White Devil Research Articles

The Playhouse Effect: John Webster, Deixis and Story-Telling in the Theatres of Jacobean London

The recent (2014) inauguration of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, a reconstruction of an archetypal Jacobean indoor playhouse, on London’s Southbank, has led students and scholars of early modern theatre once again to focus attention on original playhouse performances, just as they did when its older sibling Shakespeare’s Globe opened its doors in 1996. The earlier assumption that the differences between open-air amphitheatres and indoor playhouses conditioned the way plays were written and acted is now enjoying a new lease on life, and yet there has been little research conducted in order to substantiate this otherwise perfectly logical intuition. Drawing on the insights of drama theorist Manfred Pfister as well as the linguistic concept of deixis, this article compares the language and plotting of three plays by the Jacobean playwright John Webster: The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi and The Devil’s Law Case. Each play was first staged under significantly different circumstances within the theatrical landscape of Jacobean London, which makes them a singularly illustrative case study of how an early modern English dramatist adapted his style in order to meet the demands of the city’s diverse performance conditions.

Debunking the "White Devils" and Black Supremacy Myths in the Teaching and Spreading of Islam in America in the 1950s and 1960s

Debunking the "White Devils" and Black Supremacy Myths in the Teaching and Spreading of Islam in America in the 1950s and 1960s

The Trials of Katherine of Aragon and Vittoria Corombona: 2.4 and 3.1 of Shakespeare’s “Henry VIII” and 3.2 of Webster’s “The White Devil”

The Trials of Katherine of Aragon and Vittoria Corombona: 2.4 and 3.1 of Shakespeare’s “Henry VIII” and 3.2 of Webster’s “The White Devil”

MYTHOPOEIC PARADIGM IN ENGLISH BAROQUE DRAMA (JOHN WEBSTER “THE WHITE DEVIL”)

The article deals with the mythopoeic analysis of the play of revenge “The White Devil” by John Webster. The historical background of the play is also under examination. The tragedy “White Devil” (1612) is known in the translations by I. Aksenov, T. Potnitseva. The genre of tragedy in the XVII th century reflects the writers’ appeal to the biblical text and its transformation in motives, images, stylistic and generic systems, this tradition is particular important for the baroque writers, the constant feature of the English dramaturgy of the XVIIth century is appeal to the antique mythology and the national cultural heritage.

〈기생충〉(2019)의 영화색채, 검은 천사 하얀 악마

〈기생충〉은 다양한 학술 분야에서 상호텍스트적 독해를 폭넓게 촉발한다. 문학, 음악, 미술 같은 전통예술부터 정치, 경제, 건축, 보건 등에 이르기까지 각 전공 영역의 관점에서 분석되고 해석된다. 극장 개봉 이후 발간된 관련 문헌들의 키워드를 살펴보면, 사회적 울분, 계급모순, 상징폭력, 집의 공간성과 모티프, 국가적 알레고리, 냄새와 혐오, 아비투스, 욕망과 환상 등이 〈기생충〉설명한다. 학술담론들로는 서사학, 기호학, 프레드릭 제임슨의 정치적 무의식, 부르디외의 구별짓기, 가스통 바슐라르의 집의 가치, 정신분석학의 타자성, 문화자본론의 취향 등이 방법론으로 활용된다. 이 개념들과 담론들은 〈기생충〉 현상에 관한 텍스트 상호 간의 유기적인 해석을 도출한다. 영향 내지 모방을 의미하는 상호텍스트성은 중립적이지 않고, 사회정치적인 특별한 순간을 강조한다. 무엇보다, 관계성, 상호연결성, 상호의존성이라는 개념을 포괄하는 상호텍스트성은 대중문화의 분석에 유용하다. 이 글은 포스트모더니즘의 특성으로 설명되는 상호텍스트성의 이해로부터 비언어적 예술형식으로 〈기생충〉의 색채 의미를 찾아보고자 하였다. 외연상 사회구조의 계급화를 풍자하는 시각장치로 하양과 검정의 상징 대비가 낮과 밤, 빛과 그림자, 따뜻함과 차가움, 물과 공기, 향기와 냄새, 진실과 거짓, 수평과 수직, 지상과 지하, 계획과 무계획, 집과 빈 집, 오르막과 내리막, 터널과 계단, 창과 벽 등 일체의 공감각적 장치에 적용된다. 사회계급화의 대립 관계를 표상하려는 애초의 기획은 무계획을 강조했던 기택(송강호)의 자가 감금으로 어긋난다. 대립 관계는 기택네가 박사장네와 조우할 때까지만 유효했고, 문광 부부와 생존을 다투면서 신의 빛과 악마의 그림자라는 색채 전통은 검은 천사와 하얀 악마라는 역설의 도식으로 재구성된다. 고정되고 절대적인 흑백 관념이 깨지고, 상대적인 관점만 남는다. 빛과 어둠, 선과 악, 희망과 절망, 시작과 끝 같은 흑백의 색채 신화가 고착화된 사회구조를 향한 묵시록적 두려움과 공포로 나타난다. 세상의 종말 속 인간 육체의 하양은 주검이며, 검정은 영혼의 공포이다. 후반부 초록 정원에서의 묵시록적 축제에서 기정(박소담)의 하얀 육체, 근세의 검은 광기, 피의 선명한 빨강이 일체의 흔적을 지우고, 불확실한 한국사회를 성찰하도록 이끈다.

