John Webster

It is almost impossible to make meaningful and constructive comments on the failures of a government and on its corrupt and unjust practices without holding its executive head responsible. But many critics of Hasina’s autocratic government followed this strategy and kept mum about her role in brutal oppression that targeted political opponents and dissent voices. During her rule, corruption gripped the entire administrative hierarchy, but almost none dared to associate it with her. The vast majority assiduously and artfully avoided the elephant in the room.

An investigation in John Webster's Trinitarian Deduction Ecclesiology. What are the ecclesiological problems he is dealing with? How to construct the church's being and action based on the doctrine of the Trinity. In what sense the church as a theological community?

15 Lessons on Theology and Theological Method

神學，彷彿是一些抽象難明的概念，是一門艱澀深奧的學問，脫離現實。
本書是神學知識論的入門讀物，集結作者多年來有關神學知識論的文章，旨在教導人認識何為神學，以及做神學時所需的元素：理性、聖經、傳統、語言和處境，從而認清神學的本相，幫助教會及信徒活出信仰。
「沒有神學是永恆的，我這本文集也是如此，但這是在上帝神聖的啟示底下所作的判斷，而不能以此為藉口，可以隨便按照人自己對聖經、傳統、理性、處境的了解來認識和言說上帝及其一切。」
——鄧紹光

https://www.logos.com.hk/bf/acms/content.asp?site=logosbf&op=show&type=product&code=LP265

The recent (2014) inauguration of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, a reconstruction of an archetypal Jacobean indoor playhouse, on London’s Southbank, has led students and scholars of early modern theatre once again to focus attention on original playhouse performances, just as they did when its older sibling Shakespeare’s Globe opened its doors in 1996. The earlier assumption that the differences between open-air amphitheatres and indoor playhouses conditioned the way plays were written and acted is now enjoying a new lease on life, and yet there has been little research conducted in order to substantiate this otherwise perfectly logical intuition. Drawing on the insights of drama theorist Manfred Pfister as well as the linguistic concept of deixis, this article compares the language and plotting of three plays by the Jacobean playwright John Webster: The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi and The Devil’s Law Case. Each play was first staged under significantly different circumstances within the theatrical landscape of Jacobean London, which makes them a singularly illustrative case study of how an early modern English dramatist adapted his style in order to meet the demands of the city’s diverse performance conditions.

This article offers a new reading of the Jacobean play The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt (c. 1602) by exploring the play’s use of setting, imagery and motif. The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt explores the confrontation between secular and divine authority, and the problems posed through the monarch’s two bodies: the body politic and the body natural. These ideological debates are reflected in the play’s use of language, which seeks to interlink the motifs of heads and coins, through the central setting of the play, the Tower of London. These motifs demonstrate the ability of both the rebel and the monarch to assume the authority of God.  So just as an assayer is able to calculate the worth and value of a coin, in accordance with a certain standard of purity, so the act of execution, or more specifically the act of beheading, demonstrates an individual’s ability to assay the worth and value of a human being, according to a certain standard of loyalty. The protagonists of th...

