Critics Flashcards
Luckyj
WD is a ‘critique of James’ pro-Spanish policies’ with a court court ‘reminiscent of Catholicism’
Leech
‘Webster would not have us forget she [Vittoria] is the devil of his play’s title’
Hobbes
Argued that men only stay peaceful bc it best serves them and that it’s our instinct to want war and to compete to assert our dominance
human life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’
Niccolò Machiavelli
Argued that power is only attainable through immorality and that the end always justifies the means in his 15th C political treatise ‘The Prince’, written for the Medici family, who ruled Florence
Ricks
Webster’s characters are ‘not all black or white but grey’
Blackmore
Webster’s mind is filled with ‘dark terror’
Jack
There is a ‘disturbing moral ambiguity’ in Webster’s characters
Cecil
Flamineo is the ‘typical, Machiavellian adventurer’
Milton
wanted ‘each man to be his own church’
Tillyard
women were ‘innately inferior’
Bromley
‘both refuse to submit to their doom’ (Vittoria and The Duchess of Malfi)
Luckyj
The dumb shows force the audience to ‘engage more fully’ in the voyeurism
Spencer
Vittoria is a ‘victim of male barbarity’
Donne in his poem ‘An Anatomy of the World’, 1611
Elizabethan optimism giving way to Jacobean pessimism
Public taste thus becoming darker and more accepting of taboo topics (such as pandering one’s own sister)
‘new philosophy [of Jacobean times] calls all in doubt’
Cecil
‘His vision is a moral one. Each play presents us with a picture of sin and its consequences’
