D.C. Gunby says in his "Introduction" of John Webster: Three Plays, that little is known about the life of John Webster (c. 1578-9 - c. 1634), since even the dates given for his birth and death are only guesses. The bare fats of Webster's life are that he was born to prosperous parents and lived in London as a dramatist and properous businessman , that allowed him to retired comparatively young and to live a life of prosperous retirement in his home town. He appears to have made few enemies, and a number of good friends, during his life, and to have shown little concern for the publication of his own works. The bare details of his life -birth, marriage, and death, involvement in law suits, purchases of land- are not well documented. About his attitude to his work, his feelings about the theatre, his loves, his hates, and his philosophy of life we have nothing, except the lines he wrote in his plays, which may be based on his own experience and personal feeling. Perhaps, this circumstance is one of the biggest blessings, for the absence of personal detail about Webster leaves the field clear for a view of the plays themselves. As critics have said, because we know very little about the man, we tend to concentrate on his writing trying to guess about the writer and his thinking. However, as Gunby remarks, this situation has improved after the discoveries of Mary Edmond, 'In Search of John Webster' (published in The Times Literary Supplement, 24 December, 1976, pp. 1621-22), and later on in 1985; the research of Mary Edmond, has contributed a lot to the information available on Webster.1

        In this Web we have tried to collect the different facts about Webster's life, although few things can be well documented and they are mostly suppositions. However, there are a large number of those suppositions of what might be called educated guesses, many of them based on years of research by well known scholars, and which whilst not totally beyond doubt are usually taken as being by and large correct.

        John Webster was a Londoner, he came from the prosperous middle class, born in 1578 or 1579 (about fifteen years after Shakespeare) to a wealthy coachmaker. The family business was based in Cow Lane, a few hundred yards north-west of the Old City Wall, in the West Smithfield district within the parish of St Sepulchre, where the Websters were based throughout John's life. In fact, we don't know when he was born or died, because the Great Fire of London in 1666 destroyed many of the capital's official records, including those which would have contained details of his baptism and burial. However, we know that his parents were married in November 1577 and he probably came into the world within a year or two. He had a younger brother, Edward (c. 1590-1644), and probably more than one sister.' 2

     Webster's father was a wealthy coach-merchant, the owner of a business engaged in the making, hiring and selling of coaches, wagons, and carts in Cow Lane. His prosperous business close by the City Wall and near to the Law Courts, served the nearby fashionable houses and was convenient for Smithfield market where the trade was principally in horses (see gallery pictures above). Webster grew up in the noisy, smelly and densely populated parish of St Sepulchre, near Smithfield, the hub of London's thriving manufacturing trade. Since his father supplied everything from carts for transporting whores and condemned criminals to vehicles for civic pageants and lavish coaches for the nobility, the younger Webster 'might well have rubbed elbows with a wide spectrum of London society, including theatre professionals'. About the atmosphere in London and St Sepulchre's area, critics say that it was a bustling, thriving, bargaining world of law, nobility, commerce, with its private scandals and sensations mingling with the ceremony and dignity of court and parliament. Also in the vicinity of the Webster house were a number of theatres including the Fortune and the Red Bull.

     Gunby says: 'We have always known, because Webster himself remarks on the fact in the dedication to his civic pageant, Monuments of Honour (1624), that he was a Londoner, 'born free' of the Merchant Taylors' Company. We now know with certainty what was previously only conjecture: namely that this link with the Merchant Taylors derived from his father's membership of the Company. We also know that John Webster senior, who was made free of the Merchant Taylors' Company in 1571, was by trade a coachmaker, and that he built up a large and prosperous business, hiring as well as building wagons, carts and coaches, before his death, probably in 1615. Thereafter the family business, which was situated in Cow Lane, Smithfield, near the cattle market and in a street which was a recognized centre for coach-and harness-makers, was run (equally successfully, it seems) by his son Edward until the latter's death in 1644'.

     Until a separate Coachmakers' Company was founded in 1677, it was usual for members of this trade to join the Merchant Taylors, with whom -in the provision of trappings and hearses for funerals - they had some community of interest.

     As no Coachmakers' Company was incorporates till 1677, John Webster senior and, later, his son Edward became freemen of the Merchant Taylors' Company, whose school John Webster almost certainly attended before passing to the New Inn and being admitted to the Middle Temple on 1 August 1598.