This superb monograph reveals the impact professional actresses had on the early modern London stage, an arena famously lacking in them. The English public theater, Pamela Allen Brown demonstrates, was shaped from the first by celebrity Italian divas, whose reputations crossed international borders and whose variegated roles and dazzling playing styles influenced English playwrights from John Lyly to John Webster. The story of influence is multifaceted, and The Diva's Gift is far more than a source study (though it is that, too). Brown is occupied less with tracing genetic links between plays than with demonstrating the complex interplay of two theatrical cultures: that of the comici-itinerant, mixed-gender Italian troupes working throughout Europe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries-and that of the all-male London stage. Because the comici improvised from scenarios, mixing elements of multiple plays, it is not always possible to trace an English text's precise verbal or narrative debts to an Italian one. The most profound evidence of influence lies instead in shared "theatergrams": the "highly codified roles, scenes, actions, and plot elements that writers and players constantly recycled and combined" (10). Theatergrams spread by Italian players to the English stage range from stock characters and common situations to specific types of dramatic speech: solo laments at the point of death, for instance, or the sharpedged back-and-forth of witty courtship. Remixing these elements into their own scripted creations, England's theater makers both imitated the commedia and created something new. Whereas earlier comparative criticism of Italian and English drama (notably the work of Louise George Clubb, a frequent interlocutor in these pages) investigates multiple points of connection, Brown's study focuses on a specific "theatergram of character" (9) more or less invented by Italian players: the leading innamorata whose "erotic choices become central to the comic plot" (8) and whose impact can be felt on English characters as diverse as Thomas Kyd's Bel-Imperia, William Shakespeare's Cleopatra, and Ben Jonson's Lady Politic Would-Be. Zooming in on a single character type leads Brown to a set of interlinked claims: (1) the innamorata inspired English playwrights to introduce longer and more lively female roles; (2) English dramatists, further inspired by the talented actresses who played these parts, called on their own boy actresses to cultivate and display similar "star power"; and (3) attending to the impact of Italian playing on the English stage allows us to see familiar features of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama with new eyes.

This article examines a lesser-known play, The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt, which, in a trend initiated by David Bevington, and expanded upon by Judith D. Spikes and Julia Gasper, has been read primarily for its topical link to the Essex Rebellion. 1 It is the contention of this article that the play should instead be considered for its broader ruminations on the power of the monarchy and the ability of rebels to usurp royal authority through the metaphoric associations of coins and heads, both of which have prominent connection to the main setting of the play: the Tower of London. Thomas Dekker and John Webster's early Jacobean history play depicts the story of Lady Jane's nine day reign, Mary's succession to the throne, the Spanish marriage, and Quotations from The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt are taken from the following edition: The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. by Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Vol. 1. In the interest of readability, I have modernised the spelling and punctuation of all early modern texts, with the exception of the titles of primary texts listed in the notes. Those exceptions withstanding, the letters 'u', 'v', 'i' and 'j' have been silently normalised in accordance with modern usage. The use of capitalisation has also been silently normalised. The use of italics within the text has also been silently removed to provide clarity for the modern reader. By modernising the spelling and punctuation in The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt, this paper aims to enable the play to undergo comfortable comparison with the fully modernised Arden Shakespeare editions.

Is Holy Scripture a text? Curiously enough, modern theologians in the West are of a divided mind. Some have argued that Scripture is not defined by what it is (i.e., a text), but rather, by what it is for (i.e., for the use of the Church) or where it is from (i.e., primitive oral traditions), both inherently non-textual accounts of Scripture. Such critiques tend to conclude that, ultimately, it is unfitting for Holy Scripture to be a text. This essay resists such tendencies by taking up a generative, though often overlooked, passage in the apostle Paul's epistle to the Romans. I argue that Romans 15:4 teaches that Holy Scripture is a patient text, and the patience of Holy Scripture's textuality fittingly conveys the patience of God Himself. This essay builds upon theological writings from within Reformed Protestantism, including John Calvin, Karl Barth, and John Webster, as well as Paul Dafydd Jones' recently unveiled and still unfolding theological exploration of divine patience.

This essay explores the way that the social interactions of the classroom play a role in shaping sign production. It examines the talk of one second year Advanced Level English literature class in North London during their study of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi through the lens of Volosinov's theories of language. It seeks to locate these emergent discourses within wider socio-political frameworks concerning gender, race and power. By assessing the semiotic significance of Webster's Duchess and more contemporary figures such as Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, in these discourses, it suggests that the process of negotiation in this classroom is characterised by acts of transgression.

