[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 Othello and Desdemona over the obstacle of parental opposition in the first act is replayed in their survival of the storm in the second act. The basic pattern of the first two acts is then repeated in the third act: twice Iago and Roderigo rouse the citizens with the bell; twice Othello is confronted with an important challenge. The first time, Othello and Desdemona stand united against an angry and jealous father; the second time, however, distrust and suspicion grow not between parent and child but between husband and wife. Shakespeare repeats and modifies such large sequences of dramatic material in order to clarify the underlying shape of the tragedy. According to Beckerman, in Shakespeare's plays, "the impulse to dilate upon the story achieves maximum expansion in the center of the play". Like Shakespeare, Webster is less concerned with developing a causally linked narrative than with exploring and emphasizing the different aspects of a central experience. Like Shakespeare, Webster uses repetitive form, de-emphasizing the play's linear progression for the advantage of reworking and expanding his basic material. In the central acts of both his major tragedies, Webster repeats and modulates large dramatic sequences of events to clarify and intensify the direction of his play.

THE WHITE DEVIL

[Harold] Jenkins [in his essay "The Tragedy of Revenge in Shakespeare and Webster", 1961] maintains that there is "some confusion about what is being avenged" in The White Devil.

For Camillo's murder Vittoria is apprehended, but though the play … has stressed her culpability in advance, the murder is never brought home to her and she is sentenced as a whore. The murder of Isabella is not even discovered till after Vittoria has been sentenced, when the play is already half over. Yet it is this murder which at length gives the revengers their chance to set to work…. It is as though his sources, with the murder of Camillo as well as Isabella, and the revenge tradition, with its ghosts and poisonings and mad scenes, have supplied him with too much material, which his imagination cannot effectively control.

In his criticism of the structure of The White Devil, Jenkins isolates an important feature of its overall design. The two murders that are speedily dispatched in the dumb shows of the second act provide separate revenge motives which lead first to the arraignment and then to the final deaths of the protagonists. Webster's suppression of knowledge of the murder of Isabella, like his suppression of knowledge of the Duchess's marriage in The Duchess of Malfi, allows him to draw out his action. In The White Devil, the murders are discovered sequentially; in The Duchess of Malfi, information about the Duchess's marriage is gleaned by degrees. After the climactic trial of the third act of The White Devil, a new revenge motive is introduced and a new "plot" unfolds. Far from betraying a confusing overabundance of source material, or a slavish regard for the chronological sequence of events, Webster's split structure in The White Devil is his own. [Gunnar] Boklund [in The Sources of The White Devil, 1957] points out that, "in marked contrast to what has so far been believed, Webster had a notably succinct story on which to base his tragedy." Confusing and tenuous as much of the source material may be, it clearly indicates a simple cause/effect relation between the double murder and the joint revenge. Boklund observes that "the trial scene … is independent of any source," and Vittoria, after her capture, was simply imprisoned in a "monasterie of Nunnes," whence she was freed by Brachiano. Webster, on the other hand, deliberately brings one action to a climactic stalemate in the trial scene, entirely suppressing the other murder so that he can introduce a new revenge action halfway through the play and move the action toward a denouement. The divided focus that results gives Webster opportunities for repetition and variation that he later exploits for a similar purpose in The Duchess of Malfi.

In an attempt to impose neoclassical form on The White Devil, [W.W.] Greg [in his essay "Webster's White Devil: An Essay in Formal Criticism," 1900] tries to locate the climax or turning-point in the play. He hesitates between the arraignment scene and the scene in the house of convertites. In his view, both scenes are important: "The scene in which Vittoria and the duke quarrel divides with the 'arraignment' the honours of the play." In his view, IV.ii contains "the subtlest and most complex delineation of character to be met with in Webster". Though he admits that "the climax, the point of culmination of the plot … should obviously possess a dramatic value corresponding to its architectonic importance," he finally concludes that the arraignment, the obvious choice, comes too early in the play to serve as its climax. He argues instead for the scene in the house of convertites as the climactic turning-point because "it is on the scene in the house of convertites rather than on the trial that the plot turns…. The scene of Brachiano's jealousy … leads up to the culminating point of the play, in which Vittoria attains momentarily to the height of her ambition. This point is likewise the turn of fortune, for by the very move by which the guilty couple think to triumph they step into the net woven for them by Francisco". Greg's argument is clearly inadequate. The "culminating point" at the end of IV.ii is shrouded in the ambiguity of Vittoria's silence and dramatically undermined by Flamineo's long-winded tale. Brachiano's plan for their escape occupies an insignificant portion of the scene, which is dominated by the dramatic confrontation between the lovers. That their escape is really a trap set by Francisco does not become clear until the following scene. In the play's overall construction, the arraignment is obviously dominant. Yet Greg's sense of the importance of IV.ii to the play's movement and direction is confirmed in a review of the 1976 Old Vic production by Irving Wardle, theatre critic for the Times, who called the scene "a fine piece of feminine derision, and the most passionate passage in the production". Its position in the play's construction is curious. Coming as it does so soon after the arraignment (usually considered the set-piece of any performance), and repeating some of the same material in a different context, the scene appears to be a redundancy hardly justified by its contribution to the plot. The split structure of The White Devil, which generates both the trial and the quarrel, appears only to slow the pace of the action and to overload it with redundancies. Yet the dramatic impact of both scenes is clearly important to the play's overall shape.

In an early essay, T. S. Eliot maintains that "a certain apparent irrelevance" in drama may be the clue to "an under-pattern, less manifest than the theatrical one". This is certainly true of The Duchess of Malfi, where, as we shall see, Bosola's futility in the second act allows Webster to intensify his tragedy through repetition in the third act. The fourth act of The White Devil is riddled with apparent irrelevancies—Francisco's adoption and subsequent rejection of a succession of revenge strategies, Flamineo's parable of the crocodile, and the papal election scene, to name a few. While the first revenge action culminates in the trial, the second revenge action does not really get under way until the final act. Yet in the intervening act, from a mere hint in his sources, Webster develops a complex scene that mirrors his invented trial and allows for full structural repetition.

