CHALLENGING TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE LAWS IN THE DUCHESS OF MALFI: LOVE OR LONGINGS OR DEFYING PATRIARCHY?

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster speculates into the tradition of Elizabethan marriage, laws regarding marriage, its violation and the consequences it brings. The drama continues to reverberate among today’s audiences because of the majestic appeal of the Duchess and her enterprising tryst at rebuffing the ‘authority of social conventions and norms’. The Duchess has been credited for her attempt and bravery to choose and win over a spouse for love. Wedding, one of the most important moment of a woman’s life, was seen from a completely different perspective, temperament and in a ‘non-secular’ impression. The woman during the Elizabethan age had absolutely no choice in selecting her prospective groom. Women were seen subservient to men. Elizabethan woman were raised to believe that they were inferior to men and that they must abide by ‘the other’s verdicts’. Disobedience was a crime against religion and the consequences were monstrous. Webster uses majestic traits to exemplify the Duchess’ feminine strength of virtuosity and greatness which instil in the modern audience’s empathy and respect for the Duchess. This paper tries to revisit The Duchess of Malfi, decoding these socio-cultural and religious perspective and the ways of the aristocracy used by Webster, contributing to the eventual downfall of the Duchess. This paper also delves deep into documenting Webster’s attempt to portrays her as a tragic heroine and victim of law. KEYWORDS: The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster, Elizabethan marriage laws, Violation of laws, Tragedy

“Navigating the Beautiful Tension”

The book’s conclusion draws together the seven ethnographic studies by arguing that evangelical worship is better understood as a theological culture than as a static structure. In contrast to the scholarship Kathryn Tanner and Molly Worthen, which understands the culture of Christianity and/or evangelicalism as an essentially contested concept, this chapter ultimately affirms the perspective of theologians John Webster and Kevin Vanhoozer, who understand evangelicalism eschatologically, as a unified diversity. When congregations gather in the presence of the living God, they are dislocated and re-established, changed into something they were not before the event began. Consequentially, corporate worship is not a peripheral “extra” tacked on to a fully formed spiritual/political/cultural movement, but rather the crucible in which congregations forge, debate over, and enact their unique contributions to the American mosaic known as evangelicalism.

John W Kirklin: The Greatest Scientific Cardiac Surgeon of the Century

John Webster Kirklin was an American cardiothoracic surgeon, prolific author and medical educator who is best remembered for refining John Gibbon’s heart-lung bypass machine via a pump-oxygenator to make feasible under direct vision routine open-heart surgery. His other advances, on which success of heart surgeries depends, including teamwork, developments in establishing the correct diagnosis before surgery and progress in computerized intensive care unit monitoring after open heart surgery. Wayne Miller refers to Dr Kirklin in the 1970s as “arguably the best practicing open heart surgeon anywhere. He was one of cardiac surgery’s most accomplished researchers, a scientist whose mind was sometimes compared, flatteringly, to a computer.” John W Kirklin and Brian G Barratt-Boyes drafted the book ‘Cardiac Surgery’, which is considered as the Bible of the subject. Cardiovasc j 2021; 14(1): 93-96

Divine Action is Constitutive of Theology: William Abraham, John Webster, and Theological Theology

This article puts forward the view that divine action is constitutive of Christian theology. More precisely, it claims that what makes a theologian’s work theological is her commitment to a narrative composed by God’s actions to create, redeem, sustain and perfect creatures. It begins with a systematic summary of William Abraham’s four-volume Divine Agency and Divine Action. Two objections are then put to it, one regarding the breadth of the concept ‘action’ and another regarding its ability to facilitate a complete theological method. It then argues that these objections can be overcome when partnered with John Webster’s ‘theological theology’ approach, as it supplies the crucial concept of an ‘economy’ of divine action. A final section presents a ‘Websterian/Abrahamic’ approach, with the result that divine action is no longer relegated to discussions of special divine providence but is the defining feature of all theological work.

David Gunby, David Carnegie, and MacDonald P. Jackson, eds. The Works of John Webster, Vol. IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp 642.

José A. Pérez Díez's review of The Works of John Webster, Vol. IV, edited by David Gunby, David Carnegie, and MacDonald P. Jackson.

MYTHOPOEIC PARADIGM IN ENGLISH BAROQUE DRAMA (JOHN WEBSTER “THE WHITE DEVIL”)

The article deals with the mythopoeic analysis of the play of revenge “The White Devil” by John Webster. The historical background of the play is also under examination. The tragedy “White Devil” (1612) is known in the translations by I. Aksenov, T. Potnitseva. The genre of tragedy in the XVII th century reflects the writers’ appeal to the biblical text and its transformation in motives, images, stylistic and generic systems, this tradition is particular important for the baroque writers, the constant feature of the English dramaturgy of the XVIIth century is appeal to the antique mythology and the national cultural heritage.