Webster himself invited comparison with his most famous contemporaries, and if I have not strictly followed the list that prefaces The White Devil, I hope this attempt to read Webster in his chosen context has helped clarify his involvement in some of the most exciting dramatic developments of his period. Old-fashioned neither in form nor content, both Webster's moral attitudes and his experimental dramaturgy grow out of the social, philosophic, and artistic concerns that dominated his best contemporaries' work. His apprenticeship, if not his maturity, was served in the explosive first decade of the seventeenth century, a period of intense, competitive interaction between public and private theaters as well as between individual dramatists; his later, unaided work draws on such generic experimentation and its products, plays that are inconoclastic and unsettling in both form and tone.

In seeking formal expression of his own vision, then, Webster reflects and extends in dramatic terms one aspect of his period's intellectual and artistic ferment. Historical studies of Mannerist style note its distinctive fluctuating tone, its use of intrusively shocking content and displays of self-conscious technical virtuosity to encourage both engagement and detachment; more psychologically oriented investigations treat disjunctive form as an expression of spiritual crisis. Stylistic innovation constitutes one reply to the failure of inherited artistic structures fully to satisfy contemporary needs. New forms both explore and are themselves responses to more general cultural and historical turbulence. A wide spectrum of Jacobean plays, even those as intellectually unsatisfying as Beaumont and Fletcher's, reflect this subjective turmoil in their technical and generic mixtures. In the dramatists' preoccupation with detachment's aesthetic as well as moral effects, philosophic interests merge with more purely literary fashions. Dramatic technique strains to alter the audience's response to traditional materials and conventional structures. Manipulation of aesthetic distance becomes a major structural and investigative tool, and formal experiments in distancing complement thematic ones.

On both public and private stages, new blends of comedy and tragedy explore those problems of distance which seem central to the period's philosophic restlessness. Seeking a stance capable of dealing with ambiguities of character and situation, these generically innovative plays propose variously successful intriguers whose mingled common sense and calculation continued to fascinate us and whose disturbing implications Webster further explored. They reexamine, and reject, the solution Altofront-Malevole had seemed to offer: a disguised prince objective enough to understand and intelligent enough to manipulate and even convert his enemies. Master of any style, his final success reestablishes both the style and values that the new dispensation had apparently overthrown; witty and adaptable, he conquers the Machiavel's weapons and places them in the service of traditional morality. However attractive the "white" Machiavel's solution, tensions implicit in his methods find immediate development in less hopeful tragicomedies. The cool disengagement that promised both psychological safety and external control, witty vitality and wordly success, comes under scrutiny as the new age investigates its own ideal.

Seeing through hypocrisy, pedantry, and the delusions of fools, society's critics now retreat and adopt a realistic philosophy denying the possibility of either nobility or self-transcendence. Society now provides no acceptable comic norm. Less than ideal, it becomes an active antagonist demanding conversion or acquiescence. Its smug mediocrity at best, and hypocritically filmed-over corruption at worst, provoke the protagonist's revolt and deepen our sense of the split between self and others, private needs and public satisfactions. Disillusioned with his world and unable to shape it to his will, the intelligent intriguer turns aggressively self-protective. Although society tries to enforce the union of appearance and reality, denounces playing with language and appearance as wrong, the unillusioned man enjoys the vigorous and elaborate play of self and roles. Through wit and self-conscious theatricality he tries to evade the moral and social categories he sees as inadequate. The cynic turns self-reflexive and with witty indifference resists serious endeavor and society's traditional moral imperatives and judgments. The self-referential farceur joins hands with the political Machiavel. Recognizing in man or nature no inherent morality, each accepts this world and its rewards as the only certain value; each finds in self-preservation and self-promotion humanity's chief "moral" obligation. He challenges society and tries to wrest from it, and from those depersonalized others of whom it is composed, some satisfaction of his private desires.