The preface to the 1609 quarto of Troilus and Cressida provides one of the most famous examples of anti-theatrical posturing in an early modern playbook, and certainly the most famous example of this tactic in a printed work by William Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s playbooks occasionally engaged with the emerging ‘literary’ tradition that, in the words of Ben Jonson, designated certain plays as “legitimate Poemes” fit for an elite readership’s consumption. However, most of Shakespeare’s plays were marketed in the standard ‘theatrical’ way that tied playbooks to their origin on the stage and had its roots in the playbill advertisements printed for public performances. Troilus and Cressida defies this tradition, announcing a “new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar,” hoping to entice even those “most displeased with plays”. In order to understand the unusual case of Troilus and Cressida, I will examine the development, motivations, and tactics associated with both ‘theatrical’ and ‘anti-theatrical’ methods of advertisement and the playbooks that employed them, including works by John Fletcher, Ben Jonson, and John Webster, in addition to other works by Shakespeare.

The relation of theology and economy is a perennial theological challenge. Many contemporary theologian's understanding of this challenge is shaped by Karl Barth's attempt to resolve a set of tensions problematising this relation inherited from figures like Kant and Feuerbach. Barth 'identified' God's decision to be God with his decision to be human. Further, he inconsistently but insistently claimed that the 'form' in which God reveals Godself in the person of Jesus somewhat isomorphically corresponds to God in Godself. The brilliance and yet instability of Barth's approach spawned a number of construals of theology and economy which depart from him in significant ways. I label these contemporary trajectories the post-Barthian temptation, Barthian revisionism, Barthian Balthasarianism, and Barthian catholicism and critically evaluate them, suggesting that Barthian catholicism is the most promising.

This essay resituates Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi within the early modern discourses of learned service (in general) and political intelligence (in particular), thereby revealing the extent to which the text interrogates the ideal of civic-minded learning by highlighting the tensions and contradictions that inevitably arise from any attempt at its lived application. In the expansive, early modern use of the term, service was not a failed alternative to education, but a desired result thereof. Indeed, a glance at the broader early modern English discourses on learnedness and civic responsibility readily confirms that learned service was a cherished ideal foundational to civic humanism. However, it reveals as well that this ideal was under tremendous pressure in the period, particularly in the related cultural conversation about diplomacy and intelligence-gathering. Reexamined in this context, Webster’s reluctant intelligencer and melancholy murderer Bosola has not fallen from learnedness to service; rather, his development from scholar into spy dramatizes the crises (of training, of prestige, of morality) that those educated in the civic humanist ideal of learned service confront when they attempt to apply their learning in a world where the emergent practice of political statecraft is fast gaining currency.

William Shakespeare and John Webster are two of the most popular and significant playwrights of the English Literary world. Their respective works _The Tempest_ and _The Duchess of Malfi_ are two of the most magnificent dramas of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. These two different dramas are written by two different playwrights, each a character in both the plays having the same name “Ferdinand”. It is now going to be the major focus of this paper to discuss the comparison and contrast of the two different characters having the same name and again how the playwrights have portrayed them in their respective dramas.

В статье рассмотрены исторический, культурный и религиозный контекст легенды о дьяволе, внезапно появившемся на сцене лондонского театра (в наиболее известном случае — трактира «Белл Сэвидж»). Авторы предлагают анализировать ее в рамках общего исследования театральной полемики XVI — первой половины XVII вв. с ее взаимовлиянием литературных жанров. Традиция связывать происхождение театра с дьявольскими силами отчасти подпитывается через восприятие актеров и зрителей как вольных или невольных слуг «альтернативной иерархии», восходящей к дьяволу — однако важна и интерпретация «дьявола на сцене» как предупреждения о необходимости покаяния.

John Webster’s account of Scripture grants the canonical texts an ontology determined by their divine use, discusses Scripture as an aspect of the doctrine of revelation rather than the church, and above all preserves the capacity of God’s Word to question and form believers. Yet, Webster’s proposal has met resistance from theologians who find his accent on sola scriptura inconsistent with his claim that interpretation (not simply “text”) has ontological force as a part of “sanctification.” This paper asks whether it is possible to retain a robustly Websterian account of Scripture while at the same time denying that Scripture’s primacy is separable from the interpretive tradition (thus safeguarding against individualism). Taking its cues from Webster’s own insistence that the clarity of Scripture emerges over time in the practices of the believing community, the paper places Webster’s account in conversation with the entanglement of liturgical practices, the written word, and apostoli...