As in The Duchess of Malfi, structural repetition in The White Devil is followed by a highly visual scene which represents iconographically the inevitable defeat of the protagonists and ends any uncertainty about the outcome of the plot. The banishment scene of The Duchess of Malfi and the papal election scene of The White Devil both consolidate the final direction, but only after the underlying dynamics of the tragedy have been emphasized through repetition. In his review of the 1960 Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Duchess of Malfi, Martin Holmes protests that "neither here nor at the Haymarket were we given that turning-point in the middle of the play," the banishment scene. He goes on to link the banishment scene with the papal election scene in their common use of ceremony to achieve a precise dramatic impact. "As with the papal election scene in The White Devil, Webster knew what an effect could be created, and how much information conveyed, by an impressive piece of pageantry, and it is a matter for regret that he has not, of late years, been given a chance of showing it". The banishment scene was a high point of the 1971 production of The Duchess of Malfi at Stratford, Ontario, as the review in the Times testified. Afterwards, the audience watches, not for what will happen, but for what must happen. Through repetition, Webster de-emphasizes the force and immediacy of "story" in preparation for the inevitable outcome. At the same time, repetition enables him to define the real direction of his tragedy, its "under-pattern."

The first movements of both The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil end on a high note. An intense confrontation is left unresolved, and the emotion generated is barely controlled. At the end of the third act of The White Devil, the sudden explosion of Flamineo leaves Lodovico trembling with rage:

I learnt it of no fencer to shake thus;
Come I'll forget him, and go drink some wine.
(III.iii.135-36)

The violent confrontation between the two men is left unresolved dramatically, for the following scene disappoints expectation. A similar point of tension is reached at the end of the second act of The Duchess of Malfi. Ferdinand's violent threats against the Duchess are more ominous because held in check:

In, in; I'll go sleep—
Till I know who leaps my sister, I'll not stir:
That known, I'll find scorpions to string my whips,
And fix her in a general eclipse.
(II.v.76-79)

The third act of The Duchess of Malfi then dissipates the play's momentum by changing its tone and direction. Similarly, the fourth act of The White Devil suspends, rather than extends, the expectations aroused by the previous action. Monticelso advises Francisco:

Bear your wrongs conceal'd
And, patient as the tortoise, let this camel
Stalk o'er your back unbruis'd: sleep with the lion,
And let this brood of secure foolish mice
Play with your nostrils, till the time be ripe
For th' bloody audit, and the fatal gripe.
(IV.i.14-19)

This passage anticipates Antonio's description of Ferdinand at the beginning of the third act of The Duchess of Malfi:

He is so quiet, that he seems to sleep
The tempest out, as dormice do in winter:
Those houses that are haunted are most still,
Till the devil be up.
(III.i.21-24)

As Ferdinand is suddenly "weary", so Francisco is unexpectedly "turn'd all marble". For the second movement of each play, the pace of the action is slowed and the causal structure weakened. The muted, softened force of the antagonists in both plays signals a change in focus. By introducing a kind of dramatic paralysis, Webster again diverts attention from the linear narrative and engages our attention for a different end. In The Duchess of Malfi, Act I with its powerful wooing scene is balanced against Act II with Bosola's dominant satiric perspective; the third act must decide the final direction. In The White Devil, the crimes of the protagonists in Act II are balanced against their heroic defense in Act III; the fourth act is designed to clarify the issues.

In the fourth act of The White Devil, the immediacy of the confrontation between Lodovico and Flamineo at the end of Act III gives way to the lengthy, deliberate speeches of Francisco and Monticelso. The expectation of revenge, invoked in Monticelso's opening reminder to Francisco that their "sister's poisoned" is immediately undercut by Francisco's reply:

Far be it from my thoughts
To seek revenge.
(IV.i.3-4)

As the scene continues, Francisco's refusal to pursue revenge is undercut in its turn by his expressed desire to see Monticelso's "black book", containing the names of "notorious offenders", "agents for any villainy". In the 1983 York Graduate Theatre Company production in Toronto, Francisco's verbal refusal to undertake revenge was undercut by his stage gesture. Francisco knelt before Monticelso upon the lines:

I know there's thunder yonder: and I'll stand,
Like a safe valley, which low bends the knee
To some aspiring mountain.
(IV.i.23-25)

His movement visually suggested that Francisco expected his brother to carry out the revenge. Yet these are hardly conventional revengers—as soon as the usual properties of revenge are introduced, they are dismissed. The "black book" is considered more as a social document than as a tool for revenge in the lengthy speeches of Francisco and Monticelso. When Francisco finally recalls his purpose, he decides he must approach his revenge "more seriously". He then conjures up the ghost of Isabella, another conventional property of the avenger. Yet once again Francisco dismisses it:

remove this object—
Out of my brain with't: what have I to do
With tombs, or death-beds, funerals, or tears,
That have to meditate upon revenge?
(IV.i.112-15)

Finally, after numerous attempts to attend "seriously" to "this weighty business" of revenge, Francisco changes his tone and calls for "idle mirth" while he composes a love letter to Vittoria. The scene presents a succession of attitudes to the revenge convention and undercuts each one in turn. These are desultory avengers, whose self-conscious trying-on of attitudes undermines the play's revenge structure at a point when it threatens to determine the play's shape.

Webster's design in undermining the revenge convention in the fourth act is strengthened by repetition. The brothers have vowed revenge in the past. In Act II, before any real crime has been committed by the protagonists, Monticelso declares,

It may be objected I am dishonourable,
To play thus with my kinsman, but I answer,
For my revenge I'd stake a brother's life,
That being wrong'd durst not avenge himself.
(II.i.391-94)

Francisco replies, "Come to observe this strumpet", elliptically anticipating the arraignment before the murders have been committed. The murders seem almost an irrelevance to the revenge plot—the trial is designed to expose Vittoria's "black lust" rather than to investigate Camillo's murder, and in IV.i Francisco dismisses Isabella's ghost to focus once again on Vittoria's sexuality. The new revenge motive in Act IV is actually a replay of the old one. Webster's divided focus—with the murder of Camillo inciting the first revenge, the murder of Isabella the second—allows for the reduplication of the revenge motive even as it undermines it.

The repetition of the revenge motive in The White Devil fulfills two important functions in the play's construction. First, such repetition, combined with the emergence of a new, vital, Machiavellian revenger in Francisco, signals the inevitable defeat of the protagonists. Second, and somewhat paradoxically, the talk of revenge, undercut and disconnected from its immediate stimulus by the sequence of events, loses its significance as a causal agent. Through this kind of structural repetition Webster mitigates the tendencies of his tragedy toward either cautionary tale or melodrama. Since there is no direct linear narrative connecting the protagonists' crimes with their punishment, it is (or ought to be) difficult to see the latter as a direct or a necessary result of the former. Although the play's events strictly speaking lead to the destruction of the protagonists by the avengers, Webster so fragments and undercuts this simple cause/effect relation that quite a different structure emerges, as we shall see. This point is missed by critics who maintain that Francisco is the "pivotal figure in a play whose structure is largely determined by his action". The structure of events undermines even as it asserts Francisco's control.

