The conclusion of The White Devil is ambiguous, fulfilling the catastrophic ending required of tragedy but without the suggestion of the nobility and greatness of man. Flamineo dies in despair of his worldly goods, wealth and advancement rather than in despair of his worthiness before God. There is the possibility of Flamineo accepting moral responsibility directly before his death as he reflects, 'While we looke up to heaven wee confound / Knowledge with knowledge' (V.vi.259-60), and yet immediately before this he said , 'I doe not looke / Who went before, nor who shall follow mee; / Noe, at my self I will begin and end' (V.vi.256-58). Although the play ends with the death of the tragic hero, as tradition dictates, this is not the satisfactory ending of classical tragedies. There is no remorse, no retraction of arrogance and greed in the face of the divine. As A.L. Kistner (1993) wondered, 'Where does it lie – in the triumph of will, in grabbing for every expression of self that this world has to offer or in the calm discipline of self-denial for a higher picture of man?' (267). Webster leaves the audience with an unsatisfactory portrait of free choice and the capacity for moral responsibility.
The emergence in the 1580s of an Elizabethan tragic tradition which manipulated the limitations of classical generic boundaries points toward the developing self-consciousness of a modern culture. As evidenced in such works as Tamburlaine and The White Devil, the theatre was the site of an evolving culture in conflict with the older, traditional forms of expression. Marlowe, Webster and Heywood used the stage 'for the assertion and defense of an ego which … was constantly threatened by powerful forces of desire and conscience, forces which [they] coped with as best as [they] could by making them conscious, by finding a form for them which would command social understanding and the control of shared social attitudes' (Barber 37). The new tragic genre was a way of registering an experience of change and dislocation, a shift from the Classical tradition of moral order and stability.
Works Cited
Aristotle, (1953) Aristotle on the Art of Fiction: an English translation of Aristotle's Poetics. Trans. by L. J. Potts. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.
Barber, C. L. (1988) Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: the theatre of Marlowe and Kyd. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Bowers, F. T. (1940) Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy 1587-1642. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Brown, J. R. (1962) 'Theater research and the Criticism of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries' Shakespeare Quarterly, 13
Falco, R. (2000) Charismatic Authority in Early Modern English Tragedy. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Goldberg, D. (1987) Between Worlds: A study of the plays of John Webster, Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Greenblatt, S. (1985) 'Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V ' in J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield, (eds.), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism , pp. 18-47. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
