Jacobean Drama

The Elizabethan age was an age characterized by a spirit of revival, by the concept of
order and the rise of symbolism, the conviction that beyond concrete reality there exists a
transcendental one, a world of symbols and metaphors. By comparison, the Jacobean age
is characterized by a spirit of negation, disorder and chaos, by the fall of symbolism and
by pragmatism. At the level of literary work, the rise of symbolism was materialized in
the “play metaphor” as compared to the fall of symbolism materialized in”life as a game
of chess”. The game of chess requires rules, laws and little imagination.
Other features which characterize the Jacobean age are the shift of emphasis from God
to Man. Man is on his own, he experiences joy and pain without any guidance and this
freedom is also a threat to man’s individuality. Another feature is interest in the evil, in
the psychology of sin, satanic vision of life and manifestations of abnormality. There are
many similarities to be drawn between Jacobean drama and horror movies. In the 20th
century there appeared a new interest in it as it suited the atmosphere of chaos
characteristic of this century. Jacobeans use the works of Seneca also used by
Shakespeare and the Elizabethans but while the latter inspired themselves from the rules
of the three unities: time, space and action, the Jacobeans were mainly influenced by the
Senecan mood of negation, destruction and evil. They took from Seneca the concept of
“negative teaching” and the mood of abnormality and negation.
Representatives
John Marston

His best known plays are Antonio’s Revenge and The Malcontent. Antonio’s Revenge is
centered on the idea of revenge and on the psychological side of characters being the
Jacobean counterpart of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, imbued with scenes of crimes and
destructions. The moral severe criticism coupled with an indeterminacy of genre marks
much of Marston’s work. His plays deal, in a dark manner, with tragic situations,
intrigues, feigned madness and above all revenge in the upper-class Italy. His moral
vision is reflected in the equally discordant rhetoric; he inspired himself from the
Senecan stoicism, to which he added his personal despair through long, exhausting lines
and discontinuous, cumulative lists of words. Marston exposes moral corruption and
restless pursuit for political and social justice. He often tries to make his moral point by
exaggerating the disorders of an evil age, until he transforms his characters into grotesque
figures.

Thomas Heywood

His most important play is A Woman Killed with Kindness .The plot is centered around a
woman, who performs adultery. Her husband decides to punish her with kindness,
behaving exactly as he had done before. He is very kind to her and when she receives
kindness she can’t bear this and dies. The play deals with the clinical descriptions of her
death, caused by the fact that she wasn’t able to bear her husband’s behaviour. This play
makes the most of a sensational fictional situation; it opens with a wedding between a
supposedly ideal woman and a man proud of his social status and personal happiness.
But, this rapidly reverses into deception and destruction. The wife finds herself involved

1
in adultery and the husband kindly banishes her from his house and their children. Her
remorseful death brings her ultimate forgiveness. It is a revenge play without revenge and
with controlled murderous impulses. In other plays (The Fair Maid of the West, A Girl
worth Gold) women have an extraordinary power of mind, are resourceful and
courageous in fighting for their goals.

Thomas Middleton

His most important play is Women Beware Women. It is from this play that the image of
life as a game of chess is taken. The stage is divided into two parts, actually two parallel
situations: in one room there are people playing chess and in the other there is an act of
seduction. It is women who are first corrupted and then facing the consequences of their
corruption until being consumed by it. The two interwoven plots often show women
confined and locked, contrived by men or by other women acting as agents of male
power. Livia seduces her niece into an adulterous relationship with her uncle and then
helps the Duke of Florence in his seduction of the married Bianca (the game of chess
with its references to black kings, lost pawns and mating have a symbolical duality.
Moral licence and ambition drive both Livia and Bianca into enjoying the benefits of
sexual and financial power in a predominantly patriarchal society. However both of them
are to be punished during the performance of the Duke’s marriage masque, as various
theatrical tricks prove fatal to actors and observers alike.

