John Webster (c. 1580 - 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. Events March 1 - Michel de Montaigne signs the preface to his most significant work, Essays. ... Events Moses Amyrauts Traite de la predestination is published Curaçao captured by the Dutch Treaty of Polianovska First meeting of the Académie française The witchcraft affair at Loudun Jean Nicolet lands at Green Bay, Wisconsin Opening of Covent Garden Market in London English establish a settlement... Motto: (French for God and my right) Anthem: Multiple unofficial anthems Capital London Largest city London Official language(s) English (de facto) Unification    - by Athelstan AD 927  Area    - Total 130,395 km² (1st in UK)   50,346 sq mi  Population    - 2005 est. ... This article is in need of attention. ... A dramatist is an author of dramatic compositions, usually plays. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... ... The Duchess of Malfi is a macabre, tragic play, written by the English dramatist John Webster and first performed in 1614 at the Globe Theatre in London. ...

Life and career

Webster's life is obscure, and the dates of his birth and death are not known. His father, a coachmaker also named John Webster, married a blacksmith's daughter named Elizabeth Coates on November 4, 1577, and it is likely that Webster was born not long after in or near London. On August 1, 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 probably him. Webster married a 17-year-old girl named Sara Peniall on March 18, 1606, and their first child, John, was baptized at the parish of St. Dunstan-in-the-West on May 8, 1606. Bequests in the will of a neighbor who died in 1617 indicate that other children were born to him. Part of Middle Temple c. ...

Most else that is 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 November 7, 1634) speaks of him in the past tense, implying he was by then dead. Thomas Heywood (died approx. ...

Early collaborations

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, which 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. This page is about the year. ... Michael Drayton (1563- December 23, 1631) was an English poet who came to prominence in the Elizabethan era. ... Thomas Dekker, (c. ... Thomas Middleton (baptized April 18, 1580, died 1627) was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. ... Anthony Munday (or Monday) (1560?–August 10, 1633), was an English dramatist and miscellaneous writer. ... Thomas Dekker, (c. ... City comedy is a common genre of Elizabethan drama. ... John Marston (October 7, 1576 - June 25, 1634) was an English poet, playwright and satirist during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. ... It has been suggested that Lord Chamberlains Men be merged into this article or section. ...

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, but if printed no text has survived. ... Vittoria Accoramboni (15 February 1557 - 22 December 1585) was an Italian lady famous for her great beauty and accomplishments and for her untimely end, a story that was later the basis for a play and a novel. ... The Red Bull was a playhouse in London during the seventeenth century. ... The Duchess of Malfi is a macabre, tragic play, written by the English dramatist John Webster and first performed in 1614 at the Globe Theatre in London. ... It has been suggested that Lord Chamberlains Men be merged into this article or section. ...

The White Devil was performed in the Red Bull Theatre, an open air theatre that is believed to have specialized 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. The Red Bull was a playhouse in London during the seventeenth century. ... Blackfriars Theatre was the name of two separate theatres in the City of London, built on grounds previously belonging to a Dominican monastery. ...

Late plays

Webster wrote one more play on his own: The Devil's Law-Case (1618-19), a tragi-comedy. 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. City comedy is a common genre of Elizabethan drama. ... Please wikify (format) this article or section as suggested in the Guide to layout and the Manual of Style. ... Thomas Middleton (baptized April 18, 1580, died 1627) was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. ... William Rowley was an English Jacobean dramatist, best known for works written in collaboration with more successful writers. ... John Ford (baptized April 17, 1586 - c. ... John Fletcher (1579-1625) was a Jacobean playwright. ... Philip Massinger (1583 - 1640) was an English dramatist. ... Thomas Heywood (died approx. ...

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 eighteenth century. Intricate, complex, subtle and learned, they are difficult but rewarding, and are still frequently staged today. ... The Duchess of Malfi is a macabre, tragic play, written by the English dramatist John Webster and first performed in 1614 at the Globe Theatre in London. ... Strawberry Hill, an English villa in the Gothic revival style, built by seminal Gothic writer Horace Walpole The gothic novel was a literary genre that belonged to Romanticism and began in the United Kingdom with The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole. ... (17th century - 18th century - 19th century - more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 18th century refers to the century that lasted from 1701 through 1800. ...

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 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 romance, Shakespeare in Love, the young Webster is shown as a small boy who plays with wild mice (and feeds them to alley cats) and speaks admiringly of the macabre aspects of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus ("I like it when they cut heads off. And the daughter mutilated with knives"). John Ford (baptized April 17, 1586 - c. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM (September 26, 1888 ? January 4, 1965) was a poet, dramatist and literary critic, whose works, such as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, and Four Quartets, are considered defining achievements of twentieth century Modernist poetry. ... Shakespeare in Love is a 1998 motion picture. ... Title page of the first quarto edition (1594) The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus may be Shakespeares earliest tragedy. ...

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." Edwards makes Webster sound like a twentieth century hardboiled novelist such as Dashiell Hammett. More recently, Webster's combination of extreme violence with complex wordplay and eloquent assassins has been compared with the films of Quentin Tarantino. One could also argue that Websters characters of Ferdinand and Cardinal from "The Duchess of Malfi" were the basis for Frank Miller's "Sin City" characters of the Roark brothers where one was a corrupt Cardinal and the other a Senator. (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s The 20th century lasted from 1901 to 2000 in the Gregorian calendar (often from (1900 to 1999 in common usage). ... Samuel Dashiell Hammett (May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories. ... Quentin Jerome Tarantino (born March 27, 1963) is an American film director, actor, and Oscar-winning screenwriter. ...

Webster in other works

• The 1982 detective novel The Skull Beneath the Skin by P. D. James centers around an aging 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' (see above).
• 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 (see above).

1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Detective fiction is a branch of crime fiction that centres upon the investigation of a crime, usually murder, by a detective, either professional or amateur. ... The Skull Beneath The Skin is a 1982 detective novel by P. D. James, featuring her female private detective Cordelia Gray. ... Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park OBE (born 3 August 1920) is an English writer of crime fiction and member of the House of Lords, who writes as P. D. James. ... The Duchess of Malfi is a macabre, tragic play, written by the English dramatist John Webster and first performed in 1614 at the Globe Theatre in London. ... Queen Victoria (shown here on the morning of her Ascension to the Throne, 20 June 1837) gave her name to the historic era The Victorian Era of Great Britain marked the height of the British industrial revolution and the apex of the British Empire. ... John Webster (c. ... Echo & the Bunnymen are an English post-punk group formed in Liverpool in 1978. ... 1983 (MCMLXXXIII) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Porcupine is the third album by the British band Echo & the Bunnymen. ... 1998 (MCMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ... Shakespeare in Love is a 1998 motion picture. ... John Webster (c. ...

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).

Biographical information is from Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster (1986), by Charles R. Forker.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

John Webster

• Luminarium: John Webster Life, works, essays
• Works by John Webster at Project Gutenberg
• Jacobean Times: Film, Drama & Culture: http://jacobeanvisions.edublogs.org