A recurrent descriptor in literary analysis, the term ‘protagonist’ is commonly understood to mean a character perceived as playing a leading role in a story. It remains a somewhat elusive term, though, since there are many different ways in which a character can exert influence over a plot’s development: a protagonist can be the catalyst of action or the subject of others’ efforts and desires, a protagonist can be constantly present or only punctually-but-perfunctorily seen and/or heard... Depending on the literary genre, the period in question and the type of story being told, what makes a ‘protagonist’ may be defined and measured by one set or criteria or another. In the particular case of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European theatre, for instance, one of the most reliable markers of protagonism is speech share. Perhaps more so than at any other point in time, the dramatic style of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Molière and their peers is almost exclusively driven by dialogue, and thus a character’s role length is often a good and easily measurable indicator of their centrality. There are, however, other prominent forms of drama during this period in which role length does not adequately reveal a character’s degree of protagonism, such as the English court masques which revolved around the static and silent display of aristocratic ladies at the centre of the spectacle. With these and other similar exceptions in mind, this paper explores a variety of quantitative methods of measuring protagonism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European theatre. After developing a comprehensive list of possible ‘indicators of protagonism’ based on a wide selection of dramatic texts from across the European continent, this presentation will provide a comparative test case by applying these barometers to two plays based on the same source story, John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Lope de Vega’s El Mayordomo de la Duquesa de Amalfi.

Title: The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature
Author: Elizabeth Gruber
Series: Environmental Humanities in Pre-modern Cultures
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature tracks an important shift in early modern conceptions of selfhood, arguing that the period hosted the birth of a new subset of the human, the eco-self, which melds a deeply introspective turn with an abiding sense of humans’ embedment in the world. A confluence of cultural factors produced the relevant changes. Of paramount significance was the rapid spread of literacy in England and across Europe: reading transformed the relationship between self and world, retooled moral reasoning, and even altered human anatomy. This book pursues the salutary possibilities, including the ecological benefits, of this redesigned self by advancing fresh readings of texts by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Webster, and Margaret Cavendish. The eco-self offers certain refinements to ecological theory by renewing appreciation for the rational, deliberative functions that distinguish humans from other species.

For more info, visit: https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463728881/the-eco-self-in-early-modern-english-literature

John Webster and Dietrich Bonhoeffer are two theologians invested in prioritising certain conceptions of divine transcendence within their respective theological projects. Specifically, both appeal to conceptions of divine transcendence and agency amidst what they understand to be the problematic naturalisation of theological discourse in modern Protestant theology, particularly within its liberal German traditions. The way they understand transcendence, however, and the doctrinal loci they choose to affect it, leads to different conceptualisations of the possibilities, scope and organisation of systematic theology. Where Webster (especially in his later work) seeks to prioritise God's immanent perfection and aseity through theology proper, Bonhoeffer instead emphasises God's freedom pro me within the person of Jesus Christ. These differences in first theological foundations have important consequences for the shape of theological method and doctrinal architecture within the practice of contemporary systematic theology.

This book examines a series of contemporary plays where writers put theatre itself on stage. The texts examined variously dramatize how theatre falls short in response to the demands of violence, expose its implication in structures of violence—including racism and gender-based violence—and illustrate how it might effectively resist violence through reconfiguring representation. Case studies, which include Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present and Fairview, Ella Hickson’s The Writer and Tim Crouch’s The Author, provide a range of practice-based perspectives on the question of whether theatre is capable of accounting for and expressing the complexities of structural and interpersonal violence as both lived in the body and borne out in society. The book will appeal to scholars and artists working in the areas of violence, theatre and ethics, witnessing, memory and trauma, spectatorship and contemporary dramaturgy, as well as to those interested in both the doubts and dreams we have about the role of theatre in the twenty-first century.