As his control is undermined, Francisco gains an attractive new identity by appropriating Flamineo's voice. Imitating even Flamineo's social criticism, Francisco now offers the perspective on the protagonists that belonged to Flamineo in the play's first half. In the first act, Flamineo remarked, "what an ignorant ass or flattering knave might he be counted, that should write sonnets to her eyes, or call her brow the snow of Ida, or ivory of Corinth". Francisco adopts a similar scornful, satiric pose when he pens his letter to Vittoria. As a result, in the following scene Flamineo is freed from his limited function as the lovers' foil because of Francisco's appropriation of his role, and he can take on another more complex function, as we shall see later.

In The White Devil, Webster minimizes the pull of generic expectations while exploiting their structural usefulness. His play is articulated through the revenge-plot structure, yet it manipulates that structure for its own ends. When, in the fourth act, it becomes clear that the avengers will triumph in the "plot," Webster at the same time works quickly to clarify the important issues. He does so by means of repetition, recalling and reworking past scenes in a major effort to redefine the nature and direction of his tragedy.

The second, repeated sequence of events in The White Devil that begins in Act IV greatly abbreviates and transforms the first sequence. The first two scenes of Act IV are set side by side in an intense compression of the play's first half, as villain-revengers are compared with villain-heroes. The two scenes reflect Webster's different interest in the two groups: the first is episodic, the second dramatic; the first avoids open confrontation, the second erupts into passionate conflict; the first isolates the villain-revengers from one another, the second creates a composite stage image of union from disunion. The rhythm of IV.i is desultory and digressive; the rhythm of IV.ii is intensely dynamic, driving toward a point of climax and reversal. The first scene is primarily "reactive," showing a succession of responses to a previous crisis, Isabella's murder; the second scene is primarily "active," showing, despite the initial reaction to the stimulus provided by Francisco, a movement toward a visible transformation on the stage. The distinctly different rhythms of the two scenes are important to a consideration of their dramatic effect in the play's overall shape.

The scene in the house of convertites—so important on the stage—is largely irrelevant to the plot. Brachiano's decision to help Vittoria to escape and then to marry her occupies only 15 of the scene's 247 lines and thus fails to justify its length in narrative terms. The scene is above all, [Lee] Bliss [in his The World's Perspective: John Webster and the Jacobean Drama, 1983] points out, rich in "allusive parallels to earlier scenes". The confrontation between Branchiano and Vittoria recalls most vividly the arraignment scene, as Brachiano takes the place of the accusers while Vittoria again defends herself. Yet it also replays the bitter rejection scene between Brachiano and Isabella, in which Brachiano's rejection of Isabella was followed by Isabella's rejection of Brachiano in turn. Finally, the scene sends us back to the lovers' first meeting in I.ii, as it reduplicates the staging of the earlier scene with Flamineo as observer and commentator. At this important point in the play, Webster chooses to redefine his protagonists by means of a complex rweb of echoes and associations.

The scene—which should be examined in some detail—begins with a replay of Camillo's comic jealousy in the first act. Flamineo's comic treatment of the cuckold resurfaces.

Jealousy is worser, her fits present to a man, like so many bubbles in a basin of water, twenty several crabbed faces,—many times makes his own shadow his cuckold-maker. (I.ii.110-13)

The stage business between Brachiano and Flamineo, as Francisco's letter is rapidly tossed back and forth, reduces Brachiano's fury to absurdly mechanical gestures. As in the first act, Flamineo undercuts Brachiano's "rival" with clever puns:

"Who prefer blossoms before fruit that's mellow?"
Rotten on my knowledge with lying too long i' th' bed-straw.
(IV. ii. 36-37)

While Flamineo treats Francisco's threat to Brachiano precisely as he had treated Camillo's earlier, Brachiano himself adopts Camillo's former role as outraged husband. Flamineo's attempts to defuse Francisco's threat and to expose Brachiano as a comic cuckold are only partly successful, however. Brachiano's fury at Vittoria, though triggered by Francisco's stratagem and thus without foundation, powerfully reactivates the play's major issues. Whereas Camillo's well-founded suspicions were treated earlier by Flamineo as mere illusions, Brachiano's ill-founded ones reanimate the questions left unresolved by the trial and transcend Flamineo's attempts to contain them. The power that Flamineo wielded over Brachiano throughout the first half is suddenly reversed when Brachiano asks threateningly, "Do you know me?", and Flamineo is forced to reassert their hierarchical positions: "You're a great duke; I your poor secretary".

When Vittoria enters, Brachiano calls her a "stately and advanced whore" and quite deliberately recalls the trial scene:

Thy loose thoughts
Scatter like quicksilver, I was bewitch'd;
For all the world speaks ill of thee.
(IV.ii.100-102)

The rhetoric of Monticelso and Francisco is reapplied and reexamined in the first part of this scene. The perspective of the "world" is no longer imposed on Vittoria by her enemies in public, but is articulated by her lover in an intimate context. And, while Vittoria suffers from Brachiano what she endured on his behalf in the trial scene, Brachiano must accept from Vittoria the rejection he gave Isabella in the second act. The two voices of accusation and counter-accusation that have been heard so often throughout the play are raised again in this scene. Yet the overtones of role-playing that contaminated Isabella's rejection of Brachiano and Vittoria's self-defense at her trial are diminished here. Brachiano's anger imitates Monticelso's, yet is based on fabrications; Vittoria's self-righteousness is less a public performance than a justified outcry at her lover's betrayal, and both these distinctions contribute to the scene's dramatic conviction. In contrast to the scene with Isabella, Brachiano's rejection of Vittoria is motivated not by weariness and disgust, but by passion; Vittoria's rejection of Brachiano proclaims not her own innocence—for she admits she has been his "whore"—but the masculine hypocrisy of which she has been a victim.

