Webster, John - Christina Luckyj (essay date 1989)
Christina Luckyj (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "Winding and Indirect: Nonlinear Development," in A Winter's Snake: Dramatic Forms in the Tragedies of John Webster, The University of Georgia Press, 1989, pp. 1-28.
[Below, Luckyj explores how Webster's repetition of large dramatic action sequences in The White Devil and in The Duchess of Malfi "allows [each] play's simple linear progression to be de-emphasized and its central experience explored and intensified, " providing at the climactic center of each tragedy, "a clear and sustained dramatic experience [that] incarnates the play's central paradox."]
[Bernard] Beckerman [in his Shakespeare at the Globe, 1599-1609, 1962] points out that the "climax" of a Shakespearean play is usually a sustained sequence of repeated, intensified episodes; in Coriolanus, for example, Coriolanus's struggle with the tribunes occurs not once but twice. In Othello, the triumph of...
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