Zusammenfassung der Ressource
White Devil Critics
- Vittoria
- ‘As befits so multifaceted a character as [Vittoria], the responses evoked by this train of metaphors are
tentative and complex, blending as they do a sense of her negative qualities (artifice, hardness, and surface
glitter) with a feeling for the admirable features of her personality (glowing passion, radiant physical splendour,
and gem-like inner strength)’ – John F Mc Elroy.
- ‘Vittoria’s character has been constructed by the assumptions and interpretations of the characters who
surround her’ – Dr June Waudby
- ‘Vittoria’s character epitomises contrariety and paradox throughout the play’ – Dr June Waudby
- ‘[Vittoria] appropriates the masculine privilege of public voice’ – Dr June Waudby
- ‘one of the noticeable features of Webster’s heroines is that they
never address the audience directly’ - Kate Aughterson
- ‘The lack of soliloquies is not a hindrance to characterization, but illustrates how Webster constructs
character through dramatic action’ – Kate Aughterson
- Vittoria as a ‘dialectical counterforce to all those black and despairing elements in the play which
achieve their focus in Flamineo.’ Layman
- Her speeches ‘illustrate a strength and nobility of character which is actually enhanced by her own
knowledge of her past wrong doing’ - Kate Aughterson
- ‘[Vittoria] constructs herself indirectly as a martyr’ - Kate Aughterson
- Flamineo
- ‘None of the other characters present the illusion of psychological depth to the
extent that Flamineo does’ Andrew Strycharski
- ‘a fantasy of control’ Andrew Strycharski
- ‘In violently protecting his sister’s social standing, Flamineo
simultaneously seeks to protect his own.’ Andrew Strycharski
- ‘halting between his inherited and his individual values’ John Russell Brown
- ‘Mephistophelean entrepreneur’ Layman
- Form/Structure
- On Webster’s plays ‘They are not constructed plays, but loose-strung,
go-as-you-please romances in dialogue.’ J M Symmonds
- ‘The escape of Francisco, the play’s most cold-blooded egoist, is a thumb
in the eye of peoptic justice Andrew Strycharski
- ‘Webster wrote a mongrel drama ... although he borrowed from
others, few borrowed so widely as he’ John Russell Brown
- ‘The situation remains almost the same at the end of it as it was at the beginning’ John Russell Brown
- Gender/Misogyny
- ‘The commodification of women is institutionalised’ – Dr June Waudby
- Morality
- ‘Aside from the broad assumption that life is hell, there is nothing resembling a coherent moral
attitude in the play ...Anything can mean as much or as little in The White Devil as anything else.’
Arthur C Kirsch
- All ‘humane intuition’ is ‘distorted by a malignant social ethos’ Andrew Strycharski
- ‘The text criticises the Jacobean era yet cannot be considered to be separate from it’ Liam
McNamara
- ‘Webster heightens the desolateness of his world by making his few decent persons…completely ineffectual in their
struggle against evil. Their virtues…hold no rewards, worldly or otherwise’ Layman
- Religion
- The ritual inversions of the play ‘dramatically, though metaphorically, the inverted,
evil-oriented nature of the society of the play’ James Hurt
- Power
- Attempts to ‘exorcise’ Machiavellian thought
through its various ‘travesties’, but ‘his desperate
perceptions lingered in the air, together with an
oppressive and occasionally hallucinatory sense of
their validity’ Layman
- Appearance/Reality
- ‘Webster uses duplication ... to emphasise and restate the theme of duality’ Susan H Mc Leod
- ‘Rhetorical devices [such as subjunctio] dissemblance and false-seeming in
the action’ – Susan H Mc Leod
- The trial is designed to ‘erase the difference between “truth” and “opinion”’ Layman