John Webster

John Webster (c. 1578 - c. 1634) was an English Jacobean dramatist, 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, but he was born in 1578 or 1579 as the son of a cartmaker in Smithfield, London. His interest in theatre may have been sparked when his father was hired to make wagons for city pageants.

Early collaborations

Webster probably studied at the Merchant Taylor's School, before going on to the law schools at the Middle Temple. However, by 1602 he 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 entitled Christmas Comes but Once a Year (1602. With Dekker, he also wrote Sir Thomas Wyatt; this play was printed in 1607. He worked with Thomas Dekker again on two city comedies, Westward Ho! in 1603 and Northward Ho! in 1604. 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 brooding tragedies. The White Devil was a disaster when staged at the Red Bull theatre in 1612, being too unusual and intellectual for its audience. The Duchess of Malfi, first performed by the King's Men in 1613 or 1614, was more successful. He also wrote a play called Guise, based on French history, in c.1614-1618, but it was never printed.

Late plays

Webster wrote one more play on his own: The Devil's Lawcase (1618-19), 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, The Late Murder of the Son upon the Mother (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 last known play is Appius and Virginia, probably written with Thomas Heywood in 1627.

Reputation

Webster's major plays, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, are macabre, disturbing works that seem to pre-empt the Gothic literature of the eighteenth 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 a Pity She's a Whore is also very bleak, Webster's tragedies present an horrific vision of mankind. In his poem 'Whispers of Immortality', T. S. Eliot memorably refers to Webster as always seeing "the skull beneath the skin". In the 1998 film comedy, Shakespeare in Love, the young Webster is shown as a small boy who loves rats and says of Romeo and Juliet "I liked it when she stabbed herself".

References

Dates of Webster's plays are taken from The Works of John Webster: An Old-Spelling Critical Edition, ed. Gunby, Carnegie and Hammond (Cambridge, 1995)