents this movement as moot; men repeatedly fail to operationalize it in practice, and women only do so in their dying moments.

This article outlines Bavinck’s conceptualization of theology as the servant-queen of the sciences. The potential contribution Bavinck makes to the contemporary debate over the place of theology in the university is considered, paying attention to the historical context in which it was framed, recent objections to any revival of the claim that theology is the queen of the sciences, and a notable lacuna in Bavinck’s reflections on this subject.

This seminar will explore the excesses of the early modern revenge play in a variety of modes. We will reflect on how both the raw violence and cunning devices of this genre defy and deform social, political, sexual, and aesthetic categories. Although they are usually set in the safely-removed zones of the corrupt Catholic Mediterranean, in their portraits of unruly appetites and hyperbolic violence, Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge dramas also disclose the distempers of the Reformation English body politic. By usurping the sovereign right to punish or pardon, the anti-heroes of revenge drama move outside the law; on stage, they embody revenge as " a kind of wild justice, " in Francis Bacon's famous phrase. However, the decision to revenge can also mimic the legitimate sovereign decision to suspend the law in the name of the law. The paradoxical logic of revenge finds its formal analogue in the way that the parodic and metatheatrical excesses of these plays perpetually call into question both generic and gendered norms. We will begin with the classical origins of the revenge genre in Aeschylus's Oresteia and in Seneca's Roman adaptations of this Greek tragedy. We will move on to a series of early modern revenge plays by authors including Kyd, Middleton, Webster and Ford. Although this seminar will emphasize non-Shakespearean drama, we will consider Shakespeare's two most famous contributions to the revenge genre—Titus Andronicus and Hamlet—which respond to the innovations of contemporaries and inspire imitation and parody in the work of younger playwrights. We will read some classic criticism on revenge tragedy by Fredson Bowers and T.S. Eliot, as well as influential New Historicist and cultural materialist interpretations of the genre. We will also sample some pertinent theoretical literature on revenge, law, violence and sovereignty, including

This paper examines one aspect of the two-way cultural traffic between London and Padua: how the city of Padua figured in debates about the nature of masculinity in early modern London, especially its theatres. Invariably known primarily for its university—noted by Coryat and Moryson, a tourist attraction for Chaucer, Sidney, and Milton—the name " Padua " became synonymous with " erudition. " While learnedness was in theory a positive quality, the place of learnedness in a declining honor culture and its complex role in constituting masculinity remained a contentious subject. English writers by turns envied or scorned the learning acquired in Italy, and invocations of Padua and its link to rapier fencing resulted in a series of contradictory figures in the drama of Shakespeare and Webster: doctors, pedants, enlightened philosophers, lovers, murderers for hire.

Performed for the first time in 1612, Webster's play is based on events in recent Italian history, twenty-seven years having passed since Vittoria Accoramboni's actual death.
It has been called by many names, such as a revenge tragedy, a chronicle play, a family tragedy, a tragedy of love, the tragedy of a whole society, a tragicomedy, and a black farce.
The themes are in fact love and death, family honor and shame, justice and revenge.
The themes are constructed on oxymorons and oppositions, then.
    Moreover, it was considered to be a revenge tragedy in reference to the Roman History :
Without doubt,  The White Devil is heavily influenced by the conventions of revenge tragedy. Revenge plays drew on the example of the Roman playwright Seneca (4BC-AD65), who dramatized some  spectacularly violent sequences of crime and revenge, and, like Webster, combined bloody and treacherous actions with sententious moralizing.
    Private revenge, linked with family honor, was considered by many to be a sacred duty, but this clashed with the Christian ethic, which placed revenge in God's hands alone, and this is the reason why this play is highly controversial.

Abstract ◊ The article covers the main milestones of life and oeuvre of John Webster (с. 1578/1580, London — 1638?), one of the most influential playwrights among Shakespeare's younger contemporaries. His writings are still attracting interest of readers and theatre-goers, and the play „The White Devil‟ has become a symbol of popular mass culture.
Keywords: W. Shakespeare, John Webster, younger contemporaries of Shakespeare, Jacobean theater.

The paper takes into account several tragedies based on the Roman subject – drawn by Titus Livius – of Appio and Virginia, composed in English, French and Italian between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in order to show how the subject's progressive refinement allows the dramatists to cope with essential matters of the Early modern political philosophy, from the relationship between the sovereign and the law to the gap between public and private happiness. The analysis aims to prove that, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the subject of Virginia becomes an unavoidable passage for dramatist interested in representing political tragedies. (http://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/view/2720)

Manichaean and Christian values in John Webster’s “The Duchess of Malfi” were studied with a focus on demonism, damnation, and salvation. Empirical research and references to Christian and Manichaean precepts like “Mixture” and “ontological dualism” were carried out to unravel the guiding strand in shaping the tragic and its consequences. Damnation, a Christian concept, is related to demonism and dementia. One difference between Christianity and Manichaeism relates to the understanding of the tragic. Manichaeism advances a pessimistic view of matter as endlessly evil; Christianity defends the idea of felix culpa. Webster might have been aware of similarities and divergences between Manichaeism and Christianity.

