To browse Academia. Carroll, Paris, Humensis Flammarion. It enables us to envisage an object in terms of both its material and poetic existence on the stage and on the page. The tragic manipulation of the comic topos of love thanks to the arras leads us to consider it less as a dramaturgical instrument than as a mode of writing.
Webster relies on the arras and its avatars to create a paroxysmal dramaturgy of cruelty successfully fusing the conventional and the realistic to switch the focus from revenge to injustice. Critics have long noted the Renaissance trope that all the world is a stage, but the concept is not always as simple as it sounds, and John Webster plays with the tensions between private and public performances in The Duchess of Malfi.
The Jacobean tragedy presents characters who seemingly uphold the notion that people are always engaged in a performance: almost every character is seen playing different roles for various on-stage audiences, showing everything from the courts to the bedroom as a type of stage for a specific performance.
When flaws begin to show in one of their performances for the other characters, they routinely switch to new performances, moving from one role to the next like professional actors. In this essay, I analyze the characters' various performances through the lens of Erving Goffman, who describes all social interaction as a type of performance.
Goffman himself struggles with his theory's connection to the stage-world metaphor, insisting that "All the world is not, of course, a stage," but has difficulty maintaining such a position because "the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify" One type of event that may reveal limitations to the stage-world metaphor is the act of confession: 1 I suggest that the numerous acts of voluntary confession in The Duchess may be perceived as actors scripting yet another performance, but the notion that people are only acting is challenged by characters who express guilt but cannot confess it: such inhibited desires to confess imply the presence of an authentic self behind the social performances, an actor behind the mask.
