The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama

Abstract

but it does produce emphases that are on occasion overstated or pressed too narrowly, as in the claims for "relevance."In the Italy of The White Devil English audiences no doubt saw much that struck home; but such appositeness does not necessarily become itself the subject of the play.To find that The White Devil is concerned with "the overriding theme of a corrupt society" confuses context with matter.The effect of the play's relevance is to make credible its moral relativity by reminding spectators of the nearby corroborative evidence.Moreover, the notorious ambivalence of Webster's tragedy gains force by the play's formal relation to a tradition that from its inception deals uneasily with the abso- lutes of virtue, duty, and death.Lever properly opposes the concept of a Jacobean drama "where tragedy sat for ever re-enacting man's primeval fall"; yet for all its originality Jacobean drama does not lose the resonance created by an Elizabethan awareness of model and archetype, even though that awareness came increasingly to bear ironically.

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