When reading John Webster's two revenge tragedies "The White Devil" and "The Duchess of Malfi", a great number of excessive crimes against morality can be pointed to immediately, be it intrigue, adultery, cruelty, or murder in any form imaginable. Others, like incest, can only be discovered at closer inspection and need to be read from between the lines. This paper analyses and compares two extraordinary brother-sister relationships, namely those between Vittoria and Flamineo and of the Duchess and Ferdinand, and proves that they are strongly sexualised to a degree that might be labelled incestuous.

It is the aim of the present bibliography to provide a reference guide to the criticism focusing on John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi from 1955 to the present day. Entries written in English or French have been classified in sections dealing with critical editions of the play, French-language translations, bibliographies on John Webster, books on Webster, monographs on The Duchess of Malfi, anthologies of criticism, articles in journals, essays in collections, chapters from books, a selection of academic reviews of post-2000 stage productions as well as stage and screen productions which are available for viewing. Reprints and revisions are also included so that the reader may have easy access to references which may be found in print form or online.

Julia Kristeva’s proposition that ‘significance is inherent in the human body’ is especially true when considering plays. ‘Significance’ here relates to the meaning, or meanings, that can be found in the human body. The way characters present themselves on stage, their movements, gestures, delivery and facial expressions are the key to the success of a play. The human body is everything in the construction of meaning. This essay aims to discuss Kristeva’s assertion in relation to William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, using physiognomy as a frame to explore the character’s inner world and gender ideology. As Sibylle Baumbach has argued, because of the ‘immediacy with which emotions are translated onto the facial surface, it was deemed to be the index of the mind’.

In Christ Existing as Community, Michael Mawson recovers and clarifies the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's early and important work on ecclesiology, focusing especially on his doctoral dissertation Sanctorum Communio. Despite occasional pronouncements of the importance of this dissertation, it has still received only limited scholarly attention. Mawson demonstrates how Bonhoeffer draws upon and reworks social theory in order to develop an account of the church as a reality of God's revelation and a concrete human community. On this basis Mawson concludes that Bonhoeffer's ecclesiology has ongoing significance for contemporary debates in theology and Christian ethics.

This chapter argues against the familiar consensus that Barth’s relationship to modern moral philosophy is oppositional. It demonstrates that Barth appropriates the central insights of his philosophical predecessors and incorporates them into his ethics, even as he anticipates one of the most fruitful developments in contemporary moral philosophy: Stephen Darwall’s ‘second-personal ethics.’ Rather than casting autonomy as sin, he recasts obedience to the Word of God as a form of autonomy. Barth incorporates the rational form of Kantian self-legislation and the social form of Hegelian mutual recognition into his account of subjective reception of revelation. Because Barth does not separate the sovereignty of revelation from the sociality of the church’s interpretation of Scripture and confession of faith, we—Barth’s readers—must not separate his account of hearing the Word of God from his account of hearing the divine command. In fact, we should take his account of subjective reception of revelation as his most fulsome and winsome account of practical reason.

This article takes as its starting point a convention in prosody that stylistically pushes the feminine and femininity to the margin of the poetic line and excludes them from the metrical norm. Extending that principle to the play, it offers a reflection on the way endings are made distinct for female and male protagonists, and thereby paradoxically opens a space for the feminine and femininity within the text, even if that space can only be reached in loss and death.

Early modern tragedy is characterised by its brutality; it is blood which lubricates tragedy’s joints. Similarly, passions in early modern England were essentially physical sensations; to be filled with anger was a literal phenomenon. This bridge between the individual and the environment was not only intrinsic to early modern physiology, psychology, and conceptions of the self, but also crucial to the workings of the drama of the age. It is the internal made external which is steeped in horror, and while some of the wounds are less painful to witness today, many of the scars remain tender.

This paper will consider early modern plays in the light of Renaissance knowledge of the passions with the body as porous, the important gender dimensions written into this, and the way in which the internal made external remains troubling today. Frequently the cruelty enacted on stage is by men who violently explode with revenge and murderous deeds; in contrast women implode and become progressively more passive. However, while men fight and make a bloody mess on the outside, it is the inside where the bloody mess for women resides.

