Abstract
As the only other surviving play of Webster’s sole authorship, The Devil’s Law-Case has had to carry a burden of critical expectation which it has scarcely been able to fulfil. Written soon after the great tragedies, it is filled with verbal, visual and situational echoes of the earlier plays but has often been described in terms reminiscent of Donne’s insulting ‘compliment’ to a woman:
Though all her parts be not in th’usuall place, She’hath yet an Anagram of a good face.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
John Donne, Elegie II, ‘The Anagram’, 11. 15–16, in The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Dent, 1985).
The fullest discussion of Renaissance tragicomedy in relation to Webster is Jacqueline Pearson, Tragedy and Tragicomedy in the Plays of John Webster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980).
From Abraham Wright’s Commonplace Book (c.1650), reprinted in Webster: The Critical Heritage, ed. Don D. Moore (London: Routledge, 1981) p. 35.
Most of the relevant details can be found in Lucas’s introduction and notes to The Devil’s Law-Case (in vol. II of The Works of John Webster) or in Akiko Kusunoki, ‘A Study of The Devil’s Law-Case: with Special Reference to the Controversy over Women’, Shakespeare Studies (Tokyo), vol. XXI (1982–3) 1–33.
Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil, in The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J. B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) pp. 74–5.
Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, section 9, in Sir Thomas Browne, The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) p. 69.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1995 Rowland Wymer
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wymer, R. (1995). The Devil’s Law-Case. In: Webster and Ford. English Dramatists. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23853-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23853-8_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-56738-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-23853-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)