SOURCE: "Winding and Indirect: Nonlinear Development," in A Winter's Snake: Dramatic Forms in the Tragedies of John Webster, The University of Georgia Press, 1989, pp. 1-28.

Below, Luckyj explores how Webster's repetition of large dramatic action sequences in The White Devil and in The Duchess of Malfi "allows [each play's simple linear progression to be de-emphasized and its central experience explored and intensified, " providing at the climactic center of each tragedy, "a clear and sustained dramatic experience [that] incarnates the play's central paradox."]

[Bernard] Beckerman [in his Shakespeare at the Globe, 1599-1609, 1962] points out that the "climax" of a Shakespearean play is usually a sustained sequence of repeated, intensified episodes; in Coriolanus, for example, Coriolanus's struggle with the tribunes occurs not once but twice. In Othello, the triumph of Othello and Desdemona over the obstacle of parental opposition in the first act is replayed in their survival of the...