(S)words cut deep, and this paper will turn in particular to three plays which demonstrate the silent suffering of women: the blood pouring from Titus Andronicus’ Lavinia, the experiences of Isabella and Vittoria of Webster’s The White Devil, and the cut of Twelfth Night Malvolio’s fancies. As women are ravished and degraded to their physical signs, their bloody bodily states become their only identity. Through these discussions ultimately this paper seeks to uncover another dimension to the violence of early modern plays - turning from the overt male bloody scenes, to the female scenes of bloody destruction, explicit and implicit.

We express ourselves with language, and so it is that language is intertwined with power, but it is also true that he who shouts loudest carries the most influence. This paper takes depression, a disease which pervades society yet remains taboo and spoken of only in hushed tones, and considers the apparently juxtaposed, but essentially interconnected sufferers in society: the empowered individuals, and those who live in forced silence, as it investigates the state of power and language in our society through the light of Renaissance drama.

Gender is an important dimension to this discussion and shall also be considered. Reactions to grief and melancholia by male characters in Renaissance plays tend to be loud, violent, and full of revenge, whereas in female characters the reaction is more subdued, they tend to lose their voices and shrink into themselves. While men explode, women implode. However, these reactions have wider implications in terms of voice and power. It is the men, rather than women, criticism has tended to focus on, largely because men, often in positions of power, are quick to vocalise their feelings, while women are stripped of any power through their loss of voice thanks to circumstance.

This paper will consider the counterpointed figures of Hieronimo and Isabella in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the reactions to grief seen in Hamlet, and the destructive effects the articulation of power through violence may have on society as portrayed in The White Devil, where melancholy, violence, and dangerous language lead to its collapse. Through these discussions this paper will ultimately consider the way fictional depictions of melancholy and its associated powerlessness, helplessness, and voicelessness, can help further our understanding of present day power dimensions and one’s sense of identity.

Another Voyage': Death as Social Performance in the Major Tragedies of John Webster Near the end of John Webster's The White Devil , the courtier Flamineo is faced with ruin when his patron. Duke Brachiano, is murdered. He responds by forming a suicide pact with his sister, Vittoria, and his mistress, Zanche, but at the last moment the women withdraw from the contract, shoot him, and stamp on his body. The ensuing death scene has all the trappings of a stage villain's fmal reckoning. Represented throughout the play as a trickster who uses his acting skills in order to rise socially, Flamineo is now 'caught in [his] own engine' (5.6.122),' falling prey to the hypocrisy by which he has lived. Then, suddenly, this moment of retribution is revealed as a parody of the real thing. What seemed Flamineo's fmal loss of control turns out to be his most darkly witty act of self-assertion when he rises from the dead:

The question of embodiment is at once the question that makes posthuman theory so exciting, and the area in which posthuman discourse sometimes stumbles over its own false alternatives. In order to consider the body of the posthuman, and the modes of corporeality available to posthumanity, we need to develop a more expansive body theory that can encompass nonhuman as well as human bodies. The place to start is with early modern physics, which is the study of what we would consider today both physics and physiology. This article dwells on the figure of the Echo in John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, arguing that reading the scene through the lens of early modern physics illustrates an alternative mode of corporeality for the posthuman.

A question that is often asked of analytic theologians is: what, if anything, distinguishes analytic theology from philosophy of religion? In this essay, I consider two approaches to what is called "analytic theology." I argue that the first approach, which I associate with the common practice of analytic theology in the university, is very difficult to distinguish consistently from philosophy of religion. I also argue, however, that there is another approach that can be more clearly distinguished from philosophy of religion (generally understood). Following Aquinas, I associate this with a scientific approach to analytic theology: an approach that is distinguished by a specific commitment to understanding the mind-independent reality of God and all things in relation to God. The primary aim of this essay is to present an account of this latter approach and ask whether it might be possible to take such an approach in the contemporary university.

Revenge Tragedy and Classical Philosophy on the Early Modern Stage discovers within Renaissance revenge tragedy the surprising shaping presence of a wide array of classical philosophies not commonly affiliated with the genre. By recovering the pervasive influence of Aristotelian faculty psychology on The Spanish Tragedy, Aristotelian ethics on Titus Andronicus, Lucretian atomism on Hamlet, Galenic pneumatics on Antonio’s Revenge and Epictetian Stoicism on The Duchess of Malfi, Crosbie reveals how the very atmospheres and ontological assumptions of revenge tragedy exert their own kind of conditioning dramaturgical force. The book also revitalizes our understanding of how the Renaissance stage, even at its most lurid, functions as a unique space for the era’s practical, vernacular engagement with received philosophy.