ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT

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JOHN WEBSTER was a Londoner born in 1578 or 1579, which made him about fifteen years younger than Shakespeare, and he lived until the early 1630s. He was the son of a successful coachmaker, John Webster senior, whose business supplying coaches and wagons brought him into contact with London theater companies needing carts to transport their properties and costumes. He was also brought into contact with those who built the yearly pageants for the Lord Mayor’s celebrations. Tradition has it that the young John Webster was educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School and the Middle Temple (London’s training ground for lawyers), but the evidence for these claims is sparse. We know for certain that he married Sara Penial in March of 1606 when she was seven months pregnant, and that he began to write plays shortly after 1600. Like many dramatists of the period, much of Webster’s career was spent in collaborative writing. In 1602 the theater manager Richard Henslowe lent money to Webster, Munday, Middleton, Drayton, and Webster to complete a play on the life of Julius Caesar for the Admiral’s Men. That play is not extant, nor are many others upon which Webster worked; but we do have the two lively city comedies, Westward Ho and Northward Ho, that he wrote with Thomas Dekker in 1604 and 1605 for the Children of St. Paul’s, and the history play, Sir Thomas Wyatt, printed in 1607, also a collaboration with Dekker. On his own, Webster wrote two of the greatest tragedies of the Jacobean period—The White Devil in 1612 and The Duchess of Malfi in 1614—and a tragicomedy, The Devil’s Law Case, in 1617 or 1618. In the later years of his career he wrote city comedies and tragicomedies in collaboration with Middleton, Rowley, Fletcher, and others.

 

ABOUT THE PLAY

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As far as we know, The White Devil (1612) was the first play Webster wrote solely by himself. Performed at the popular Red Bull Theater in north London, it was followed two years later by what is usually considered Webster’s masterpiece, The Duchess of Malfi. Both are set in Italy and depict a world in which characters are defined by lust, lawless ambition, and treachery. T.S. Eliot, writing about Webster in “Whispers of Immortality,” suggestively said:

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Webster was much possessed by

death And saw the skull beneath

the skin; And breastless creatures

under ground Leaned backward

with a lipless grin. Daffodil bulbs

instead of balls

Stared from the sockets of the eyes!

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Eliot caught here the macabre fascination with death in Webster’s tragedies and the way in which the grave, repository of skulls and bones, mocks human ambition and aspiration. Whatever Webster’s characters hope to achieve, in the end they are defeated by the foe that captures everyone. Death comes in novel ways in The White Devil. Characters kiss poisoned pictures, have their necks deliberately broken when exercising on a vaulting horse, go brainsick from the fumes of a poisoned helmet, or, more prosaically, are run through with a sword. Webster’s talents as a dramatist are shown in part by his inventiveness with these technologies of death.

 

The White Devil belongs to the early modern genre of revenge tragedy, a type of play in which crime spurs secret retaliation that in turn spurs further revenge. We see this cycle when Brachiano, married to Isabella, falls passionately in love with the beautiful Vittoria, who is married to Camillo. In pursuit of his adulterous passion, Brachiano has Isabella killed by a poisoned painting and Camillo’s neck snapped at the vaulting horse. Flamineo, the discontented and poor secretary to Brachiano and Vittoria’s brother, is his instrument. In the play’s counteraction, Francisco, Duke of Florence and his sister of Isabella, seeks revenge for her murder, aided by the Cardinal Monticelso, and Count Lodovico, an unrequited lover of Isabella. Vittoria stands trial and is banished to a religious house before both she and Brachiano, and a host of others, are killed.

 

The voraciousness with which Brachiano and Vittoria, the play’s protagonists, pursue their adulterous passion, along with the remarkable composure displayed by Vittoria in the long courtroom scene that dominates Act III, are riveting theater. Brachiano and Vittoria are villain heroes; each ruthlessly spurns conventional morality; each displays remarkable courage and strength of mind in the face of almost certain death and, in Vittoria’s case, in the face of the combined forces of state and church. Her outspoken defiance of those who would judge her, her insistence that they stop speaking Latin and condemn her plainly in their shared native tongue, have made this character interesting to contemporary feminists. In a play in which men have most of the power, she seizes as much of it as she can, unmasking the hypocrisy and double standard by which her crimes are punished and men’s are not. Cornelia, mother of Vittoria and Flamineo, is the play’s only truly “good” woman, a figure of antique Roman virtue rather than contemporary Italian vice, but she is out-shone, theatrically speaking, by the shamelessly adulterous Vittoria and her Moorish maid, Zanche.

 

Flamineo, the discontented secretary, is Webster’s other remarkable creation in this play. He is clear kin to Bosola, the ambitious courtier in The Duchess of Malfi. Like Bosola, Flamineo serves the great and does terrible things, including murdering his brother, to win their favor. Like many other Renaissance aspiring servants, his efforts win him few rewards, but when it comes his time to die, he faces death with clear-eyed Stoicism: “We cease to grieve, cease to be Fortune’s slaves / Nay, cease to die by dying” (V.vi.252-53). Here, death inspires less terror than relief. It means the end of fearing death; it means the end of a life dominated by Fortune, that restless goddess who gives men opportunities only to snatch them away. Bosola has been great men’s lackey, trying to seize fickle Fortune’s rewards. In the end, he achieves a noble death only by embracing it and setting his face against the world whose prizes have teased and eluded him.  

 

Jean Howard, George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University

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