The Ambiguities of Bacurau

Bacurau is the name of a city in Brazilian hinterland whose inhabitants fight to survive a foreign invasion. The struggle of native populations for the right to remain on their land is a common motif not only in the history of cinema, as in classic Westerns, but also in Brazilian culture and history, In this article, Ikeda proposes that Bacurau’s originality lies in how it seeks to establish a balance between genre film and political cinema, eschewing the commodified exotic spectacle of Sérgio Rezende’s The Battle of Canudos (1997) and Glauber Rocha’s radical political allegory in Black God, White Devil (1964), in order to offer a more complex commentary on the current Brazilian historical moment.

The Political Economy of Hate Industry: Islamophobia in the Western Public Sphere

Minority communities across the globe are increasingly being targeted for vilification and demonization which consequently result in their marginalization and persecution, among other forms of physical, psychological, structural and cultural violence. These may be on account of race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disabilities or other demographic indicators—a phenomenon which summatively came to be known as hate speech/crime. When such violence ballooned beyond bearable level against the black community in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, it triggered counteroffensive under the veneer of “white devil,” insighting the production of “How Hate Begets Hate” and Bigger Thomases of that world. In recent times, nowhere is such hate more pronounced than the one directed at the Muslim communities living in various countries of the West. Their framing as irrational, incompatible and security threat to the West has resulted in a number of stringent legislation/policies targeting them, beside organized violence by individuals and a propaganda industry feeding on this. This rising Islamophobia, as the study found, is a byproduct of historical experiences, fuelled contemporarily by the economic and political interests of individuals and organizations. Using qualitative content analysis and political economy as methodological and theoretical frameworks respectively, this study identifies the key players in heightening anti-Muslim sentiment in the West, as well as their motivations and strategy of public deception. It also explores the phases and causes of tension in West–Muslim relations, the role of media and the solution to this, among other things.

