Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Flamineo
- Builds a relationship with audience
- Through asides and soliloquies
- Is the audiences main source of information
- Uncomfortable relationship
- Learn to distrust him and disapprove of his
character and actions
- Entertained by his outrageous insolence
- Whilst hoping he will be redeemed
- Both attractive and repellent
- Forces audience to consider their
own moral position, when they find
themselves colluding with him
- Modern psychology would define
him as 'psychopathic'
- Early contemporary audience understand character through four
humours - sanguine (pleasure-seeking), phlegmatic
(relaxed/peaceful), choleric (ambitious) and melancholic
(analytical)
- His general behaviour
indicates excessive of
'black bile' leading to
melancholy
- Popular character choice
in early modern drama -
Iago in Othello
- Typical malcontent - unhappy and
dissatisfied with the world and his life
- As a relative outsider offers a cynical
commentary on characters and events
- Blames mother for lack of money
- "I would fain to know where lies the mass of
wealth, which you have hoarded for my
maintenance"
- To advance himself in the world, he becomes
Brachiano's secretary
- "Prompt as lightening" - to his service
- Willing to prostitute his sister and
murder his brother in law to advance his
own interests
- But dislikes and despises Brachiano - confronts him
- "As in this world there are degrees of evils: / So in this world
there are degrees of devils"
- Slant rhyme emphasises his dislike
- Course of action is tragic - gives audience sense of
what he might have becomes on following a different
path
- However, he is presented as arrogant, marking him out for
disaster - constantly treating others with cynical contempt
- Asides on Camillo are amusing, but the murder is not
- Remarks addressed to Giovanni about the
advantages of his fathers death are callous
- "You're now, my lord, i'th'saddle"
- Egocentric
- Captured in his dying remark
- "At myself I will begin and end"
- Only towards the end of the
play to we see feelings for
others
- Comment on mother - "I have a strange thing in me,
to th'which I cannot give a name, without it be
Compassion."
- Admiration expressed for Vittoria as
she faces death - "Th'art a noble
sister - I love thee now"
- Misogyny in commentary
- Resonates with views of other characters, and Webster himself
- Flamineo was historically the name of Vittoria's innocent younger brother. Webster
swapped the names around for the resonance of fire and flames in Flamineo