Tragicomedy's manipulators are happy with their engineered endings, although we are not. The playwright has shown us that the world they see is restricted and that what they exclude is of great value: the kind of loving commitment so attractively dramatized in Crispinella and Tysefew and suggested, though certainly not embodied, in Lysander and Cynthia. Instead, in order to interpret and control his world the intriguer disentangles himself from inhibiting commitments and injunctions; he adopts the coolly impersonal "knowledge" and amoral objectivity his urban, competitive life seems to reward. Accepting the world's perspective allows him to impose on it a form—his form, his plot; in defining the world he defines himself. Superficially, success is his. Material prizes are gained without loss of identity or vitality, and the individual apparently acts efficiently while eluding the lifeless categories into which society has forced others. Yet what seemed to offer a heady new freedom, to liberate the modern individual from outmoded codes of behavior and evaluation, proves unsatisfactory, in a new way even more constricting. Utter flexibility, the willingness to be whatever the immediate occasion demands, preserves no uniquely vital identity; indeed, in threatens dissolution. Trying to hold the self aloof while accomodating one's virtues to the time's demands proves impossible. Being a "man o' th' time" finally justifies the social order from which one had revolted and leaves the individual dedicated to the very trifles he had disprized. The loss or absence of a central self whose integrity lies safely beyond the pragmatists' quotidian accommodations—which we suspect in Freevill, Tharsalio, and perhaps Duke Vincentio—is starkly dramatized in Vittoria's and Flamineo's final despair. When the chameleon roles fall away, nothing is left.

Ironic tragicomedey shares with tragedy a devotion to exploring and renovating the terms by which the life we share may be considered moral and not just a community in the most mechanical and mercantile sense. Its failed resolutions signal the need for tragedy, for the kind of exploration and affirmation that we associate with Shakespeare's tragic masterpieces. The tragedian grants the "realistic" philosophy's pragmatic efficacy—in Monsieur, Octavius, and Aufidius as well as in Francisco—and allows its reasonable perspective to challenge his play's tragic issues and its protagonist's self-proclaimed stature. Something like the farceur's point of view repeatedly distances us from the tragic hero and suggests he is no great-souled visionary but merely comedy's self-deluded absolutist writ large. Yet the tragedian must also suggest that such wholly materialist assumptions wrongly, or inadequately, explain humanity's nature and value. In predicating universal competitive and aggressive motives, such a philosophy is like the spectacles Flamineo describes to his brother-in-law: they color all he sees with the same jaundiced tinge. Disengagement protects against suffering, but it also severs those commitments to external reality that make life meaningful. It values liveliness, intelligence, and vitality, and promises situational mastery, but in successfully accommodating us to a fallible, earthbound reality it also threatens the very values it aimed to ensure.

Heroic tragedy's protagonist admits no limits. Disdaining prudence and calculation alike, he seeks total self-realization and demands that reality fulfill the most ambitious of the heart's desires. The heroic image—an impossibly expansive ideal of self "past the size of dreaming"—reveals its limits when applied to the complex and fallible world of mortal men. Foolishly, the protagonists give to a metaphysical idea of freedom and self-fulfillment a local habitation and a name; they chase a tangible form which can only betray their dream. They are, moreover, victims of their own distorting ideals as well as their imperfect environments. Their contradictory humanity stands between them and a self-proclaimed apotheosis; they are estranged from themselves as well as from others. Bussy D'Ambois, Antony, and Coriolanus display an acute consciousness of the requirements of the heroic image they have set themselves, and they act out this role to themselves as well as to their mocking antagonists. Final disaster confronts them with a physical failure they cannot argue away and so forces self-knowledge; up until this rude awakening they are deaf to others' criticisms and blind to any view of themselves that violates their mirror's image.

