John Webster

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.

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:

This paper in history of philosophy covers themes about determinism from Pomponazzi to Cudworth. It deals with Pico della Mirandola, Lipsius and the neo-Stoics, Pietro Pomponazzi's attacks on free will, the English dramatist John Webster, Marin Mersenne, Hobbes's deterministic psychology, and English NeoPlatonism.

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.

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.

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.

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 is a review of Darren Sarisky’s Reading the Bible Theologically. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Sarisky's leading idea is that the Bible is best understood as a set of signs for depicting God and God’s actions. He develops this semiotic position in a reflective and painstaking style that he terms a “via media” between the theological interpretation of Scripture movement, on the one hand, and the set of historically based views on the other hand. His primary concern is to diagnose the main problem with biblical scholarship, which is its methodological naturalism.

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.

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.

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.

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)