The Duchess of Malfi Essay | Critical Essay #5

The Duchess of Malfi Critical Essay #5

This is the burden felt by all: the shaping of the social self in the abrasive zone between emergent and residual social formations. Webster's play is what Kenneth Burke calls a magical chart, a cognitive decree that names a problematic situation and voices an attitude toward it. Webster's chart insists that the characters' urges and defining gestures are transformations of one another; that they are fundamentally constituted by, "struck and banded which way please," a net of dimly understood and contradictory social forces; and that these forces shape and limit the kind of actions we habitually regard as individually authentic and chosen (and that carry the responsibilities we associate with tragedy and villainy). Webster provides a social world that constitutes what are clearly not the transcendental subjects of traditional moral inquiry.

Fredric Jameson suggests a more political repossession:

The cultural monuments and masterworks that have
survived tend...
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