Partly, we find these protagonists so intensely alive and valuable because we respond to the quality of their illusion: we are awed by the visionary power of an ideal of nobility, or goodness, or unhampered freedom of the will that sets them apart from the soldiers, timeservers, citizens, and cautious relatives who surround them. They defy their critics' categories of virtue or vice, nobility or folly; they are not "of" their world, though they mistakenly try to find their happiness and identity within its institutions and available roles. Seeking public recognition, the validation of his private image in political power and social approbation, the heroic individual compromises and threatens those very qualities we prize. A corrupt society is no longer the guardian and judge of value, but to exceed its prescribed bounds shows a "fearful madness" compounded of weakness and strength. Fatal and at the same time salutary, it frees the protagonist from society's restricted perception and limitations on passionate commitment. In a world of shifting evaluations and pragmatic ethics, the protagonist must create the values by which he is to be judged: the heroic vision he cannot fulfill, the potential for a moral knowledge and acceptance of human bonds and responsibilities he refuses to pursue. Such men must be forcibly released from their strong hearts' bondage to this world before they can discover within themselves a source of meaning or finally declare themselves independent of public judgments. Our fascination derives as much from the way in which they fall short of their ideal as from their inability to trnasform their world by either rhetoric or force. Demanding a life worth living, they must find one worth dying for.

The heroic protagonist's failure of his own ideal as well as his society's demands is bound up with his private relationships to a remarkable degree. Indeed, sexual and familial affections dominate the world of Shakespeare's and Chapman's heroic tragedy. Strong women prove disastrous influences: they lure men from their epic mission and threaten soldierly supermacy; they tempt their men to turn politician and "flank policy with policy." Yet in exploding the hero's isolation and helping destroy his initial, material identity they are also the means to whatever nobility beyond Herculean heroics he attains. They demonstrate the hero's confusing complexity: any single perception of him, whether his critics' reduction to comic stature or his own monolithic ideal, proves too narrow for his contradictory vitality. They also show us the hero's real singularity, for he is not simply nostalgia's spokesman for an impossibly outmoded warrior ideal. It is in the quality of his passionate involvement with others that the heroic protagonist stands, finally, opposed to the realist politicians who successfully destroy him.

These men fail—or feel they have failed—their life's challenge. As epic hero, each has tried to act as if a god alone while retaining his personal integrity. They exemplify the absolutist's inflexibility, but also his emotional grandeur in refusing to accept an expedient nobility. Finally, from the very traits they could not subdue to their chosen part's demands, they draw the moral strength to scorn their executioners. Paradoxically, in defeat they find a greater humanity, one capable of expressing, momentarily, an awesome harmony of all their complexly human and discordant elements. Unable to give substance to the epic hero's superhuman image, they also transcend its limiting contours. They die accepting a full and responsible humanity, their great souls worthily expended in conquering that self-division required of both successful heroes and politicians. In the end, there is no world elsewhere, only within. In discovering that world for us, if not for the play's survivors, these protagonists refuse to make the farceur's accommodation, to accept man "as is." Each fails to be his own hero but learns to be human, a much more difficult and unsatisfying identity.

In ironic tragicomedy we are haunted by the social consequences of forfeiting the ideal, of looking no higher than we can reach. In Shakespeare's and Chapman's heroic tragedies we see the individual cost of refusing the pragmatist's common sense, yet also see that the realist's world, expediency's reward, is indeed "common" and insufficient. Webster's witty intriguers stand in no danger of the tragic hero's spiritual obstinacy: resourcefulness and adaptability are their watchwords. Their ambitions are more material; their goals of freedom and power are tied more explicitly to wealth and social position. (Even the Duchess's ideal of love finds expression not in trying to define the inexpressible through hyperbole, but in the solid facts of marriage—in a husband and children.) Webster's plays deal openly with the disturbing effect of wit's disengagement, its pliable and "realistic" outlook; his cynical antiheroes lack the vision of human possibility that sustains and illuminates the perplexing careers of Shakespeare's and Chapman's epic figures.

