John Webster

John Webster (c. 1580 – c. 1634)cite book
last = Forker
first = Charles
authorlink =
coauthors =
title = Skull Beneath the Skin
publisher = Southern Illinois University Press
date = 1995-06-15
location = Carbondale, Illinois, United States
isbn = 978-0809312795 ] was an English Jacobean dramatist, and a late contemporary of William Shakespeare. His tragedies "The White Devil" and "The Duchess of Malfi" are often regarded as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage.

Life and career

Webster's life is obscure, and the dates of his birth and death are not known. His father, a coach maker also named John Webster, married a blacksmith's daughter named Elizabeth Coates on 4 November 1577, and it is likely that Webster was born not long after in or near London. On 1 August 1598, "John Webster, lately of the New Inn" was admitted to the Middle Temple, one of the Inns of Court; in view of the legal interests evident in his dramatic work; this is possibly the playwright.cite book
last = Grosvenor Myer
first = Valerie
authorlink =
coauthors = Serafin, Steven
title = The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature
publisher = Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
date = 2003-06-12
location =
pages = 1032
isbn = 978-0826414564 ] Webster married a 17-year-old girl named Sara Peniall on 18 March 1606, and their first child, John, was baptized at the parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West on 8 May 1606. Bequests in the will of a neighbour who died in 1617 indicate that other children were born to him.

Most of what is otherwise known of him relates to his theatrical activities. Webster was still writing plays as late as the mid-1620s, but Thomas Heywood's "Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels" (licensed 7 November 1634) speaks of him in the past tense, implying he was then dead.

Early collaborations

By 1602, Webster was working with teams of playwrights on history plays, most of which were never printed. These included a tragedy "Caesar's Fall" (written with Michael Drayton, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton and Anthony Munday), and a collaboration with Thomas Dekker "Christmas Comes but Once a Year" (1602).cite book
last = Gunby
first = David
authorlink =
coauthors = Carnegie, David; MacDonald P Jackson
title = The Works of John Webster 3 Volume Set: The Works of John Webster: An Old-spelling
publisher = Cambridge University Press
date = 2007-01-25
location = Cambridge
isbn = 978-0521260619 ] With Dekker he also wrote "Sir Thomas Wyatt", which was printed in 1607. He worked with Thomas Dekker again on two city comedies, "Westward Ho" in 1604 and "Northward Ho" in 1605. Also in 1604, he adapted John Marston's "The Malcontent" for staging by the King's Men.

The major tragedies

Despite his ability to write comedy, Webster is best known for his two brooding English tragedies based on Italian sources. "The White Devil", a retelling of the intrigues involving Vittoria Accoramboni, an Italian woman assassinated at the age of 28, was a failure when staged at the Red Bull Theatre in 1612 (published the same year), being too unusual and intellectual for its audience. "The Duchess of Malfi", first performed by the King's Men about 1614 and published nine years later, was more successful. He also wrote a play called "Guise", based on French history, of which little else is known as no text has survived.

"The White Devil" was performed in the Red Bull Theatre, an open air theatre that is believed to have specialised in providing simple, escapist drama for a largely working class audience, a factor that might explain why Webster's highly intellectual and complex play was unpopular with its audience. In contrast, "The Duchess of Malfi" was probably performed by the King's Men in the smaller, indoor Blackfriars Theatre, where it would have played to a more highly educated audience that might have appreciated it better. The two plays would thus have been very different in their original performances. "The White Devil" would have been performed, probably in one continuous action, by adult actors, with elaborate stage effects a possibility. "The Duchess of Malfi" was performed in a controlled environment, with artificial lighting, and musical interludes between acts, which allowed time, perhaps, for the audience to accept the otherwise strange rapidity with which the Duchess is able to have babies.

Late plays

Webster wrote one more play on his own: "The Devil's Law Case" (c. 1617–1619?), a tragicomedy. His later plays were collaborative city comedies: "Anything for a Quiet Life" (c. 1621), co-written with Thomas Middleton, and "A Cure for a Cuckold" (c. 1624), co-written with William Rowley. In 1624, he also co-wrote a topical play about a recent scandal, "Keep the Widow Waking" (with John Ford, Rowley and Dekker). The play itself is lost, although its plot is known from a court case. He is believed to have contributed to the tragicomedy "The Fair Maid of the Inn" with John Fletcher, Ford, and Phillip Massinger. His "Appius and Virginia", probably written with Thomas Heywood, is of uncertain date.

Reputation

Webster's major plays, "The White Devil" and "The Duchess of Malfi", are macabre, disturbing works that seem to prefigure the Gothic literature of the seventeenth century. Intricate, complex, subtle and learned, they are difficult but rewarding, and are still frequently staged today.

Webster has received a reputation for being the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatist with the most unsparingly dark vision of human nature. Even more than John Ford, whose "'Tis Pity She's a Whore" is also very bleak, Webster's tragedies present a horrific vision of mankind. In his poem "Whispers of Immortality," T. S. Eliot memorably says that Webster always saw "the skull beneath the skin".

In the 1998 film romance, "Shakespeare in Love", the young Webster is shown as a small boy who plays with wild mice and feeds them to alley cats. He is refused a role in Shakespeare's upcoming play, and says morosely, "I was in a play once. They cut my head off in "Titus Andronicus". When I write plays, they'll be like "Titus." Shakespeare asks, "You admire it?" Webster replies: "I like it when they cut heads off, and the daughter, mu'ilated with knives." He holds a mouse up for a cat, and Shakespeare turns away - but Webster adds, "Plenty of blood. That's the only writing."

While Webster's drama was generally dismissed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many twentieth century critics and theatregoers find "The White Devil" and "The Duchess of Malfi" to be brilliant plays of great poetic quality and dark themes. One explanation for this change is that only after the horrors of war in the early twentieth century could their desperate protagonists be portrayed on stage again, and understood. W. A. Edwards wrote of Webster's plays in "Scrutiny" II (1933–4): "Events are not within control, nor are our human desires; let's snatch what comes and clutch it, fight our way out of tight corners, and meet the end without squealing." The violence and pessimism of Webster's tragedies have seemed to some analysts close to modern sensibilities.cite book
last = Fernie
first = Ewan
coauthors = Wray, Ramona; Thornton Burnett, Mark; McManus, Clare
title = Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader
publisher = Oxford University Press
date = 2005-03-31
location = Oxford
pages = 163
isbn = 0199265577 ]

Webster in other works

*The 1982 detective novel "The Skull Beneath the Skin" by P. D. James centres around an ageing actress who plans to play Webster's drama "The Duchess of Malfi" in a Victorian castle theatre. The novel takes its title from T.S. Eliot's famous characterization of Webster's work in his poem 'Whispers of Immortality'.
*The song "My White Devil" from Echo & the Bunnymen's 1983 album "Porcupine" refers to Webster as "one of the best there was" and mentions his two tragic plays by name.
*A young John Webster, played by Joe Roberts, appears in the 1998 film "Shakespeare in Love".
*A fragment of Scene Two, Act Four of The Duchess of Malfi is shown in the 1987 BBC TV film version of Agatha Christie's detective novel "Sleeping Murder".

References

External links

*imdb name|id=0916925|name=John Webster
*gutenberg author| id=John+Webster | name=John Webster
* [http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/acs-idx.pl?type=section&rgn=level1&byte=1613585 Algernon Swinburne's The Age of Shakespeare, "John Webster"]