Introduction: Staging the Role of Theatre,

Performative Violence and Self-Reflexive Dramaturgy: A Study of Guillermo Calderón’s Kiss and Other Works

“Touching Something Real”: The Critique of Historical and Theatrical Methodology in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present… 

The Ethics of Imagining Others: The Limits of “Performative Witness” in Michael Redhill’s Goodness and Erik Ehn’s Thistle

Staging Rage: A Feminist Perspective on Theatrical Self-Reflexivity in Ella Hickson’s The Writer and Tim Crouch’s The Author

Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Reception: Mirroring the Audience in Ontroerend Goed’s Audience and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview

Conclusion

This article argues that, in the early seventeenth century, rhetorical devices and stage devices overlap. There has been much critical interest in the materiality of theatres like the Blackfriars, the Globe, and the Red Bull. Recent work in early modern theatre studies has made some broad gestures to the way in which poetic and verbal effects are linked with the practical theatrical work of the playhouse. Rhetoric and rhetorical styles have also been subject to renewed scholarly interest, with some suggesting the imminence of an “aesthetic turn” or “New Formalism.” Yet these two critical approaches often remain distinct. Attention to the interaction between speech and spectacle can unite ostensibly different angles of literary analysis and deliver further attention to the visual, philosophical, and intellectual complexity of seventeenth-century playhouse spectacle. I begin by exploring some important terms in early modern English that point to rhetoric's participation in the mat...

'Other Men's Provision': Ben Jonson's Parody of Robert White in "Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue"
Author(s): Robert C. Evans Source: Comparative Drama , Spring 1990, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 55-77 Published by: Comparative Drama Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41153441

In this essay, the authors explore the mental and social worlds depicted in Webster's two great Jacobean tragedies, The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi. (1623). The authors particularly focus on the sibling relationships depicted in these plays, and explore how far the strengths or weakness of these relationships, their domination by the life or death drives, by emotions of love or hate, can be understood as a measure of the health of the social order in which these relationships are situate

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.

This introduction examines the modern creation of revenge tragedy as a genre in order to reveal how this critical apparatus for understanding theatrical retribution, while valuable, has led to the estrangement in our hermeneutic between revenging action and most forms of philosophical inquiry.  The chapter explains how revenge tragedy, still an enduring, useful heuristic, in fact participates in a more expansive mode of philosophical engagement than we've previously appreciated. 

Keywords: Revenge Tragedy, Genre, Shakespeare, Kyd, Marston, Webster

W pierwszej części artykułu zaprezentowano "ontologię Pisma Świętego" Johna Webstera. Teolog postrzegał teksty biblijne w świetle ich pochodzenia i roli w Boskiej samo-komunikacji. Uczony wprowadził termin uświęcenie, oznaczający oddzielenie przez Boga i włączenie na służbę "ekonomii łaski". Doktryna natchnienia została przez Webstera podporządkowana pojęciu objawienia i ulokowana w ramach uświęcenia. W drugiej części artykułu oceniono refleksję autora Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch uprawianą zgodnie z pryncypiami doktryny reformowanej. Pomimo licznych zbieżności z teologią katolicką doktrynę Pisma Webstera należy uznać za niesatysfakcjonująco wpisaną w nexus mysteriorum, a jego teologię natchnienia za zbyt mało "wcieleniową". Teologia katolicka może z kolei zainspirować się podkreślanym przez Webstera soteriologicznym wymiarem objawienia oraz Pisma Świętego.

From the large bulk of national English and Spanish drama, those plays which happen to coincide in dealing with the same subject offer themselves as a privileged domain where a fruitful contrastive analysis can be carried out with a view to eliciting the divergent conventions and ideological values which rule in different and even opposing ways the production of literary works in seventeenth century England and Spain. To analyse and contrast some of those elements in The Duchess of Malfi and El mayordomo de la duquesa de Amalfi and put them in relation with their social, ideological and canonical context is the aim of this paper as a way of showing not only the literary practice in different societies, but how the notion of value in its Bakhtinian sense must be taken into account when assaying the appreciation of literary works stemming from divergent backgrounds.

