Horror Shows by Orlando Bartro
John Webster (c. 1578 – c. 1632), a contemporary of Shakespeare, was an innovative playwright. Two of his plays still hold the stage, especially The Duchess of Malfi.
Webster knows that standard play structure begins with an inciting incident, ascends through a sequence of rising actions, reaches a climax, and resolves all conflicts.
But Webster eschews standard structure in The Duchess of Malfi.
The Duchess of Malfi, though called a tragedy on its title page, isn’t a tragedy of the duchess, nor of anyone else; it is a horror show. It rejects a clear arc of rising and falling action because coincidence heightens the reality of horror; chaos is apt.
Consider Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. [Spoiler alert!] Janet Leigh was the hot new starlet, and when the movie’s first viewers saw her murdered in the famous shower scene, it was a bewildering shock, leaving only unknown actors remaining on screen. The unusual, unpredictable structure of Psycho gives it much of its shock and horror, even today.
Horror requires coincidence and chaos, as demonstrated by The Duchess of Malfi and Psycho. Happy Halloween!
Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available at Amazon for $4.91.