Is this your palace? did not the judge style it
A house of penitent whores? who sent me to it?
Who hath the honour to advance Vittoria
To this incontinent college? is't not you?
Is't not your high preferment? Go, go brag
How many ladies you have undone, like me.
(IV.ii.114-19)

The impact of the scene is strengthened by its visual resemblance to the early courtship scene of the first act. There, because of multiple commentaries and a highly public context (with Flamineo, Zanche, and Cornelia all present as observers), our judgment of the lovers was hampered. Here we are given more of the material we need on which to base a judgment because the scene explores the love relationship fully in a more private context.

Webster's most effective scenes in the theatre—scenes that, according to one theatre critic, determine the play's overall shape—are "jagged scenes of transfigured incident", and this scene is no exception. In the first half, the paradigms of senseless accusation and rejection are played out by Brachiano, while Vittoria replays her own past roles with new force. Yet halfway through the scene the theatrical pattern changes abruptly. Brachiano's furious accusations suddenly melt into unconditional acceptance when Vittoria's defiance becomes despair, as she "throws herself upon a bed" face down and weeps. The tears which Brachiano before viewed as "dissembling" now proceed from "matchless eyes"; the same "cursed hand" is now desired in a gesture of reconciliation. The moment recalls Shakespeare's Coriolanus, when Volumnia's furious rejection of her son finally prompts him to yield and he "holds her by the hand, silent." Shakespeare's moment is rich in the same ambiguity as Webster's—human weakness and human greatness are confounded in a single gesture. Brachiano, like Coriolanus (and like Antony), is at his most heroic when he is most vulnerable. Likewise Vittoria, like Volumnia (and like Cleopatra), remains richly ambiguous. After the women achieve their desire, their subsequent silence leaves open a range of stage interpretations. Vittoria's silence may be quiet triumph, word-less contempt, or private devastation. Critical views of the scene range from one critic's [Melvin Seiden, 1972] contention that "there is revealed a tenacity of attachment and devotion that transcends mere lust", to another critic's [Lee Bliss] view that "characters whose previous actions had meaning for them (or Cornelia) as free moral choices now suffer a reduced stature". Whether in fact "Brachiano is mastered by Vittoria", or the lovers' reconciliation is a genuine act of mutual love and forgiveness, is not resolved by Webster. The scene is more complex dramatically than any other in the play, demanding as it does a mixed and full response from its director, actors, and audience alike. Thus, although it refuses to resolve the complex relationship of the protagonists into a simple moral formula, it does confirm the author's commitment and invite the audience's commitment to that complexity.

Webster does not flinch in this scene from showing Brachiano and Vittoria locked in a union that is both physically and emotionally intense. The scene recalls the first wooing in that little seems to have changed—Brachiano is still "lost" in Vittoria's charms, Vittoria is still powerful and ambiguous, Flamineo still "cold, itchy, filthily knowing". Yet from the multiple, fragmented perspectives of the first act, Webster has shifted to a composite tableau of which the following interchange is an example:

The three voices intermingle in a shared rhythm, not of real conflict, but of underlying assent. Vittoria's gentle protests are absorbed by the humorous rejoinders of Flamineo and the loving protestations of Brachiano. Critics are divided on Flamineo's function in the scene—some contend that "even Flamineo's obscene comments fail to leave their smudge on Brachiano and Vittoria's love", while others maintain that "Flamineo's smutty devaluation and self-interested coaching dominate the final accord, as they did not in I.ii". Flamineo's incessant participation in the scene undercuts the lovers' potential status as romantic heroes, while illuminating their human vulnerability. Flamineo acts as a kind of screen onto which the negative aspects of the relationship are projected and transferred. He mitigates these negative overtones by appropriating and exaggerating them, while at the same time providing a human perspective on the lovers. Webster's use of Bosola in Act II of The Duchess of Malfi is similar; his obscene distortions of the Duchess's pregnancy nonetheless serve to convey her new humanity and vulnerability. Indeed, Bosola's observation that "the like passions" hold sway over princes and commoners underlies Webster's design in portraying the Duchess as a fertile woman with ordinary domestic desires. Like Bosola's, Flamineo's language here is broad and analogical; he generalizes and reduces the lovers so they become not individuals but examples of general instinctive human behavior: "O we curl'd-hair'd men / Are still most kind to women". He is allowed to participate in the scene because of Webster's need to balance the dramatic power of the potentially heroic reconciliation with a more comprehensive human perspective. In this scene, Brachiano and Vittoria move beyond the simple heroic defiance of their trial scenes and the crude Machiavellianism of their murders. While he distances and generalizes the lovers through Flamineo, Webster at the same time brings into focus the combination of guilty desire and heroic self-will that motivated them. [Charles] Forker [in his Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster, 1986] points out, "In the grotesque and terror-ridden universe the pair must inhabit … grandeur and pettiness, devotion and selfishness, nobility and crime are somehow compatible". In the fourth act, their mixture of guilt and innocence is no longer hopelessly ambiguous, but intensely, recognizably human, even comic.

At the end of the scene, Flamineo delivers a tale that has frequently been criticized as an irrelevance. Flamineo himself suggests one interpretation of the tale, while Brachiano adopts another—critics have found still others. Yet the tale's precise meaning is less important than the general paradox of love and pain that it explores. The crocodile in the tale enjoys the "present remedy" and "ease" provided by the bird, yet attempts to swallow it; the bird, while it eases the "extreme anguish" caused the crocodile by the worm, yet pricks and wounds the crocodile in order to escape. The three protagonists of The White Devil are bound together in a similar symbiosis; their self-interest and their painful manipulation of one another somehow coexist with their mutual desire and even love. The play's final scene, in which Vittoria and Flamineo turn on one another, only to die side by side a few moments later, illuminates the same complex vision. Flamineo's tale encapsulates the paradox as it begins to emerge strongly in the play. As it redirects our attention to the interplay of energies in the scene, Flamineo's parable also slows down the forward momentum of Brachiano's plan for Vittoria's escape. By taking the audience backward into the scene with its complex triangle of relationships suggested by crocodile, worm and bird, rather than forward into the linear narrative, the tale reemphasizes the scene's dramatic importance as separate from its function in the plot.

With Flamineo in IV.ii, Webster mitigates both the generic pull of melodrama and the sweeping momentum of the plot. In this way he clarifies oppositions central to his tragedy. The crude satire of Francisco is contrasted, not with the lovers' romantic heroism, but with their vulnerable error-prone humanity. Their new humanity compensates for the loss of their "heroic" stature and for their replacement by Francisco as stage-managers of the action.