The penultimate act of John Webster's tragedy The Duchess of Malfi finds its heroine imprisoned among madmen, shown the apparent corpses of her own children, and tricked into kissing what she believes to be the dismembered hand of her husband-all for the crime of marrying beneath her station. At this lowest ebb of her fortune, however, she does not forget her own nobility. In response to her executioner's taunts, she replies, 'I am Duchess of Malfi still' (4.2.139). This line, perhaps the most famous in the play, has engendered complex and divergent critical responses. 1 However, hampered by the narrow conception of literary influence that prevailed for much of the past century, few modern scholars have recognized the & Nandini B.

The series is designed to introduce sixth-form and undergraduate students to the themes, continuing vitality and performance of major dramatic works. The attention given to production aspects is an element of special importance, responding to the invigoration given to literary study by the work of leading contemporary critics. The prime aim is to present each playas a vital experience in the mind of the reader-achieved by analysis of the text in relation to its themes and theatricality. Emphasis is accordingly placed on the relevance of the work to the modern reader and the world of today. At the same time, traditional views are presented and appraised, forming the basis from which a creative response to the text can develop. In each volume, Part One: Text discusses certain key themes or problems, the reader being encouraged to gain a stronger perception both of the inherent character of the work and also of variations in interpreting it. Part Two: Peiformance examines the ways in which these themes or problems have been handled in modern productions, and the approaches and techniques employed to enhance the play's accessibility to modern audiences. A synopsis of the play is given and an outline of its major sources, and a concluding Reading List offers guidance to the student's independent study of the work.

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. 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. 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 c...

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.

В статье ставится проблема соотношения биографического и псевдобиографического методов интерпретации образа Кристофера Марло в современной массовой культуре, на сцене и экране. По мнению автора, мифобиографический подход наиболее востребован в развлекательной популярной культуре, ориентированной на массового потребителя.

In the fictional encounter between William Shakespeare and a young John Webster in Shakespeare in Love, Webster expresses his enthusiasm for violence and "plenty of blood" in drama, saying he got his taste for this from having watched and acted in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. He claims, "They cut my head off," (perhaps he played Mutius) and elaborates, "I like it when they cut heads off and the daughter mutilated with knives" (Lavinia). The boy Webster vows, "When I write plays, they'll be like Titus," and, as if to prove his point, he feeds a live mouse to a cat before concluding, "That's the only kind of writing." 1 The cameo portrait of Webster as an apprentice in masochistic pleasure, as learned from the early works of Shakespeare, raises questions about their relative status as dramatists of disturbing emotions. Is Webster a lesser disciple of the master-Bard, or does he outdo Shakespeare in writing tragedies of violence and blood? Tom Stoppard's film script draws wittily on Webster's literary reputation stretching to the present day. Writing in 1808, Charles Lamb believed that the "dialect of despair" and the skillful spectacles of horror in The Duchess of Malfi were things "only a Webster can do" (Moore 52), a view shared by later admirers such as Swinburne, who praised Webster's "command of terror" as the chief mark of his genius (Moore 112). In 1823 the minor poet Bryan Proctor described Webster as a writer whose imagination "rioted upon the grave" and whose dreams were full of "frenzy and murder" and melancholy, concluding that he "had too gloomy a brain" (Moore 66). The Times review of an 1850 production at Sadler's Wells noted "a brilliant scintillation of a kind of ghastly wit" at the end of The Duchess of Malfi, but George Henry Lewes condemned the play as "a nightmare, not a tragedy" (Moore 87). These nineteenth-century viewpoints are perhaps best summed up by T. S. Eliot's lines "Webster was much possessed by death/And saw the skull beneath the skin." Charles R. Forker took the phrase as the title of his 1986 book The Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster, which uses biographical research by Mary Edmonds to trace the origins of Webster's morbidity and melancholy in St. Sepulchre's parish, where, as he grew up, he heard the "passing bell" tolling for members of the parish or for prisoners led off to execution (24). 2 Steven Marche has affirmed that a "fascination with death and the dead is uniquely central to Webster's drama" but argues that that this obsession "can only be explicated by means of his complex eschatology" (80), an awareness that the final judgment is always beyond the reach of human understanding and is therefore always a source of deep uncertainty and incompleteness. In Webster, according to Marche, "everything is coloured" by a dark sense of lack (92). This article seeks to explore the truth of such claims that negative feelings are particularly intense in Webster's drama by conducting computer-assisted analyses of the language of emotion in his two most famous tragedies, The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1614). Rather than focusing on violence exclusively, our analysis surveys both negative and (the lack of) positive emotions more widely. Language is clearly central to the mediation of emotions. In 1960, Roman CONTACT Jonathan Culpeper