        The Literary Encyclopedia and Literary Dictionary also says that 'John Webster senior was a member of the Merchant Taylors' Company, one of the craft guilds which regulated London trade, so the future dramatist would have been entitled to attend the Merchant Taylors' School. It was a prestigious institution with a dramatic tradition established by its great founding headmaster, Richard Mulcaster, and its literary alumni included Edmund Spenser, Thomas Lodge and Thomas Kyd. Webster would have entered the school in the late 1580s at the age of 9, and like every other Elizabethan schoolboy he would have studied the staple humanist curriculum of the Latin classics; but he would also have learned the respect for the English language which was a more distinctive feature of the educational programme at Merchant Taylors'. This nstitution was well-known because of the advanced educational theories of its first headmaster, Richard Mulcaster (c. 1530 - 1611), teacher, humanist and poet. He believed in a broadly-based curriculum so that pupils received training not only in the classic subjects of Greek and Latin but also in the English language and literature for which Mulcaster had a special admiration. The boys also learnt music, engaged in a variety of physical activities (even football) and had experience of drama through theatrical performances. We do know that at one time the school's acting company was commanded to perform before the Queen at Hampton Court. so Webster's school-days gave him a taste for literature, a care for language, acquaintance with dramatic texts and an introduction to the world of the theatre. It is thought that Webster was taught by the schoolmaster Henry Wilkinson, who 'believed in teaching English rather than exclusively in Latin, and he encouraged the performances of music and plays to encourage discipline and self-confidence in his students'. In 1576, when the Theatre was opened, most of the Merchant Taylors' School performances were moved from the court to the Theatre, and many critics think that it is possible that Webster participated in some of these performances during his more formative years.

        There are evidences that one John Webster was admitted to the Middle Temple on 1 August 1598. If this Webster and the dramatist were one and the same, it would explain the many legal allusions in his plays and the inclusion of trial scenes in The White Devil, The Devil's Law-Case, and Appius and Virginia. We believed that Webster was admitted into the Middle Temple and began to study law, in one of the law-training establishments in the Inns of Court. As well as being a teaching institution, the Middle Temple also housed practising lawyers and barristers. In addition to concern for the law and legal procedures, there was a strong tradition of entertainment and celebrations ranging from the formal to the light-hearted. Records cite productions of classical or contemporary plays (for example, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in 1602), masques and ceremonial processions as well as lively dancing and disguisings during the Christmas festivities. Some Middle Temple students gifted in composing verse or music supplied the texts, noted for their sharp wit, daring, even scurrility, in parodies, songs, mocking jests and comic orations. One of these students was John Marston who was to have a great influence on the young John Webster. We know little of his legal career, but studies in the Middle Temple certainly gave him a taste for the theatre.

     John Webster was a man of the city who has a very direct contact with life which is reflected in his plays. The background of his life in London together with his wide reading were a continuous source of inspiration. The width of his reading in classical and modern authors and his method of dramatic composition reveal a studious mind; his plays contain trial scenes and many legal allusions. His family's concern in practical aspects of mounting entertainments - his father is known to have supplied transport both to players and for shows or pageants between 1591 and 1613 - no doubt combined with Webster's own experience of Inns of Court Revels to produce an active interest in the theatre." 3

     It is possible that Webster's father sent him for legal training after he left school in the mid-1590s. In 1598, a John Webster was admitted to the Middle Temple from the New Inn. If this was the dramatist, he was following a young would-be lawyer's usual route: preparatory years at an Inn of Chancery, followed by higher study at one of the Inns of Court, the London law societies known as England's "third university". The intention may have been to equip Webster with the legal knowledge required for the administration of the family firm, which was growing into a substantial and complex business enterprise; but the Middle Temple would also have stimulated his extra-curricular interests. In the later 1590s, the society was becoming recognized as an avant garde literary centre, and several of its members dabbled in drama, including the Latin playwright George Salterne and, later, John Ford. The most important was John Marston, who was making a name for himself as a smart urban poet specializing in eroticism and satire, and was soon to move into play-writing for London's commercial theatres. By then he had written Histriomastix, the sprawling satirical play staged as the Middle Temple's Christmas entertainment for 1598, which Webster would have witnessed, or perhaps acted in, a few months after his admission.'