In the second movement of The White Devil, as a theatre critic has pointed out, "as the cast thins, the pace slackens. The richness of the word begins to penetrate—'and now I'll go weeping to heaven on crutches'." In both tragedies, Webster slows the pace by means of repetition in order to achieve such intensification. A new clarity and lucidity emerge in the language of IV.ii, in speeches like Brachiano's:

Your beauty! O, ten thousand curses on't.
How long have I beheld the devil in crystal?
Thou hast led me, like an heathen sacrifice,
With music, and with fatal yokes of flowers
To my eternal ruin. Woman to man
Is either a god or a wolf.
(IV.ii.88-92)

In The Duchess of Malfi III.ii, the powerful, sweeping lines belong to Ferdinand:

The howling of a wolf
Is music to thee, screech-owl, prithee peace!

…..

If thou do wish thy lecher may grow old
In thy embracements, I would have thee build
Such a room for him as our anchorites
To holier use inhabit: let not the sun
Shine on him, till he's dead.
(III.ii.88-89, 100-104)

In the intimate confrontation between Vittoria and Brachiano in The White Devil, and between the Duchess and Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi, the plays' central dialectic of opposed perspectives is clearly presented. In The White Devil, Brachiano changes his perspective when his fury at Vittoria suddenly shifts to unconditional, loving acceptance of her. In The Duchess of Malfi, Ferdinand's crazed wrath is juxtaposed with the Duchess's quiet domestic desires, highlighted in her previous loving interview with Antonio. At a similar point in the development of both plays, Webster chooses to contrast the mysterious, irrational perspective of lovers with the equally powerful and irrational perspective that threatens their love. In The White Devil, Brachiano himself illustrates both attitudes. And in both plays the finest rhetoric belongs, not to the lovers, but to their enemies. By contrast, the world of the lovers is conveyed not through language but through gesture: in The White Devil, through the clasping of hands and the physical embraces of the reconciliation scene, and in The Duchess of Malfi, through the intimate disrobing and playful banter of the bedroom scene. Thus Webster pits the linguistic against the verbal resources of his art in order to heighten the central conflict of each play.

The fourth act of The White Devil shows the development of intimacy and humanity in the central love relationship. At the same time, all three protagonists in The White Devil remain both manipulators and victims—as Flamineo implies in his tale—and Vittoria's ambiguity is confirmed rather than removed. While he captures dramatic interest in his protagonists with this scene, Webster maintains a complex perspective on them. Their complexity is illuminated by contrast with the simplicity of the antagonists by whom they are framed. Although Francisco sends the love letter that provokes Brachiano's jealousy, the rest of the scene quickly surpasses his initial provocation. Only later does Francisco claim, "'twas this / I only laboured. I did send the letter / T'instruct him what to do". His device originally appears designed to create a rift between the lovers, in which he does not succeed. At any rate, the grip on the protagonists that Francisco later appears to tighten is not strong enough to match the dramatic intensity of the previous scene. Since Francisco's clarification of his plan comes after the scene in the house of convertites, in retrospect it is impossible to agree that his "god-like perspective frames and distances all the reversals and manoeuvrings" or that "in Francisco's diabolic plan they are all actors meekly responding on cue". The love letter both undermines the revenge structure and sets in motion the echoes and repetitions of the following scene. Francisco's control over the narrative line is confirmed only when it has been effectively transcended.

In Act IV of The White Devil Webster rephrases the revenge motive and generates a new sequence of events that repeats earlier material from a new perspective. As a result, the play's linear progression is undercut for the greater advantage of clarifying its final direction. The repetition of the revengers' scheming in IV.i allowed by Webster's split structure confirms their control over the action but at the same time undercuts the significance of that control in the play's dramaturgy. More important is the complex, dynamic exploration of human love and pain in IV.ii that is emphasized by the surrounding scenes. The lovers' scene in turn repeats earlier scenes—the wooing of Act I, the rejection of Act II, the trial of Act III. The second movement of the play makes the final direction clear even as it de-emphasizes causality and plot progression. The villains will gain their ends, but the nature, not the fate, of the protagonists will be the real focus of interest. The same strategy of structural repetition that reduces the villains brings the protagonists into intimate focus.

The kind of construction suggested here may explain how Webster's intense tragic vision of "the progress of passionate life through its fulfilment to its inevitable destruction" can be articulated through a pattern of events that appears "disjointed" and discontinuous. Though The White Devil seems to rush headlong to its conclusion, its structure is, as John Russell Brown points out [in his introduction to The White Devil, 1960], "a gothic aggregation rather than a steady exposition and development towards a single consummation". Forker notes, "Webster gives us a plot structure commensurate to a world of labyrinthine deceit, 'winding and indirect'". Yet it is in Act IV of The White Devil that the multiplicity and "discontinuousness" for which Webster has been alternately praised and criticized become instruments of the intensification of his tragic vision. In Act IV, as we have seen, he both uses and transcends his own revenge plot structure and, by delaying the forward movement of the linear narrative, he actually advances the course of his tragedy. Webster's protagonists may be, as [Robert] Ornstein [in The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, 1960] calls them, "heroic characters who escape the restrictive bonds and illusions of mortality only to be swept to disaster by the irresistible tide of their desires", but Webster articulates this vision by means of careful and deliberate dramatic construction.

THE DUCHESS OF MALFI

Academic and theatrical critics alike have pointed to the slow development of the tragic action over a span of several years in the second and third acts of The Duchess of Malfl. Abraham Wright, a Caroline clergyman and Webster's earliest critic, maintained: "And which is against the laws of the scene, the business was two years a-doing, as may be perceived by the beginning of the third act where Antonio has three children by the Duchess, when in the first act he had but one [sic]". Three hundred years later, Leech attributes the notorious "delay" to a conflict between Webster's regard for his sources and his own dramatic instincts: "Ferdinand's strange patience during the long interval between Acts II and III is a … serious matter, throwing a haze of improbability over his character and this part of the action. Doubtless Webster could not resist introducing Bosola's immediate discovery of the birth of the first child, but then proceeded to follow Bandello's story by keeping the marriage secret for a long period". Similarly, [Madeleine] Doran [in Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama, 1954] criticizes the play for "excessive looseness of time and place". A recent theatre critic, in answer to the question, "Why is it that Bosola, that baffling spy, cannot discover what is going on in the Duchess' household after three years?" ingeniously declares that "to shorten the play would cheat Webster of the time he needs to exhibit virtuosity in evil". Early in the century, William Archer [in his Nineteenth Century, 1920] criticized Bosola's role as an imperceptive spy as utterly improbable and the consequent extension of the action as apparently purposeless. In his opinion, "the catastrophe should have followed like a thunder-clap". In fact, the first three acts repeat a similar sequence of events twice over, so that the "thunder-clap" of a catastrophe appears to be muted deliberately.

