A Winter's Snake: Dramatic Form in the Tragedies of John Webster by Christina Luckyj (review)

HUMANITIES 129 Logan's argument only tangentially in the footnotes. He simply asserts in his abrupt Conclusion that More constructs his 'radically new solution' by secularizing the self-sufficient, regulated, communal life of the medieval monastery to re-create Plato's 'Arcadian' society. Yet I found this cursory section on book ll, perhaps because its focus is indeed 'the history of ideas' derivative principally from Augustine, more persuasive and potentially influential than the somewhat laboured 'literary' analyses of dialogue in book Ithat not only entrap More arbitrarily within one of his creatures but often require heavily intrusive parenthetical glosses to make quotations support assertions. Starnes's case for the role of Plato in book I is provocative , but its provocations would gain in resonance and suasive consistency from a direct engagement with Logan's provocations and a thorough consideration of book ll. (MICHAEL F. DIXON) Christina Luckyj. A Winter's Snake: Dramatic Form in the Tragedies ofJohn Webster University of Georgia Press 1989. xxvi, 181. US $27.50 'Crabbed Websterio,' as one of his contemporaries called him, seems not to have been a rapid writer: 'Lord! who would know him? / Was ever man so mangled with a poem? / See how he draws his mouth awry of late, / How he scrubs, wrings his wrists,scratches his pate. / A midwife, help!' Webster himself confessed, in the preface to The White Devil, that he did not 'write with a goose-quill, winged with two feathers' - though at the same time he anticipated that this play would be valued in ages which had long since forgotten the verses of his detractors. With respect to his major tragedies, The White Devil and The DuchessofMa1fi, this boast has been amply fulfilled: they are not merely read and studied, but also performed - more often and more happily, I would guess, than any other play by a contemporary of Shakespeare. (Appius and Virginia, a later tragedy, and The Devil's Law Case, a tragicomedy, have fared less well.) There is, then, good reason to expect rewards from a study of the formal properties ofWebster's two masterworks. In her choice ofan epigraph from The White Devil, Christina Luckyj shows her awareness that Webster's dark and laboured genius moved, not crabwise (as his contemporary's epithet might perhaps suggest), but in a manner resembling the plottings of his own F1arnineo: 'to aspire some mountain's top, / The way ascends not straight, but imitates / The subtle foldings of a winter's snake' (I.ii.35D-2). Luckyj writes, as well, with an eye to the dramatic impact of the playwright 's repetitions and indirections, his interweavings ofverbal and stage images, of parallel and contrasting characters, episodes, and scenes. In this regard she has taken care to draw not merely upon her own experience of productions of these plays, but also upon the evidence provided by a joint 130 LEITERS IN CANADA 1990 study of the prompt books of eight different productions staged between 1892 and 1984, as well as upon reviewers' evaluations of the directional decisions preserved in these prompt books. This combination of formalist analysis with reflections upon an interesting range of different productions of Webster's two great tragedies results in some fine insights. For example, in discussing the tempestuous encounter of Brachiano, Flamineo, and Vittoria in the house of convertites in act IV of The White Devil, Luckyj comments perceptively on the multiple resonances of this scene, which manages at once to echo Vittoria's trial scene, Brachiano's rejection of Isabella, the jealousy of the cuckolded Camillo, and the lovers' first meeting. Her remarks on the staging of act I, scene ii of The Duchess ofMalfi, in which she suggests the minor character Silvio should figure prominently, are likewise intriguing. Nonetheless, this book as a whole is disappointing. It should not be impossible for a study of this kind to establish connections between the formal structures which are its primary object and the historical contexts, both past and present, which contributed to the original shaping of those structures and now shapeour current receptions of them. However, Luckyj makes no gestures in this direction. Indeed, three of the studies which in my opinion have most usefully...