In the fictional encounter between William Shakespeare and a young John Webster in Shakespeare in Love, Webster expresses his enthusiasm for violence and “plenty of blood” in drama, saying he got his taste for this from having watched and acted in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. He claims, “They cut my head off,” (perhaps he played Mutius) and elaborates, “I like it when they cut heads off and the daughter mutilated with knives” (Lavinia). The boy Webster vows, “When I write plays, they’ll be like Titus,” and, as if to prove his point, he feeds a live mouse to a cat before concluding, “That’s the only kind of writing.”1 The cameo portrait of Webster as an apprentice in masochistic pleasure, as learned from the early works of Shakespeare, raises questions about their relative status as dramatists of disturbing emotions. Is Webster a lesser disciple of the master-Bard, or does he outdo Shakespeare in writing tragedies of violence and blood?

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.

This paper highlights Jonson's portrayal of contemporary psychology of fantasy where absurd ideas vanish and the positive aspects of reality and beauty exist. To portray this “paradoxical” approach to fantasy, Jonson took the help of “masques”, which were a popular literary form of Elizabethan period. Apparently, the masque proper was seen to represent fantasy while the anti-masque took the side of reality. However, these roles change as we go deep into the text of The Masque of Queens and The Vision of Delight. Also, the historical background of writing the masques as a way to praise the 'country order' of King James helps the masques to reside beyond the grip of only amusement and fantasy. The word 'fantasy' has a profound positive place in Jonson's masques: it is by no means a vague or derailed flow of wild dreams. The paper examines The Masque of Queens is an expression of 'grotesque' rather than “fearsome”. It also explores how the allegorical an...

This paper highlights Jonson's portrayal of contemporary psychology of fantasy where absurd ideas vanish and the positive aspects of reality and beauty exist. To portray this “paradoxical” approach to fantasy, Jonson took the help of “masques”, which were a popular literary form of Elizabethan period. Apparently, the masque proper was seen to represent fantasy while the anti-masque took the side of reality. However, these roles change as we go deep into the text of The Masque of Queens and The Vision of Delight. Also, the historical background of writing the masques as a way to praise the 'country order' of King James helps the masques to reside beyond the grip of only amusement and fantasy. The word 'fantasy' has a profound positive place in Jonson's masques: it is by no means a vague or derailed flow of wild dreams. The paper examines The Masque of Queens is an expression of 'grotesque' rather than “fearsome”. It also explores how the allegorical an...

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.

could he really have been 'a fool that the lady Olivia's father took much delight in'? 2.4.11-12). Gone was the itinerant beggarly observer of human folly, the only sane person in a plot thick with fools. Instead we had the all-singing, all-dancing, jolly jumping jester who, for reasons known only to him, concluded one of his spontaneous ditties with a confusingly mercurial angry exclamation. Was this an attempt at bringing an element of intricacy to an otherwise unremarkable performance? Begging a Troilus to match his Cressida was clearly beyond this incarnation of the licenced fool, with many of the incisive lines that define his liminal role either removed or hastily passed over to portray him rather as some sort of gaudy, gobby butler. What was noticeable was the audience reaction. Most seemed completely mesmerized by the sumptuous sets, hyperbolic humour and surfeit of songs and skipping, at times clapping along. This was saccharine Shakespeare, a flippant mix of feel-good and super user-friendly Shakespanto. Was it an attempt to prize the play from the paws of the pretentious privileged few or was this simply a case of directorial licence gone wrong? What was clear was that this was not Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. That this review has so little to say about the central performances-Olivia, her household, Viola, Sebastian or the two drunken knights-is a fair indication of the extent to which all were subjugated to the momentum of Luscombe's populist juggernaut. The insertion of slapstick, inflated one-liners (with exaggerated pauses to make sure we all got the joke), choreographed dances and random songs, troweled over a heavily edited text, produced a performance that was eagerly consumed by an enthusiastic audience propelled along by Edmondson's comic pedigree and the sheer volume of gags. Love's labour was regretfully lost amidst a Victorian music-hall melange-the production ended with a curtain-call jig-that obscured tragedy, nuance or any sort of dramatic complexity.