‘The Burial of the Dead’: T.S. Eliot’s Use of Poetic License

<p class="Default">Poetry is a deviation from the ordinary form of language. Deviant expressions in poetry are referred to as expressions that are ‘foregrounded’ or ‘deautomatized’. As a genre, poetry differs from prose. It is a medium of exposition used by the poet to convey his/her ideas in an abstract form in terms of lines and stanzas composed in rhythmic and tonic patterns that help emphasize the meanings with symbolism and imagery. The <em>Cambridge Dictionary of English </em>defines a poem as “a piece of writing in which the words are arranged in separate lines often ending in rhyme, and are chosen for their sound and for the images and ideas they suggest”. While poetry takes such a stylized form, the composers of poetry enjoy, under poetic license, a freedom to effect “changes to the facts they present or the general rules of good writing to make the work more interesting or effective” (<em>Cambridge Dictionary of English</em>). Poetic license is also used as a strategy to enhance creativity in the composition and to establish a foregrounding effect on certain elements in the message. <p class="Default"> <p class="Default">“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, <p class="Default"> <p class="Default">“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! (Lines 74-85) <p class="Default"> The archaisms in the above lines in Eliot’s poem definitely make the reader feel that the register belongs to a different era. They have been in fact borrowed from John Webster’s <em>The White Devil </em>to create a collaged effect on the poem. The purpose of borrowing is twofold: to introduce a different register, de-automatizing the reader’s ordinary flow of reading; and to transport the meaning from one text to another. The present study attempts to critically analyse the use of poetic license for the purpose of foregrounding the chosen concepts in T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Burial of the Dead’ with a focus on the impact it has on the poem in its entirety. The study adopts a library research method for its analysis and argumentation and the data is collected from a number of secondary sources, inclusive of original poems, critical studies, and other literary works.

The trial in John Webster’s The White Devil: Italy in the reenactment of a Renaissance English drama

English playwrights were fascinated by Italy both in a positive and a negative way: they were drawn to Italy as a symbol of culture and refinement, but also as a nest of corruption and bloody conspiracies. Italy had the function of offering a foreign background in which dramatists could safely address their hostility against the English court. This article highlights this fascination with the darker side of Italy in the revision of the trial of Vittoria Accoramboni in John Webster’s The White Devil (1612). The story of Vittoria Accoramboni was so famous that many writers appropriated it and re-wrote it centuries after the fact: Stendhal, among others, reproduced the records of the time to offer a historical narration of the events in his Chroniques Italiennes – Vittoria Accoramboni, une oeuvre du domain public (1855). In his turn Webster seized the story, changing some elements such as the setting (he replaced Gubbio with Venice, probably because this town was better known to the audience), fictionalizing the love relationship between Victoria and Duke Brachiano, emphasizing the pandering influence of her brother Flamineo and especially adding his own view of the trial and how it was conducted.

Sovereignty by Mary Kathryn Nagle, and: Jefferson’s Garden by Timberlake Wertenbaker

Reviewed by: Sovereignty by Mary Kathryn Nagle, and: Jefferson’s Garden by Timberlake Wertenbaker Shirley A. Huston-Findley SOVEREIGNTY. By Mary Kathryn Nagle. Directed by Molly Smith. Arena Stage, Washington, D.C. January 17, 2018. JEFFERSON’S GARDEN. By Timberlake Wertenbaker. Directed by Nataki Garrett. Ford’s Theatre, Washington, D.C. January 20, 2018. Despite the city’s rather significant number of female led/women-centric theatres, issues of gender parity remain throughout the thriving theatre community in and around our nation’s capital. To combat the inequality, the Women’s Voices Theater Festival, now in its second iteration, offered twenty-four plays throughout the D.C. area during the first few months of 2018. I was fortunate to witness thirteen of those productions, all of which demonstrated a thriving and provocative world of theatre by—and often about—women, including the world-premiere of Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty and the American-premiere of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Jefferson’s Garden. Both productions offered up historical and cultural lessons regarding freedom in America, a topic as relevant today as it has been in our nation’s past. Sovereignty, part of Arena Stage’s Power Plays commissioning cycle, revolves in part around the importance and breakage of treaties between Native Americans and the US Government. As we are transported between President Andrew Jackson’s 1830s and our not too distant 2020, we are reminded that these hollow promises for freedom were never meant to be kept. In Nagle’s play, the lack of sovereignty consists of an inability to enforce laws on native lands, specifically the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). VAWA serves as the center of Sarah Polson’s (Kyla Garcia) legal agenda. Polson is a direct descendent, like the playwright, of Major Ridge (Andrew Roa) and his son, the Cherokee Nation leader John Ridge (Kalani Queypo), who were both instrumental in winning the 1832 Supreme Court case Worcester v. Georgia regarding tribal sovereignty. As our history lessons remind us, despite Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall’s ruling, Jackson failed to enforce the decision. Polson—a lawyer also like the playwright—convinces John Ross (Jake Waid) to assist her in arguing for VAWA at the Supreme Court level, hoping to increase the nation’s jurisdiction over non-natives on Native land, thereby reducing the level of violence against Native women, which has continued to increase since that jurisdiction was removed in 1978. Significant here is the heritage that both Polson and Ross bring with them in their mutual cause. Polson’s ancestor, Major Ridge, leader of the Ridge Party, signed the 1835 Treaty of Echota that removed the Cherokee from their land in the southeast (Georgia), sending them to what we now know as Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. In opposition, Ross’s family lineage can be traced back to the Chief of the Cherokee National Party, John Ross, who, along with the National Council, rebuffed the treaty. While this historically accurate sort of “Hatfield versus McCoy” plays out from the past, Ross introduces Polson to the fictional Ben (Joseph Carlson), a non-Native with whom she falls in love, marries, has a child, and experiences physical/sexual abuse, sending her back to her nation and tribal family. Ultimately, VAWA is passed, but the damage done to her nation and self can never truly be repaired. The sovereignty of her body—women’s bodies—is placed on the same level of importance as the sovereignty of the nation, a parallel the playwright draws quite beautifully throughout the work. Nagle weaves the threads between past and present most skillfully through the use of multi-role casting, reinforcing the continued lack of real sovereignty given to Native nations. Perhaps most notable was Joseph Carlson as both Jackson and Ben—each the “white devil” in their own time periods. Carlson truly shone as President Jackson, carrying a swagger and demeanor that efficiently characterized [End Page 91] him as someone not to be trusted, but within whom all of the power resided. Therefore when Carlson emerged onstage as Ben, a clear connection was made between past white male privilege and its present versions. In an interesting twist, Nagle managed to create in...

