Reading Comprehension: Question are based on the passage.
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 â€œfindâ€ 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 Websterâ€™s Duchess of Malfi, who defined her brothers, and the behavior of Shakespeareâ€™s Desdemona, who disobeyed her father.
Yet 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 Clerkâ€™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 Griseldaâ€™s cause against Walterâ€™s oppression. Thus, efforts to supply historical and theological rationalization for Walterâ€™s persecutions tend to turn Chaucerâ€™s fable upside down, to deny its most obvious effect on readerâ€™s sympathies. Similarly, to assert that Websterâ€™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.
It can be inferred from the passage that the author believes that most people respond to intended instances of poetic justice in medieval and Elizabethan literature with*