        Of the private as well as the business lives of Edward Webster and his father we now know a good deal, thanks largely to Miss Edmond. Of John junior, the dramatist and elder son, we know for certain much less. His parents probably married in 1577, so that a birthdate of 1580 for the first son is not improbable. Nor is it improbable that the 'Master John Webster, gentleman, son and heir apparent of John Webster of London, gentleman', entered as a student at the Middle Temple in 1598, was the future dramatist. A period as a law-student, would certainly help to explain Webster's knowledge of the law, and the vehemence with which, in The Devil's Law-Case, he affirms his belief that 'Bad suits, and not the law, bred the law's shame'. The temptation to identify the law-student with the dramatist becomes stronger when we learn that the same Master John Webster did not complete his course of studies. It may be that Webster, following the lead of another poet dramatist, John Marston, who had also been a student at the Middle Temple, found his inclinations ran contrary to his calling, and deserted law for literature.

Map from the web: Shakespeare and the Globe: Then and Now

        The first records of John Webster's employment as a dramatist can be found in an account book of the theatre manager and financier Philip Henslowe who, in 1602, paid Webster, together with Anthony Munday, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, Thomas Heywood, Michael Drayton and Wentworth Smith, for work on Caesar's Fall and Christmas Comes but Once a Year -both now lost- and Lady Jane, a two-part play which probably survives, reconstructed and shortened, in The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1607). Henslowe managed the Admiral's Men, a company who were in direct competition with the Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men) for whom William Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote and to which he belonged . Over the next decade, Henslowe's records show Webster collaborating with Dekker and Heywood. 4

        About the first records about Webster's employment the Literary Dictionary says 'We next hear of Webster in 1602 as a junior collaborator on plays written for the London acting companies financed by Philip Henslowe: a tragedy, Caesar’s Fall (later retitled Two Shapes) for the Admiral’s Men, written with Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Middleton; a history play, Lady Jane for the Earl of Worcester's Men, written with Chettle, Dekker, Thomas Heywood, and Mr Smith; and Christmas Comes but Once a Year, again for Worcester’s but of indeterminable genre, with Heywood, Chettle, and Dekker. Little can be said about the literary or theatrical quality of these plays since, of the three, only a textually corrupt adaptation of Lady Jane survives, printed as Sir Thomas Wyatt in 1607; but for Webster the work was important in the opportunities it afforded for personal and professional networking. He could claim friendship with Munday and Heywood, writing commendatory verses to their publications in 1602 and 1612 respectively, and though he apparently snubbed Middleton by omitting him from a survey of current dramatists in the preface to The White Devil, the two men seem to have become close in the early 1620s. The most immediately important association, though, was with Thomas Dekker. In 1604, London's premier acting company, the King's Men, hired Webster to adapt Marston's successful tragicomedy, The Malcontent. (Whether Marston himself had any part in the revision remains a matter of scholarly dispute.) Written in 1602-3 for the boy actors at the indoor Blackfriars theatre, the play was too short for the Globe, and contained no role for the company clown, Robert Armin: Webster's task was to bulk it up by adding a theatrically self-conscious induction and new scenes involving a fool. In professional terms the commission was a step up, however small, and at around the same time he found a similar position on the skirts of prestige when he was chosen to write verses for Stephen Harrison’s Arches of Triumph, an account of the triumphal arches set up for King James I's coronation entry into London; his name may have been put forward by Dekker, who had written part of the processional entertainment for the occasion. The two men collaborated again more formally towards the end of the year on Westward Ho, the first of a pair of sex comedies written for the boy actors at the playhouse attached to St Paul’s Cathedral. When the rival boy company responded with the even more controversial Eastward Ho (by Jonson, Chapman, and Marston), Webster and Dekker capped them with Northward Ho in 1605. By now Webster was evidently working with his old senior partner on more equal terms: the writing tasks were shared out evenly, and in both cases Webster took the responsibility of writing the opening scene.'

