JOHN WEBSTER
Born sometime around 1580,
John Webster was to be the last of the great Elizabethan playwrights. Much like
many of his contemporaries, little is known of the poet himself. There was a
John Webster admitted to the Middle Temple on August 1, 1598. If this Webster
and the dramatist were one and the same, it would explain the many legal
allusions in his plays and the inclusion of trial scenes in The White Devil,
The Devil's Law Case, and Appius and Virginia.
The earliest known records
of Webster's employment as a playwright are found in the diary of theatre
manager Phillip Henslowe at the beginning of the new century. Among the
payments which Henslowe noted in his diary in 1602 were those made to Webster,
Anthony Munday, Thomas Middleton, Michael Drayton "and the rest" for
a play entitled Caesar's Fall. Over the next decade or so, Henslowe's
records show Webster collaborating with Dekker and Heywood, writing a prologue
to Marston's Malcontent, and composing his two masterpieces The White
Devil and The Duchess of Malfi.
Webster has sometimes been
criticized for the limited scope of his plays. He knows nothing, for instance,
of the tenderness and pleasant fantasy of Shakespeare. It was mankind's anguish
and evil alone which captured his imagination. But his verse is poetry of the
highest order and holds its own with the best of Marlowe and Shakespeare. T.S.
Eliot described Webster as the poet who was "much possessed by death, and
saw the skull beneath the skin."
In The White Devil, the
beautiful and spirited Vittoria falls under the spell of the dashing Duke
Brachiano. At first, they are able to conceal their love affair, but when they
feel their affair threatened, overcome by the fear of losing one another, they
murder the suspicious husband Camillo. Even so, Vittoria is no cheap murderess.
Webster creates a complex and compelling character who is simply not willing to
abide those who stand in the way of her passion, and in the process, he creates
one of the most exciting lovers' quarrels in all of dramatic literature.
In his other masterpiece, The
Duchess of Malfi, Webster deals with a more innocent pair of lovers. The
widowed Duchess of Malfi is forbidden to marry again by her brothers--Duke
Ferdinand and the Cardinal--because they covet her estate. Unbeknownst to her
brothers, however, the Duchess falls in love with her steward Antonio, and they
marry secretly. The two lovers live happily for a time and the Duchess gives
birth to three children, but when their marriage is discovered, the evil of the
world stages a macabre dance around the little family from which there is no
escape. A splendid nightmare, The Duchess of Malfi bears witness to a
sensitive spirit, overwhelmed by the horror and despair of the world.
After The Duchess of Malfi,
Webster lapsed into mostly second-rate work. Around 1620, he wrote The
Devil's Law Case and collaborated a year later with Middleton on Anything
For a Quiet Life. About 1625 he collaborated on The Fair Maid of the Inn
with Massinger and Ford and on A Cure for a Cuckold with Heywood. And
sometime before his death (probably in the 1630s), he composed the Roman
tragedy Appius and Virginia.
After Webster's death, the
Elizabethan theatre began to decline. The stage was filled with mediocre
writers such as Glapthorne, Brome, Markham, Suckling and D'Avenant, reputed to
be Shakespeare's illegitimate son. Then in 1642, the Puritans closed the public
theatres, and there was darkness.
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