John Ford

His plays combine an interest in the psychology of illicit love with a taste for the
melodramatic incident and with scenes of outmost violence. The setting of his plays is
Italy, as Italy was seen as the “home of vice”, while actually tackling problems of
contemporary England. His plays combine a mixture of romantic fatalism with a clinical
exploration of manifestations of evil. ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore is centered on an
incestuous love affair between Giovanni and Annabella, brother and sister. Giovanni does
not want to hide his affection, but he openly declares his love and he even takes pride in
displaying his feelings. Annabella’s parents force her to get married in order to save their
daughter’s integrity, but Giovanni kills Annabella’s husband and kills himself in order to
avenge his parents’ act. Ford took to the extreme the concept of negative teaching and he
was even accused by literary critics for being a deliberate immoralist and even a decadent
writer. His characters seem to move in a world preordained by damnation, individual
gestures of self-assertion being opposed to the values of an old, inherited moral code.
Ford’s leading characters, both male and female, define themselves by undermining
received or traditional values and norms. Giovanni and Annabella insist on the rightness
of their passion regardless of the restrictions of the church, family and society. They
construct a private morality out of feeling, a temporary paradise, permanently damned a
and condemned one. Giovanny breaks a great social taboo and takes his sin to the
extreme when he parades with his sister’s heart fixed to his dagger. Drama becomes
decadent when it exploits the moment without any probing of cause or consequence,
when it seeks eccentric causes for common situations or when it uses human emotions
fore the simple purpose of making our flesh creep, shocking situations without any

2
motivation, just for surprising and terrifying readers. Ford points to a certain reality
characterized by immoral, chaotic, destructive elements, but he frequently exaggerated
them shocking the readers.

John Webster

He is the best of Jacobean dramatists because he knows how to combine negative

teaching with great poetry and with high skill in character drawing. The weak point of his
creation consists in his little control of the dramatic structure; his plays are episodic, they
have good individual moments, but they are not linked in a concrete manner. Still they
allow the author to exploit with great poetic effect the terror or the pathos of individual
moments. Although his tragedies are based on true, bloody and recent occurrences in the
courts of Italy, he was a borrower of devices, effects and themes from his contemporary
English dramatists and a modern dramatic poet placing his borrowings in strikingly
innovative and distinctive contexts.
In The White Devil the characters have Italian names. Vittoria Corombona is involved in
an adulterous adventure with the Duke of Bracciano, but the Duke in a fit of rage kills
Vittoria’s husband, her children and himself. The scene when Vittoria is brought to the
Royal Court to be judged for her adultery shows Webster as a master of portrayal as
Vittoria manages to keep her dignity and turns into a victim. As compared to the other
representatives of the Court, dominated by corruption and hypocrisy, her guilt is far less.
Webster transforms his play into an indictment of the English Royal Court. Unlike Ford
who described abnormal situations only to impress the readers, Webster extends his
criticism on the whole society. Vittoria is the most achieved character, because she is
motivated by ambition and passion far beyond the ordinary ones. She has often been
compared to Marlowe’s characters. Just like Dr Faustus greeding after infinite
knowledge, her passion surpasses the human limits. A satire of court life, this play is
centered on the theme of the Machiavellian/ Faustian character and on the idea that in
moments of ultimate crises even evil characters can redeem themselves by a stoic dignity.
The play is concerned with paradoxes and antitheses and with dissimulation of hypocrisy,
as characters reveal themselves in fragmentary confessions and conflict with other
characters.
The Duchess of Malfi deals with a young duchess who is forbidden by her brothers to get
remarried, either because of an incestuous passion, either because they expected to inherit
her fortune. She does that in secret and her brothers punish her with the help of Bosola:
he is the one who sends her a dead-man hand and some wax puppets portraying her
husband and children. Thus she is finally drawn mad and sent to an asylum as a lunatic.
She manages to keep her identity in front of all these horrors and the end comes as
liberation for her. The widower Duchess commits what is seen by her villainous brothers
as an unforgivable sin against dignity, by marrying her steward. Ferdinand, Duke of
Calabria, and the Cardinal viciously outline a plan of psychological torture. The Duchess
is gradually worn down to mental degradation and becomes the single pattern of virtue in
a dark, immoral, male world.
He is the greatest representative of this period because he did not indulge in creating
sensations for their own sake, but his plays have morality attached to them and present
criticism of the contemporary society.