        There are evidence that Webster's wife was named Sara (without telling us when they married or where), some critics says that he married Sara Peniall and began a family in March 1605-6, and that they had a large family, including his eldest son named John (possibly born and baptized early 1606), Elizabeth, Sara, Margery and others. Hammond states that 'other baptismal records are lacking, but from a neighbour's will it is clear that the Websters had a large family and were citizens in good standing with the community'. The next twenty years yield little information. During this time Webster's writing seems to have stopped. Webster apparently had 'sufficient means to live an independent life. His next published work is The White Devil. Where the dramatist lived, however, remain a mystery, as does all else about him. It may be surmised, from what we know of the prosperity of the family business, that John Webster was financially independent and had no need to supplement in other ways the minuscule income that would have derived from his literary work. Given his proverbial slowness in composition, this combination of leisure and financial security was no doubt crucial to his achievement.5

        About Webster's marriage and family life, the Literary Dictionary tell us that: 'At around the same time that he was writing for the stage about the louche misadventures of contemporary middle-class Londoners, Webster had a little sexual dalliance of his own. In March 1606 he was hastily married to Sara Peniall, the daughter of a prominent local saddler. Seven weeks later, having passed her seventeenth birthday in the interim, Sara gave birth to a baby boy; at the time she was still living in her father's house while Webster lodged elsewhere. Despite this less than auspicious start, though, it seems to have been a successful marriage: Webster's mature writing, notably in The Duchess of Malfi, is strikingly positive about the pleasures of family life, the joy of children, and the sexual needs of women. The couple’s son, christened John after his father, was the first of a large family: by 1617 the Websters had had at least four more children, including two daughters, Sara and Elizabeth. Webster wrote no more plays for the rest of the decade. His sole piece of literary writing during this period was a brief epitaph on the tomb of a neighbour, Joan Essex, who died in 1608. Perhaps his new responsibilities inhibited his creativity: he was later known to be uncommonly slow in composition. Perhaps, too, they forced him to follow a more lucrative and more stable occupation. It is an interesting coincidence that his next play appeared in the same year that Edward Webster completed his apprenticeship in the family business. From here on, Edward seems to have taken a leading role in the firm: in 1615 it was he, not John, who renewed the lease on the Cow Lane coachyard after John senior's death. Perhaps the dramatist put his writing career on hold to ease the burden on his father, who was in his late 50s, and to keep the business afloat until his younger brother was ready to take over.'

"... Crabbed (Websterio)
The Play-wright, Cart-wright: whether? either!"
....
"Was ever man so mangl'd with a poem?
See how he draws his mouth awry of late,
How he scrubs: wrings his wrists: scratches his pate.
A midwife! Help? By his brain's coitus,
Some centaur strange: some huge Bucephalus,
Or Pallas (sure) engendred in his brain, -
Strike Vulcan with thy hammer once again"

        The satirist had no doubt, however, about including Webster among typical frequenters od the Blackfriars theatre. The family business was also mentioned by William Heminges in a mock elegy for the loss of Thomas Randolph's little finger in an affray of 1632:

"...Websters brother would nott lend a Coach:
He swore that all weare hired to Conuey
The Malfy dutches sadly on her way."

        Christina Luckyj in her "Introduction" to the White Devil says that unlike his younger brother Edward, Webster showed little interest in the family trade; indeed, he probably purchased his status in the Merchant Taylors' (to which he was entitled by patrimony) chiefly to allow himself the glory of serving as their official poet -an ambition that was realized in 1624 when Webster was commissioned to design the festivities for the investiture of Sir John Gore, a Merchant Taylor, as Lord Mayor of London; his Monuments of Honour was the most lavish and expensive pageant of the age. After an apprenticeship as one of Philip Henslowe's journeyman dramatists, collaborating with others such as Tomas Dekker, Anthony Munday, Thomas Middleton, Henry Chettle, Thomas Heywood, Michael Drayton and Wentworth Smith on the plays Caesar's Fall and Christmas Comes but Once a Year - both now lost - and Lady Jane, a two-part play which probably survives, reconstructed and shortened, in The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1607). Webster wrote in 1604 an Induction and probably, the part of Passarello for The Malcontent, a tragicomedy by John Marston , who, though the same age as Webster, had entered the Middle Temple c. 1595, and was a fellow Middle Templar and 'a prominent member of the intellectual avant-garde' for performance by the King's Men at the Globe.

        With Thomas Dekker, his main collaborator, he wrote two city comedies, Westward Ho! (1604) and Northward Ho! (1605), written for the fashionable, private children's company, Paul's Boys, were performed in 1604 and 1605, both plays were published in 1607. After these theatrical successes, Webster seems to have stopped writing for a time - whether because of the frequent closure of the theatres due to plague, or his own hasty marriage in 1605/6 to Sara Penial, who at the age of sixteen was seven monthos pregnant with the first of their several children.

