Biography EssayDespite his seminal importance in Jacobean drama (most critics rank him as second only to William Shakespeare as a tragedian), very little was known about John Webster's life until rece...
Read more
The reputation of the English dramatist John Webster (ca. 1580-ca. 1634) rests on two blank-verse tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. He was a painstaking literary craftsman, much con...
Read more
Despite his seminal importance in Jacobean drama (most critics rank him as second only to Shakespeare as a tragedian), very little was known about John Webster's life until recently. However, the rese...
Read more
In the excerpt below, Jack maintains that there is no correspondence between the moral axioms of "degree"—the hierarchical ordering of nature and society—and the Machiavell...
Read more
In the following excerpt, Bliss examines Webster's "unheroic" protagonists, focusing on their relationship to society and comparing them with the more traditional, heroic protagon...
Read more
In the excerpt below, Callaghan contends that traditional "masculinist" criticism has erroneously focused on the dramatist's "defective dramaturgy" rather than ...
Read more