The first and the third acts begin in much the same way, with Antonio and Delio appearing on the stage to greet one another. The beginning of Act III is obviously designed to recall the beginning of Act I. Whereas in Act I Delio greeted Antonio with, "You are welcome to your country, dear Antonio", in Act III their positions are reversed, and Antonio greets Delio with, "Our noble friend, my most beloved Delio!". Delio's speech to Antonio in III.i quite explicitly recalls the earlier scene:

Methinks 'twas yesterday: let me but wink,
And not behold your face, which to mine eye
Is somewhat leaner, verily I should dream
It were within this half-hour.
(III.i.8-11)

Webster here makes a humorous, self-conscious reference to his violation of the unity of time between the second and third acts, having allowed several years to elapse in the story, while maintaining dramatic tension in the theatre. Dramatic convention is thus exposed, while the change in Antonio's position since Act I is emphasized. Antonio's reply illuminates this change:

You have not been in law, friend Delio,
Nor in prison, nor a suitor at the court,
Nor begg'd the reversion of some great man's place,
Nor troubled with an old wife, which doth make
Your time so insensibly hasten.
(III.i.12-16)

The world in which time passes quickly and easily—the world of the theatre—is not the world of those who experience profound difficulty and pain. The deep changes wrought in the lovers between the second and third acts cannot be compassed by theatrical time, Antonio implies. At this point in the play, Webster appears to be drawing the audience's attention to the theatrical artifice for a particular reason. By slowing the pace of his action and at the same time violating theatrical illusion, Webster exposes the structural principles of his play to the audience. The deliberate recreation of the staging of the beginning of the play calls attention to itself as the beginning of a second phase or new cycle in the action. We are back at the beginning—this second cycle repeats the substance of the first in order to illuminate the progress of the tragedy.

Both sequences begin with this encounter between Antonio and Delio as servants or courtiers in attendance at Malfi. The next major move is to a court scene, which is oddly abbreviated or interrupted. In the first scene of the play, a departure is the first real topic when the princes gather together. Ferdinand begins the court scene by announcing, "Here's the Lord Silvio, is come to take his leave". In the first scene of the third act, as soon as Ferdinand enters, Delio announces that "The Lord Ferdinand / Is going to bed". The court scenes arouse expectations only to disappoint them. In the first court scene, the ceremonial encounter of the Duchess and her brothers is undercut by Antonio's verbal commentary; in the second court scene, Ferdinand's public speech of forgiveness to the Duchess is rapidly undermined by the private disclosure of his suspicions. Both court scenes are then followed by a conspiratorial conference between Ferdinand and Bosola, during which a key is probably exchanged. The wooing scene of Act I is then clearly recalled by the first half of III.ii, as a private and delightful interview between Antonio and the Duchess again takes center stage, though again menaced by what has preceded it. The menace is then fulfilled by an antagonist whose vision is at odds with that of the Duchess—in III.ii, the vision of Ferdinand; in II.i, that of Bosola. Bosola's disgust with human sexuality and its origin in "a rotten and dead body" follows immediately upon the frank sensuality of the wooing scene; Ferdinand's view of the Duchess as "unquenchable wild-fire" and of Antonio as her "lecher" is juxtaposed with the playful intimacy of the bedroom scene. Then a similar pattern of evasion and pursuit is dramatized. In II.i and ii, panic and confusion reign as the Duchess goes into labour, and Antonio invents a number of excuses, among them the following:

We have lost much plate you know; and but this evening
Jewels, to the value of four thousand ducats
Are missing in the duchess' cabinet.
(II.ii.52-54)

In III.ii, "more earthquakes" threaten to ruin the lovers, and the stage again reflects the chaos with a confusing number of exits and entrances. The Duchess invents a "noble lie" which she hopes will save them:

Antonio, the master of our household,
Hath dealt so falsely with me, in's accounts:
My brother stood engag'd with me for money
Ta'en up of certain Neapolitan Jews,
And Antonio lets the bonds be forfeit.
(III.ii. 166-70)

In both scenes, thefts are invented by the Duchess and Antonio, officers are assembled, and finally the game is given away, in Act II by Antonio (with his dropping of the horoscope), and in Act III by the Duchess (with her trusting admission to Bosola). As the earlier sequence was marked by Bosola's discovery of a key piece of "intelligence"—the birth of the Duchess's child—so the later sequence comes to a head with Bosola's discovery of the identity of the father of that child. The consequent rage of Ferdinand, and his determination to act, is the dramatic climax of both sequences. The scene that begins, "I have this night digg'd up a mandrake" is later echoed in the stage action of III.iii where Ferdinand is described as "a deadly cannon / That lightens ere it smokes". In both scenes, Ferdinand is tuned to a hysterical pitch.

It is clear that the first two acts trace a sequence of events that is largely repeated in the third act. The general outline of both sequences is strikingly similar, and the visual repetition in performance can be even more evident. Given such clear evidence of deliberate structure in the play, it becomes difficult to accept critical commonplaces about Webster's haphazard dramatic construction. We may agree that in watching The Duchess of Malfi, "we find ourselves watching a monster—cold, slow, writhing, a boa constrictor riveting us with its unplotted undulations" but we can hardly accept that this riveting tension is entirely "unplotted."