        Webster published nothing between 1605 and 1611, and seems to have stopped writing for a time, Christine Luckyj suggests that may be because of the frequent closure of the theatres due to the plague, or his own hasty marriage in 1605-6 to Sara Peniall, a young girl who at the age of sixteen was seven months pregnant with the first of their several children. Webster may indeed have laboured over his first independent dramatic effort, writing his first tragedy by himself, The White Devil, that it did not appeared until 1612, and it was first performed at the Red Bull, where it failed to please. In the White Devil's Preface to the first quarto, Webster says that the play was not liked by the original audience. In The White Devil, the beautiful and spirited Vittoria falls under the spell of the dashing Duke Brachiano. At first, they are able to conceal their love affair, but when they feel their affair threatened, overcome by the fear of losing one another, they murder the suspicious husband Camillo. Even so, Vittoria is no cheap murderess. Webster creates a complex and compelling character who is simply not willing to abide those who stand in the way of her passion, and in the process, he creates one of the most exciting lovers' quarrels in all of dramatic literature. The play shows a corrupted court, and a 'heroine' (Vittoria Corombona) who is 'the white devil', a character as evil as those she destroys. The themes of revenge and justice dominate the play, and it has a dark, brooding, and claustrophobic atmosphere, with incidents of violence and cruelty.

        His address to the reader of his first tragedy, The White Devil, performed and published in 1612, expresses admiration for Heywood, to whose Apology for Actors he contributed a commendatory poem in the same year, as well as for Dekker , Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher and the scholarly dramatists George Chapman and Ben Jonson. In the Preface to the first quarto of The White Devil Webster mentions that the play was not well liked by the audience and says:

In publishing this tragedy, I do but challenge to myself that liberty,
which other men have tane before me; not that I affect praise by
it, for nos haec nivimus esse nihil: only since it was acted,
in so dull a time of winter, presented in so open and black a theatre,
that it wanted (that which is the only grace and setting out of a
tragedy) a full and understanding auditory: and since that time
I have noted, most of the people that come to that playhouse,
resemble those ignorant asses (who visiting stationers' shops,
their use is not to inquire for good books, but new books)
I present it to the general view with this confidence:


Nec rhoncos metues, maligniorum
Nec scombris tunicas, dabis molestas.

        As we can see by the Preface to the published text, Webster strikes a pose of swaggering self-assurance: he not only calls the audience 'ignorant asses' who failed to give his play its due, but also claims kinship with the learned dramatists Chapman and Jonson.

        The White Devil was performed on a winter's day by the acting company known as The Queen's Men at the Red Bull Theatre on St John's Street in Clerkenwell, north of the city of London. The Red Bull was in the neighbourhood of Webster coach-yard, and as we can see by the author's own account the premiere was not very successful, perhaps it was because the theatre was open to the wintry air and the audience was unresponsive.

        Although Webster refers to the play's unsympathetic reception, this did not discourage him for long, since his second and best-known tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, was written soon afterwards, the play seems to have followed it quickly and some of its material was derived from sources published in 1612. Though the play cannot have been completed before late 1612, it must have been performed before December 1614, the date of the death of William Ostler, the actor who first played Antonio Bologna. Webster received praises from his contemporaries for The Duchess of Malfi (1614), as we can find in the first original edition: Middleton, in rhyming couplets said that his 'monument is rais'd in thy life time' and calls it a 'masterpiece of tragedy':

In the just worth, of that well deserver
MR. JOHN WEBSTER, and upon this
masterpiece of tragedy.

In this thou imitat'st one rich, and wise,
That sees his good deeds done before he dies;
As he by works, thou by this work of fame,
Hast well provided for thy living name;
To trust to others' honourings, is worth's crime,
Thy monument is rais'd in thy life time;
And 'tis most just; for every worthy man
I his own marble; and his merit can
Cut him to any figure, and express
More art, than Death's cathedral palaces,
Where royal ashes keep their court: thy note
Be ever plainness, 'tis the richest coat:
Thy epitaph only the title be,
Write, Duchess, that will fetch a tear for thee,
For who e'er saw this Duchess live, and die,
That could get off under a bleeding eye?

