Context - Streetcar and Malfi: Death

J. C. Trewin (British critic, 1948)

"A squalid anecdote of a nymphomaniac's decay in a New Orleans slum".

Marc Robinson

"A Streetcar Named Desire portrays only the final moments in the long history of Blanche's decline. Williams sets his best play in Blanche's last refuge and dramatizes her final battle; her fate was settled before she arrived...on the street called Elysian Fields."

Scene 11

Blanche's fantasy of death - to be buried at sea - was also the way that Williams wanted to die, as it was the way that the poet Hart Crane had died. Crane's poetry also serves as the play's epigraph. 

Biographical

The many tragedies in Williams' own life, such as his troubled childhood and struggles with his addiction and homosexuality, influenced the social tragedies of his plays. 

Elia Kazan

"Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is his life".

Tennessee Williams

"I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself".

George Bernard Shaw

Webster is the "Tussaud laureate". 

George Norton

"Webster posit[s] a mad world with few certainties and an increasingly bleak moral vision".

Biographical

Webster's family lived near London's Smithfields cattlemarket and slaughterhouse, which was also where criminals would be executed, and so grew up with death all around him. 

He also lived near where the Bartholemew Fair would pitch up, and saw the 'freaks of nature' displayed there. 

Ian Jack (1979)

Webster was a decadent with "no deeper purpose than to make our flesh creep". 

Social 

During the Renaissance, there was a rise in atheism and the prospect that the death of the body was the final end was terrifying.