ABSTRACT
Webster's reputation was summed up most memorably by T. S. Eliot, who wrote in "Whispers of Immortality" that "Webster was much possessed by death and saw the skull beneath the skin". Eliot's lines could stand as the representative epigraph for criticism of Webster's tragedies in general, with the "skull" signifying any number of lurid fixations on any number of planes, whether the social, the metaphysical, the sexual, or even the aesthetic. Webster constructs The Duchess of Malfi around the disruption of collective violence and the denial of catharsis, or sacrificial satisfaction. In dramatizing the sacrifice of a woman who is technically guilty but morally innocent in The Duchess, Webster manifests his engagement with the anti-sacrificial strain of Christianity within his culture. New Historicist criticism has done important work where Webster is concerned in demonstrating that his tragedy's darkness and fragmentation amount to a coherent, deliberate response to the problems within his society.
