Melancholy, religious despair, and social disintegration in the plays of John Webster

This dissertation recovers the sociocultural milieu of John Webster's Jacobean dramas, The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Devil's Law-Case. My aim is to anchor Webster's dramaturgy and perspective within their specific social, economic, religious, and literary contexts. My attempt to read Webster's plays in relationship to his specific Jacobean social formations is a strong reaction against New Critical approaches which have viewed Webster's plays as verbal icons. My historical analysis probes the realities of economic prosperity and alienation, tensions among social classes, court life, the workings of a corrupt Jacobean legal system, and the effects of the plague.;My critical results reveal that Webster probes and utilizes the rich traditions of melancholia, creating through them a culturally encoded language of melancholy which infuses every aspect of his dramas. From this perspective, Webster's language of melancholy functions as an expressive idiom giving meaning to specific Jacobean historical contexts, whereby social familial, economic, religious, judicial, and political formations are subverted, held up to criticism, ridiculed, and parodied.