Webster’s Purposeful Theatricality

Abstract

The one vein of imagery that runs consistently throughout Webster’s tragedies developing and refining our perceptions of the worlds and the characters he portrays relates to theatre, performance, acting. It has been argued (initially by Lord David Cecil) that Webster presents the world as a great stage of actors because, pursuing a Calvinist philosophy, he saw life as an illusion beside the Ultimate Realities of death, heaven and hell. Certainly Webster, like many of his dramatist- contemporaries, was conscious of the Morality tradition that the Renaissance theatre inherited but to stress a Calvinist approach risks losing a proper appreciation of the complexity of sympathy and insight that has gone to the creating of Vittoria, Bosola, Ferdinand; to ignore the carefully defined social and political dimensions in the plays is to miss the pathos of Flamineo’s predicament, Isabella’s or Julia’s. Webster meticulously avoids simple moral categories; and it is here that the subtlety of his concern with the processes of theatre as symbolic is most apparent. He repeatedly places his characters in situations where they must act and the quality of their response to this necessity sharpens our perception to a remarkable degree of the innermost reaches of their psyches. What impresses is the astonishing range of identities he so defines and the intricacies of discrimination this excites in us. When, for example, Isabella enacts a public separation from Brachiano [ii i 225–77], she speaks a script dictated already by him [ll.