Webster, John

b. circa 1580; d. circa 1625

English dramatist, born in London, son of a tailor, to which craft he was himself apprenticed. He wrote a number of plays in collaboration with Heywood, Dekker, Middleton and Chettle, as well as poetry and pageants. His reputation is based on two tragedies in the revenge tradition, The White Devil, 1612, and The Duchess of Malfi, c. 1614. Both plays investigate the decadence and evil which centred on the Renaissance courts, and they do so with a vision which is dark, obsessive in its concern with death and decay, and yet constantly producing poetry of extraordinary power. They have been much revived in recent years, always with success, and Webster can lay claim to being the most dramatised (in modern times) of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights after Shakespeare. Webster also wrote The Devil's Law Case, c. 1610, a tragi-comedy.

© JM Dent/Historybookshop.com

Related articles