While the heroic vision may linger in the Jacobean period, social and political beings usually seek a more profitable control through manipulating the "natural," observable human laws of self-interest and survival of the wittiest. Like Octavius, Aufidius, or Monsieur, Flamineo and Bosola renounce any ideal of moral constancy or meaningful action. They adopt a conveniently limited role, one demanding less complex responses than those of which they finally prove themselves capable. In choosing to follow and emulate their Machiavellian double, they eagerly adjust themselves to the material world he prizes and seek their freedom in its rewards. In another context, Robert Heilman [in Magic in the Web: Action and Language in "Othello ", 1956] has said that an "unwillingness to accept the burden of being human means a minimizing of the morally and spiritually possible." Webster's pragmatists seek such a diminished burden. In tragedy's real (because historical) world they attempt to exercise the moral as well as aesthetic prerogatives of farce. Steeling themselves against suffering and disillusionment, they must discover a capacity to suffer before reaching such knowledge as their last moments afford. They spend their plays learning they have a humanity to betray.

In this altered key, Webster continues Shakespeare's and Chapman's experiments in heroic tragedy, their interest in developing tragic significance out of conflicting generic perspectives and demands. Shakespeare's and Chapman's heroes steadily fall in our estimation, as the man behind the mask of greatness is revealed, only to rise again to a new, qualitatively revalued heroism. To prepare us for a tragedy of which the characters themselves believe corrupt humanity incapable, Webster must reveal his protagonists to be more, not less, than their own self-image. We must be led to see Flamineo and Bosola as panderers and murderers and yet also as frustrated moralists desperately suppressing the "knowledge" that would stifle action; Vittoria must seem selfish and willing to sacrifice husband, honor, and brother to her ambition and yet totally unlike the conventional whore of Monticelso's "character." Though their deeds subject them to the politicians' sanctions, they are not understood and cannot, finally, be commanded by the categories of self-confident Machiavels, time-servers, or moralists. They must learn, under pressure, to see the limits of their simplifying ethic; they must recognize the loss that detachment could not successfully trivialize and accept the burden of being fully human. They are at once a moral yardstick for their societies and, in subverting their own moral intelligence, both victims and >examples of its corruption.

Flamineo, then Bosola, learn what both tricksters and Machiavels evade: each discovers that his liberating philosophy has in fact restricted self-expression, its certain "knowledge" left him empty and confused. The immaterial offered no hope in life, and at death the heavens reflect only the narrowness of his own prison. The screen he had interposed between us and the play's staged life dissolves, even as he drops the private barrier interposed between himself and the existential dilemmas of his own life. He loses distance on himself, and we face with him the hard mystery at life's core. With Flamineo especially, we are inside the straitened chambers of the cynic's fallen world; with him, we look briefly but longingly out at the world of human possibility, where we want to be.

Such a brief moment of truth brings no self-transformation, no triumphant harmony of inner contradictions. Moreover, in laying bare the dizzying, self-destructive world created by the Machiavel's practical realism, Webster stretches his generic experimentation and almost destroys the affective seriousness of his plays' ends. Although most completely in The White Devil, in both plays Webster's distinctive energy and power depend on fusing a tragic conception with farce's combination of amoral humor and witty inventiveness, and this fusion abides in the plays' conclusions. In The White Devil's burlesque double "suicide" and in the final grotesque misprisions of The Duchess of Malfi, Webster farcically inverts the cool mastery that detachment and manipulative calculation seemed to ensure. In such bizarre night-pieces, all seem lost, equally distanced by the same comically lethal violence. Some distinctions remain, however. Stylized, even caricatured politicians do not become less powerful, or mere "painted devils," but they do reveal the cost of their obsessive ambition in human terms. Webster's would-be Machiavels escape their executioners' fully restricted humanity by accepting what they have suppressed and by facing, however briefly, the extent of their loss. From self-absorption and its progressive erosion of individuality Webster's protagonists, soon or late, declare themselves free.