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.

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.

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This chapter 3 of my dissertation of how Paul Tillich's theology can help interpret and critique Dietrich Bonhoeffer's prison theology.

To demonstrate that Bonhoeffer and Tillich are traveling down a similar path to do theology in a world come of age, it will be necessary to deal with the devaluing of Liberal Theology by Bonhoeffer and those who interpret Bonhoeffer.  Admittingly this is a hurdle that must be overcome in order to convince the reader that Tillich and Bonhoeffer could be possibly traveling down a similar path when so much of what Bonhoeffer and Barth said about Liberal Theology was negative.  For starters, the words of Bonhoeffer in his letters to Bethge and his prior writings demonstrate him trying to overcome Liberal Theology by taking up its questions but rejecting its answers.  Here Bonhoeffer, being a student of Harnack and his willingness to explore truth regardless of the cost, comes to the fore.  This is most clearly seen in his notion of “religionless Christianity” for a “world come of age.”  Here we see Bonhoeffer criticizing Barth for not going far enough in the Aufhebung of religion.  In Barth, religion is a category set over against revelation.  In Bonhoeffer, religion is unnecessary in a religionless age-- for Jesus did not come to call a person to a new religion but to new life.  Bonhoeffer would also level the criticism at Barth, charging him with having a “positivism of revelation” in which his theology could be understood as a take it or leave it, treating the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection together instead of separately.  For the former is a mystery that needs to be protected and not explained lest it becomes profaned and treated as a matter of biology.  And the latter is an event, an article of faith upon which the truth of Christianity rises or falls.  Bonhoeffer would then turn his praise and critique on Tillich for attempting to interpret the world religiously… thinking he understood the world better than the world understood itself.  The world would throw Tillich off his high horse and ride by.  It is argued that what Bonhoeffer criticized in Tillich was not his sociological understanding of the world come of age but his theological interpretation of the world.  He gave a religious interpretation when Bonhoeffer sought to give it a Christocentric one.  For Bonhoeffer never stopped asking, “How can Jesus Christ be Lord in the religionless situation?”.  Tillich on the other hand never stopped asking, “How can the power of New Being overcome existential estrangement to arrive at a theonomous situation?”.  Moreover, it is argued that both are seeking to do theology in a technocratic, autonomous age.  This leads them to develop a participatory ontology, rejecting classical theism.  Faith is participating in the power of New Being or the Being of Christ for Tillich and Bonhoeffer.  Both could say that Jesus does not call one to a new religion but new life.  Ethics is the realization of agape love, of being conformed to the image of Christ.

This essay argues for what is labeled a 'doctrinal ethnography.' This is established on the grounds of a reading of Aristotle/Aquinas whereby the 'ideal' and the 'real' are placed not in competitive relation but rather inform one another (though admittedly not equally). The target of the argument are theologians such as Ratzinger and Webster who 'idealise' the church, thereby downplaying its socio-historical reality and so undercutting the value of ethnography for ecclesiology more generally. This is rebutted by suggesting that acknowledging and studying the church's social nature need not negate its creaturely contingency. Consequently, 'doctrinal ethnography' goes beyond social science by attending to the divine and well as the human factors in ecclesial life.