The repetition of similar structures in Webster's drama reflects something more than simply "episodic" or "discontinuous" playwrighting, as some critics claim. According to Doran, "episodic structure is essentially serial, a stringing together of events in mere temporal succession; each complication is solved as it arises, and a new one succeeds it". She connects this episodic structure with Webster and other Jacobeans: "The tendency to organize events around several episodic centers, with the connections falling slack between them, curses such otherwise fine plays as those of Chapman, Tourneur, Webster, and Ford". Doran's criticism, however, applies more aptly to Webster's source than to his play. In the story of the Duchess translated from Belleforest in Painter's Palace of Pleasure, repeated events, like the renewed exhortations to the reader to avoid the Duchess's well-deserved fate, do not succeed in unifying an essentially episodic linear narrative. In Painter, the initial discovery of the Duchess's actions (made after the birth of her second child), is carried to the ears of her brothers by rumor alone; their reactions, "swelling wyth despite, and rapt with furie", are quickly passed over in a few sentences. The arousal of their suspicions prompts them to plant spies in the Duchess's court; this, in turn, forces the lovers to separate and finally to give themselves up when they are reunited at Ancona. After the lovers' public confession, the brothers vent their spleens at length, and finally force the lovers to separate a second time. In Painter's story, repeated actions are woven unemphatically into the chain of causally connected events so that they do not draw attention to themselves or illuminate significant contrasts or changes in the shape of the narrative. In Webster's play, the antagonism of the brothers and Bosola toward the lovers is developed fully in the first two acts to allow full structural repetition in the third act. Though Painter's version is logical and sequential in a way that Webster's is not, it remains mere narrative, a chronological chain of episodes. Webster's play, with its rough transitions and deliberate violation of strict linear causality, elaborates and thus emphasizes the repetitions that are almost buried in its source.

In the first two acts of The Duchess of Malfi, Webster builds his action to a point of extreme tension that he then deliberately leaves dramatically unresolved. George Rylands, who directed the successful 1945 production of the play, confirmed that "the first movement [that] ends after Act II" achieves its climax in "Ferdinand's revelation to the Cardinal of their sister's shame and disobedience". The third act does not follow as an immediate consequence of the preceding action, but rephrases the same sequence of events in an altered form. Its "climax" is more muted because the sustained intensity of the death scene is still to come. The end of the second, intensified and abbreviated, "movement" of the play is signalled by the ceremonial banishment scene, which confirms visually the Duchess's inevitable defeat at the hands of her brothers. Her defeat, however, is finalized only after her control and transcendence of her circumstances have been emphasized through repetition. The repetitive construction of the first three acts has a number of important consequences for the play.

[Samuel Taylor] Coleridge gives [in his Complete Works, 1884] first place in his list of Shakespeare's "characteristics" to the dramatist's arousal of "expectation in preference to surprise." He goes on to describe this important quality: "As the feeling with which we startle at a shooting star compared with that of watching the sunrise at the pre-established moment, such and so low is surprise compared with expectation". A great many of Webster's dramaturgical techniques can be understood in similar aesthetic terms. In writing a play, his problem is to maintain dramatic tension while minimizing suspense. He must redirect the attention of the audience from "story" to the dynamic interplay of energies and responses. As Beckerman says of Elizabethan drama: "The poets sought to project multiple aspects of a situation" because "interest was not in the conflict leading to a decision, but the effect. This combined stress on effect rather than cause, and on multiple effects rather than on one single effect, may well have led to the dramatists' use of repetitive form. Repeated scenes or groups of scenes not only emphasize multiplicity of effect but also de-emphasize the narrative line, for the advantage of "expectation" over "surprise." Webster combines repetitive form with interruptive form, giving his work the appearance of "discontinuity" complained of by critics, but gaining distinct advantages for his play on the stage.

Repetitive form is one way of de-emphasizing causation in drama. Because there is no single, direct linear narrative proceeding from the Duchess's wooing of Antonio to her death, it is dramatically impossible to see the latter as a result of the former—though some commentators have tried to force the play into this pattern. The play is not a cautionary tale. Nor is it a melodrama, in which the Duchess is simply victimized by the crazed fury of her brothers. The play is constructed so that the two worlds, of the Duchess and Antonio, and of the Arragonian brothers, remain irreconcilable and separate. Their causal relation is less important than their essential qualities. Ferdinand's anger, for example, as it becomes increasingly familiar on the stage, appears more and more automatic and irrational, disconnected from any discernible impetus or motive. The domestic calm of the Duchess and Antonio, on the other hand, is equally groundless and "irrational," menaced on all sides. The reassertion of both these dispositions in the replay of the third act clarifies their mutual independence and incompatibility. Ferdinand's fury is more distant and seemingly mechanical at the end of the third act than at the end of the second. The fate of the Duchess is entirely predictable and inevitable, since the machinery of the play has twice put her through the same motions. Her fate is finally sealed in III.iv, the banishment scene, and the whole focus of the audience's interest is now not on what will happen, but on what must happen. The play's dramatic construction has aroused expectation rather than laying the basis for surprise. This is particularly important in preparation for the death scene, which should unfold not with shocking horror but with quiet inevitability.

Another important advantage of repetitive construction is its invitation to comparison. An action that is repeated allows the audience to measure the distance it has travelled since its first encounter with that action. In the first scene of the play, for example, it is clear that Ferdinand gathers his courtiers around him to await the arrival of the Duchess in her own court. When she enters, accompanied by ladies-in-waiting, Ferdinand's first words to her are deferential, as he presents one of his courtiers: "Here's the Lord Silvio, is come to take his leave". It is the Duchess who holds the central authority, and gives the commands. In the first scene of Act III, however, the situation has changed. The Duchess enters without attendants, and the first announcement, made by Delio (now Ferdinand's servant), assumes Ferdinand is the central authority: "The Lord Ferdinand / Is going to bed". It is Ferdinand, finally, who orders the Duchess to leave at the end of their brief interchange, then summons his own spy in her court. The parallelism between the two court scenes emphasizes their differences. Not only has Ferdinand assumed greater control, but the Duchess has also willingly surrendered political authority for domestic peace. The first scene of Act II in fact makes it quite clear that the Duchess doesn't desire formal authority as the head and center of a court; her real authority as a prince emerges chiefly in the death scene. Just as Ferdinand's control over the court at Malfi has increased in the third act, so has the domestic security of the Duchess and Antonio grown. Unlike the wooing scene, whose rhythm some critics have found nervous and "jerky", the second scene of Act III shows the Duchess and Antonio as relaxed, open and secure. Their new intimacy is frequently emphasized by the staging as the Duchess undresses before Antonio, removing jewellery, gown and all the symbols of her station. In the 1960 Royal Shakespeare Company production, for example, the Duchess removed her own rings, earrings and bracelets while Antonio removed her necklace (an eerie anticipation of the strangling?); in the 1971 RSC production, the Duchess was "undressed by Cariola"; in the 1980 Royal Exchange production, the Duchess took off her gown. The love of Antonio and the Duchess seems to grow in proportion to the menace that surrounds them.