The White Devil's dominant movement is toward a more profound rigidity; its protagonists' vibrant and irrepressible intelligence is extinguished. The Duchess of Malfi's concluding events imply a more optimistic flexibility, despite the failure of the Duchess's life fully to transform Bosola or reach out to change the court. Instead of The White Devil's discouragingly circular development, in which the final opposition of views echoes the deadlock of I.ii, the survivors in Malfi are granted a fresh start, one whose promise depends on the way corruption at the wellspring is destroyed. Bosola discovers a freedom Flamineo had lost. Despite his claim to be the stars' plaything, his confusion and uncertainty in the new revenger's role, Bosola gains some control through his willed refusal to accept the Machiavels' system of value and reward. His action transforms "realist" politicians into over-confident fools and places them in the comic predicament which threatened Shakespeare's and Chapman's heroic protagonists. The play's optimism is guarded, its limits suggested by Bosola's disinclination to renounce worldly advancement, by his choice of the violent revenger's role, and by the problematic status of virtue and mercy in the new court. Still, Bosola asserts freedom and moral accountability as well as fatalism; he discovers through the Duchess new values and new meanings for "service." His claims, together with the Arragonian brothers' comic reduction, suggest that the egoists' pragmatic credo is not only dehumanizing but foolishly naïve, a species of comic self-delusion as well as a literally fatal mistake.

Heroic tragedy in Shakespeare and Chapman alters the old solitary-warrior ideal, and Webster extends this turn from simple martial and amatory prowess in his resolutely domestic and unheroic Duchess. If his antiheroic intriguers explore the inner cost of political pragmatism and reasonable goals, the Duchess's final integration of nobility and maternity, willfulness and humility, recalls his mentor's interest in self-transcendence as well as self-defeat. Despite her lowered rank and restricted court sphere, the Duchess, like Antony and Cleopatra, finds her goals unattainable but not unworthy. These protagonists all pass beyond recognition of failure. Under pressure they forge a new image; they momentarily fuse the seemingly incompatible elements whose disparate claims destroyed them. Tragic protagonists generally play the defiant dying hero for their executioners' benefit, but Antony, Cleopatra, and the Duchess of Malfi have a heavenly audience whose expectations they must also fulfill. As catalyst to an understanding beyond the worldly wisdom that makes each person his own god, life's final suffering frees them from the yoke of their own petty shifts, self-concern, and thirst for worldly honor or reputation. Released from their fallible humanity, the ideal of spirit they tarnished in life can be affirmed and finally possessed, in the only sense possible. In both plays that ideal ultimately rests on relationships with another, on a love whose full completeness can be envisioned beyond the physical world's corrosive confines. The dream of perfected mutuality in Antony's Elysium and in the Duchess's "eternal Church" validates the unheroic gropings, vacillating commitment, and temporal failure which the plays fully dramatize. These protagonists may not embody the ideal they pursue, but, like Bussy D'Ambois and even Coriolanus outside Rome, in their language and the shape they try to give their lives they hold that image before us.

The physical extent of such knowledge's transforming power is limited. As the social order collapses and perverts its most fundamental relationships of kinship, love, and mutual human responsibility, hope narrows to the regenerative possibilities of the individual soul. Webster's world, especially, offers little scope for political or spiritual aspiration; his plays lack old-fashioned "heroes" in Shakespeare's or Chapman's sense. Yet in his predecessors' generic cross-references Webster found the basic dialectic through which he could focus his more apolitical concerns and investigate the diminished creatures and straitened world that challenged his own ideal of spirit. Melodramatic, Italianate stories bring Webster's "historical" world closer to tragicomedy's primarily economic and social rather than political issues. Through them he could more fully explore the witty pragmatism which in heroic tragedy feeds on greatness. Webster's own generic mixture initially supports the trickster's primacy and leads us to accept his amused, detached perspective. As surrogate audience he brings himself close to us; as surrogate author he seems to share with us his privileged knowledge and "creative" manipulative power. He offers us in aesthetic terms the protective distance that rules his own interactions with others on the stage. Through such encouraged identification we are brought to suffer with him the new knowledge he so painfully and belatedly acquires. His discovery is limited, its worldly applicability ambiguous, yet it is all that matters. The figures left behind, both Machiavels and cautiously traditional moralists, are limited beings whose fates do not stir us. They are predictable, inflexible, incapable of illumination; indeed, they define that lesser, trivial world which absorbs The Devil's Law-Case.

