Those examples of poetic justice that occur in medieval and Elizabethan literature, and that seem so
satisfying, have encouraged a whole school of twentieth-century scholars to "find" further examples.
In fact, these scholars have merely forced victimized character into a moral framework by which the
injustices inflicted on them are, somehow or other, justified. Such scholars deny that the sufferers in
a tragedy are innocent; they blame the victims themselves for their tragic fates. Any misdoing is
enough to subject a character to critical whips. Thus, there are long essays about the misdemeanors
of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, who defined her brothers, and he behavior of Shakespeare’s
Desdemona, who disobeyed her father.\n\nYet it should be remembered that the Renaissance
writer Matteo Bandello strongly protests the injustice of the severe penalties issued to women for
acts of disobedience that men could, and did, commit with virtual impunity. And Shakespeare,
Chaucer, and Webster often enlist their readers on the side of their tragic heroines by describing
injustices so cruel that readers cannot but join in protest. By portraying Griselda, in the Clerk’s Tale,
as a meek, gentle victim who does not criticize, much less rebel against the prosecutor, her husband
Waltter, Chaucer incites readers to espouse Griselda’s cause against Walter’s oppression. Thus,
efforts to supply historical and theological rationalization for Walter’s persecutions tend to turn
Chaucer’s fable upside down, to deny its most obvious effect on reader’s sympathies. Similarly, to
assert that Webster’s Duchess deserved torture and death because she chose to marry the man she
loved and to bear their children is, in effect to join forces with her tyrannical brothers, and so to
confound the operation of poetic justice, of which readers should approve, with precisely those
examples of social injustice that Webster does everything in his power to make readers condemn.
Indeed. Webster has his heroin so heroically lead the resistance to tyranny that she may well in spire
members of the audience to imaginatively join forces with her against the cruelty and hypocritical
morality of her brothers. Thus Chaucer and Webster, in their different ways, attack injustice, argue
on behalf of the victims, and prosecute the persecutors. Their readers serve them as a court of
appeal that remains free to rule, as the evidence requires, and as common humanity requires, in
favour of the innocent and injured parties. For, to paraphrase the noted eighteenth-century scholar,
Samuel Johnson, despite all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, it is by the
common sense and compassion of readers who are uncorrupted by the characters and situations in
mereval and Dlizabetahn literature, as in any other literature, can best be judged.