After the scene of increased intimacy between the lovers, the second cycle shows a corresponding intensification in the attack that follows. Ferdinand's confrontation with the Duchess in III.ii is a more direct and passionate threat than Bosola's general cynicism and comic "apricocks" ruse to ferret out proof of her pregnancy in the second act. Yet the Duchess's resistance is strengthened in this second cycle. In the first cycle, the Duchess is forced off the stage while Antonio remains to invent excuses and make mistakes; in the second cycle, Antonio flees from Malfi while the Duchess remains a strong stage presence throughout the act. The Duchess's firmer control in the intensified replay of Act III is emphasized by contrast with Ferdinand's subsequent anger which, unlike his outburst of II.v, is distanced and muted by the commentary of III.iii. Thus it is clear that, even as the Arragonian brothers gain control in the plot, they lose ground in the play's world, and the Duchess assumes a more prominent role. In the first cycle, Act I was weighed against Act II, the lovers' vision against that of their enemies. Act III, the second cycle, recapitulates the opposition in order not only to intensify it but also to resolve it in

the Duchess's favor.

The intensification achieved by the repetition of material in the first three acts of The Duchess of Malfi is heightened by the extended time lapses between each act. Webster's violation of the unities has attracted considerable critical censure despite Samuel Johnson, who [in his essay "Preface to Shakespeare," 1968] pointed out long ago that "time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination". Stage productions of the play, ranging from the earliest to the most recent, have often attempted to minimize the "improbable" time gaps. In Poel's 1892 production, Acts II and III were conflated to eliminate repetition and time lapses, necessitating substantive changes in the text. A much more recent production of the play at the National Theatre in 1985 followed [William] Poel's lead in attempting to maintain temporal unity. The child born in the second act remained an infant throughout, and the "two children more", born between the second and third acts, were entirely omitted. During the banishment and separation scenes (III.iv, v), the Duchess held a wailing infant in her arms. As a result, the pathos of the Duchess's situation was heightened. The brothers' fury appeared more monstrous, the Duchess's transgression less extreme. Yet by suggesting an expanse of time in the play Webster's intention was to give full and equal weight to the opposing groups. A third stage production, at the Royal Exchange in 1980, exploited Webster's original time frame fully. The boy and girl for whom the Duchess shows concern before her death appeared throughout the third act, in the bedroom scene and in the separation scene. The domestic, familial context allowed Helen Mirren as the Duchess to play out fully on the stage the world she created and must leave. As the reviewer for the Stage put it, "Helen Mirren admirably blends nobility and humanity in the title part with the warmth of her scenes with Antonio and the children contrasting with the almost contemptuous coolness with which she confronts her executioners later on". The reviewer for the Sunday Times remarked that the play's contracted time frame emphasized the Duchess's "speed and daring," as she "has no sooner brought Antonio to her bed than she's had his child, and no sooner had his child than she's had three children by him". Boklund comments, "The silent part played by the children in The Duchess of Malfi turns what was merely a tragic love story into a family tragedy, with all the additional pathos and increased scope that this implies". By using repetitive sequences, reinforced by an extended time frame, Webster is able to give equal weight to the opposed worlds of his tragedy, and to intensify their opposition.

The opposing principles of familial love and psychotic rage that dominate the play are embodied in the dynamic confrontation between Ferdinand and the Duchess in the second scene of the third act. Again, because of the repetitive construction of the first three acts, the attention of the audience is drawn not merely to the story of a Duchess destroyed by her brothers—which has in fact been suggested from the beginning—but to the dramatic intensity of two powerful forces meeting on the stage. This emphasis is particularly important because the "story" is only part of the dramatic experience. The play is not only about the Duchess's destruction at the hands of her brothers, but also about human destructiveness and human resilience, pain and joy—the fit objects of tragedy. In diverting attention from the linear narrative, by using repetitive form, analogical probability, and ceremonial dumb show to minimize the primacy of "story," Webster is in fact directing our attention to what the play is really about.

Webster's original design in the second and third acts of The Duchess of Malfi can be further illuminated by comparison with William Poel's attempt to revise it for his 1892 production. In order to maintain the unities as far as possible, Poel eliminates the first three scenes of Act II (including the "apricocks" plot), and substitutes a complex piece of stage business to account for Bosola's discovery of the horoscope. Antonio does not drop the horoscope, but carefully locks it away in a cupboard, whence it is retrieved by the vigilant Bosola in a delicately orchestrated sequence of movements unhappily reminiscent of Restoration comedy. Ferdinand and the Cardinal are present at Malfi from the beginning of the second act, and their actions are clearly motivated by their desire to marry the Duchess to Count Malateste. Entire passages from III.i and III.iii are interpolated early in the second act to establish the brothers' suspicions regarding the Duchess's secret marriage. The last scene of Act II elides effortlessly into the first scene of Act III, and no time lapse is implied. When compared to Poel's version, the deliberate repetitions of Webster's structure in the first three acts become evident. Poel is forced to make extensive transpositions and cuts in Webster's text in order to construct a logical, causally connected, linear narrative leading from Bosola's scheming to Ferdinand's revenge. Yet Poel's conflation of the second and third acts gains compression at the expense of tragic expansion. In Poel, the Duchess becomes merely a victim of an elaborate plot mechanism; in Webster, opposing passions fully articulate their natures and play themselves out in slow motion. In Poel, when all the action is causally connected and visible on the stage without shifts in time or place, it becomes strictly dependent on time and place; in Webster, the irreconcilable passions cannot be contained, as it were, in the time frame of the play itself. The expanded time of the play suggests the vast size and endurance of its opposed forces. Poel's revision of The Duchess of Malfi illuminates by contrast the complementary functions of temporal expansion and structural repetition in Webster's play.

Kenneth Burke [in Counter-Statement, 1957] points out that, through the use of repetitive form, "by a varying number of details, the reader is led to feel more or less consciously the principle underlying them". If there is an underlying principle that is reinforced through structural repetition in the play, it is surely the self-sufficient integrity of the love scenes that are framed by the distorted menace around them. Because in each case the menace precedes as well as follows the love scene, our sense of the inevitability of disaster is heightened while narrative causality is undercut. The repetition of the same pattern assures clarity in the aesthetic design.