The White Devil dir. by Louisa Proske

The White Devil dir. by Louisa Proske

“Her ladyship’s foolish”: The servant’s disobedience in John Webster’s The White Devil

John Webster’s The White Devil (1612) has attracted considerable critical attention, focusing on, among others, its intervention in the early modern debate on “the nature of women” and depiction of...

Allegories of Creation: Glassmaking, Forests, and Fertility in Webster’sThe Duchess of Malfi

Allegories of Creation: Glassmaking, Forests, and Fertility in Webster’s<i>The Duchess of Malfi</i>

The Image of Egypt in a Selection of Elizabethan &amp; Jacobean Plays

&lt;p&gt;This study communicates the question of representational Egypt(ians) through textual analysis and close reading of Elizabethan and Jacobean selected plays, whose main concern is Egypt and Egyptians: Shakespeare’s Antony &amp;amp; Cleopatra, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, (All Is True)Henry VIII, and Cymbeline, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Jonson’s The Alchemist, Beaumont and Fletcher’s The False One, Daniel’s The Tragedie of Cleopatra, Chapman’s The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, and Webster’s The White Devil. It examines the process of labelling, the concomitant negative stereotyping of land and human, and its effect upon characters’ lives and future prospects as a result of the dramatists’ response to contemporary colonialist discourse that exaggerated the signs of cultural and epistemological difference.&lt;/p&gt;

Straight Gods, White Devils: Exploring Paths to Non-Religion in the Lives of Black LGBTQ People

To examine paths to non-religion in the lives of black LGBTQ people, I analyze 10 interviews of black LGBTQ people who were raised Christian. Utilizing an intersectional lens, I conclude that lessons of the Christian home, reinforced in religious school and at church, drew a connection between Christianity, one’s racial and ethnic identity, and heterosexuality in such a way that being LGBTQ was marked un-Christian and foreign, and sometimes associated with whiteness. This further shaped how my participants navigated the urban public sphere, one of the only spheres where they could ‘be LGBTQ’ – some neighborhoods were constructed as Christian, connected to one’s childhood and hostile to LGBTQ people, while others were LGBTQ-friendly, albeit largely white and gentrified. The overall impact of Christianity across multiple spheres influenced which non-religious paths my participants took. One remained with a Christian denomination of her childhood and one remained with a Christian denomination of her mother but not her father. The other eight left Christianity behind, with one choosing a different religion and seven becoming non-religious, holding identities from Unitarian Universalist to atheist. Overall, black LGBTQ people struggle to find acceptance of their LGBTQ identities by people closest to them and acceptance of their racial, ethnic and non-religious identities in largely white and often non-religious LGBTQ spaces. In response, they use different strategies to find community and live coherent lives, whenever possible.