Webster's would-be Machiavels set out to conquer the corrupt world on its own terms; his Duchess finally rejects the political and social world that denies her the unheroic, domestic felicity she seeks. In their various ways, all respond to the loss of a heroic world of daring exploits, superhuman virtues, and monolithic integrity. In the Jacobean plays I have discussed, the gradual erosion of heroic qualities and expansive vision is not an accident of selection. In the early seventeenth-century drama, tragic protagonists are forced to act in increasingly confusing and corrupt worlds—arenas that distort or inhibit heroic action and trivialize the transcendent aspiration they cannot understand. A diminished sphere of action reveals, or produces, a diminished race of heroes. Webster's protagonists suffer, with Shakespeare's and Chapman's, both personal entanglement and political restrictions, but his concerns become increasingly private, contract toward familial relationships and domestic goals. His tragedies and later turn to tragicomedy reflect the reduced scope of later Jacobean drama as well as the rise of a Fletcherian aesthetic.

Webster is an important, yet still transitional figure in drama's waning concern with the public consequences of those private relations that mold both the protagonist and the society he influences. Unquestionably, the political sweep and importance of the plays' events have in Webster's tragedies declined, as have the stature and ambitions of his characters. Yet in comparison with Middleton's and Ford's later tragedies (with the possible exception of Perkin Warbeck), it is evident that Webster attaches greater significance to the fact that his stories take place at the commonwealth's moral and political source. Corruption there is dangerous because it is generated by society's most influential religious and political figures, and Webster's protagonists treat service to the politically and socially great as their key to advancement. Webster has not wholly overturned tragedy's traditional concerns. In Middleton and Ford this political-social extension, with its sense of urgency and impending catastrophe, is absent or attenuated to a muted and totally pervasive background.

More important, Webster's unheroic protagonists look backward, to a more inclusive and exalted vision; they know what they have lost. In the often contradictory accounts of experience offered in these plays, Webster suggests the individual's freedom to interpret, and so in a sense to create, his world. The chosen role may in the end confer neither expressive freedom nor practical control, yet recognition of failure does not in itself affirm human nobility. In his tragedies, at least, Webster's protagonists acknowledge responsibility for the quality of the life their deeds have shaped. Despite evident limits to the ego's absolute creative freedom, both personal and external, Webster preserves something of the scope, the mystery and wonder by which great drama touches our imagination. The plays do not encourage moral confusion, though their contradictions and tonal shifts cannot be easily assimilated. The standards by which we must evaluate do not depend upon final, summary comments; they are built into the plays themselves. Vitality, the exercise of one's intelligence and feelings, is at the center of all Webster's plays, and Webster binds this quality to heroic tragedy's affirmation of moral commitment, however fatal—to its transcendence of both heroic and antiheroic solipsism. Forcing our participation through the detached intriguer, the dramatic experience itself mediates between the moralists' prim disapproval and instinctive retreat from complexity and challenge, and the political egoists' pragmatically successful yet ultimately disintegrative activity. Webster shows us nothing startling about ourselves, discovers no new answer to the worldly knowledge that confounds our deepest needs. He dramatizes simply the old paradox of strength and human potential bound to weakness, the importance of a few fundamental values—like love, care, and familial affection—on which "Compassionate Nature" can build.