‘Grammatical laments, feminine arguments’

In The White Devil Vittoria articulates her interiority, significantly in her dying confession, in which she verbalizes an inner state of moral blamelessness for the adultery she has committed and the murders she may have instigated. John Webster crafts a vague confession – a non-confession – that is unusual in relation to other contemporary plays and pamphlets based on actual murders; the full confession and repentance of the malefactor are conventional. Vittoria’s non-confessional confession has the effect of denying Jacobean audiences any anticipated revelation and resolution in favour of a new ‘realism’ that perhaps proved too novel for Webster’s dissatisfied audience.

Hunger and Rotten Flesh: Cinema Novo, Pasolini, Eisenstein

This video essay links The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Old and New with Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil (1964). Like Pasolini’s work, this film was concerned with Christianity and revolution in the Third World, and it was strongly inspired by the fusion of sexual impulse and food production in Eisenstein’s film, particularly in the sequence of the milling of manioc.

Seeing Speech as Spectacle inThe White Devil

AbstractThis article argues that, in the early seventeenth century, rhetorical devices and stage devices overlap. There has been much critical interest in the materiality of theatres like the Blackfriars, the Globe, and the Red Bull. Recent work in early modern theatre studies has made some broad gestures to the way in which poetic and verbal effects are linked with the practical theatrical work of the playhouse. Rhetoric and rhetorical styles have also been subject to renewed scholarly interest, with some suggesting the imminence of an “aesthetic turn” or “New Formalism.” Yet these two critical approaches often remain distinct. Attention to the interaction between speech and spectacle can unite ostensibly different angles of literary analysis and deliver further attention to the visual, philosophical, and intellectual complexity of seventeenth‐century playhouse spectacle.I begin by exploring some important terms in early modern English that point to rhetoric's participation in the material world and that suggest these two approaches, when considered from an historical perspective, are complementary. I then attend to the dumb shows and to light and darkness in JohnWebster'sThe White Devil(1612) to argue for a critical approach to early modern theatre studies that combines historically minded close reading with recent revisionist considerations of spectacle and that sees rhetorical style as part of the visual and material world of the playhouse.

A Study on Vittoria in The White Devil: Female Protagonist as a Victim of the Social Structure

A Study on Vittoria in The White Devil: Female Protagonist as a Victim of the Social Structure

Blushing on Cue: The Forensics of the Blush in Early Modern Drama

In Moth’s ‘dangerous rhyme’ Shakespeare pinpoints the troubling ambivalence of the female face. It is a theme to which he frequently returns, for example when Claudio says of Hero: ‘Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty’ (Much Ado About Nothing, 4.1.40). Shakespeare’s works appear to confirm the idea that there is ‘no art to find the mind’s construction in the face’ (Macbeth, 1.4.11). Yet in the early modern period criminal defendants were routinely denied legal counsel, due to a persistent belief in the legibility of the face: ‘if the partie himselfe defend it, peradventure his conscience will prick him to utter the truth, or his countenance or gesture will show some tokens thereof’ (Pulton, De Pace Regis et Regni, 1609). The blush sits at the fulcrum of these opposing views; at once thought to be involuntary and natural, while also being the stock-in-trade of the early modern actor. This paper explores the Janus-faced blush from both a dramatic and forensic perspective, by examining the appearance of the blush in trial settings. Focusing on Shakespeare’s Othello, Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and Webster’s The White Devil, I investigate the ways in which early modern dramatists perpetuate, manipulate and undermine the link between the appearance of a blush and the performance of guilt.