In Tragaediam.
Ut lux ex tenebris ictu percussa tonantis;
Illa, (ruina malis) claris sit vita poetis.
Thomas Middletonus,
Poëta & Chron:
Londinensis

        William Rowley's verse shows also his admiration for Webster's Duchess, and his view of The Duchess of Malfi is equally generous, 'Yet my opinion is, she might speak more; / But never (in her life) so well before':

To his friend MR. JOHN WEBSTER
Upon his DUCHESS
OF MALFI

I never saw thy Duchess, till the day,
That she was lively body'd in thy play;
Howe'er she answer'd her low-rated love,
Her brothers' anger did so fatal prove,
Yet my opinion is, she might speak more;
But never (in her life) so well before.
WILL: ROWLEY.

        John Ford thought that Webster's play was a masterpiece, and in the same introductory pages to The Duchess of Malfi, proclaims 'Crown him a poet, whom nor Rome nor Greece, / Transcend in all theirs, for a masterpiece':

To the reader of the author,
and his DUCHESS OF MALFI.

Crown him a poet, whom nor Rome, nor Greece,
Transcend in all theirs, for a masterpiece:
In which, whiles words and matter change, and men
Act one another; he, from whose clear pen
They all took life, to memory hath lent
A lasting fame, to raise his monument.
JOHN FORD.

        The Duchess of Malfi was written for the rival company The King's Men. it was performed both in their public theatre, the Globe, and in their private indoor theatre, the Blackfriars; and we know that Richard Burbage, the actor who created many of the great Shakespearian roles, played the part of Fersdinand, and John Lowin played Bosola (Lowin was to become a remarkable veteran actor, witnessing the closing of the theatres under the Puritan influence in about 1642, and their reopening in 1660.). The Duchess of Malfi was first presented at the private Blackfriars Theatre before a welcoming and sophisticated audience, and later on at the Globe, a large public playhouse on the south bank of the river Thames. The Blackfriars had the advantage over the Globe in that it could be darkened, lighted only by candles; important for critics who maintain that the whole of the action of the play took place at night.

        We find the following information about this period of Webster's live in the Literary Dictionary: 'Whatever the circumstances of the hiatus, Webster returned to the theatrical scene in 1612 with one of the most sophisticated of all Jacobean tragedies, The White Devil. Dekker gave it an advance puff in one of his plays, and may have persuaded Webster to offer it to his current employers, Queen Anne’s Men. It was a bad mistake. The company performed at one of London’s less exalted amphitheatres, the Red Bull, and attracted rowdy playgoers known for their crude, plebeian tastes. Webster’s layered plotting, aphoristic dialogue, and clear-sighted social and political commentary did not find an appreciative audience. Like many a disappointed dramatist, he rushed the tragedy into print, complete with a testy preface blaming the season, the playhouse, and the ignorant asses who frequented it, though he had the grace to exculpate the actors, who had, after all, selected the play for production in the first place. Dekker’s imaginative influence still hangs over The White Devil in the play’s frequent references to one of his favourite topics, Dutch culture and society. Such allusions are virtually absent from Webster’s next play, The Duchess of Malfi, written in 1613-14; but by then Dekker himself was absent too. In 1612, he was selected to write and produce the entertainment for the installation of the new Lord Mayor of London. Since the new incumbent was a Merchant Taylor, the most obvious candidate for the job was Webster, the playwright son of one of the company’s senior members; it is possible that he suggested Dekker instead. If this was a friendly gesture, though, it backfired: the production expenses pushed Dekker's often unsatisfactory finances into crisis, and in 1613 he was arrested and imprisoned for debt. One of his creditors was John Webster senior, who had made the pageant wagons and now sued him for the £40 they cost. Dekker was to remain out of circulation behind bars for seven years. Meanwhile, Webster spent the closing months of 1612 writing A Monumental Column, a long verse elegy for Prince Henry, who had died early in November; the poem was published the following year, in a memorial volume with similar contributions by the dramatists Thomas Heywood and Cyril Tourneur. His second great tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, was staged by the King’s Men, probably in late 1613 or early 1614 when they were between Globes (the first Globe theatre had burned down and the second had not yet been built), and were acting exclusively at the more intimate indoor Blackfriars theatre. His literary output continued to be steady, if leisurely, throughout the rest of the decade. When the scandal of Sir Thomas Overbury's murder broke in 1615, he edited a volume of Overbury's Characters, and added 32 new character sketches of his own, including "An Excellent Actor", which makes an important, concise statement of the theory, practice, and purpose of early seventeenth-century acting. In 1619, he turned to the fashionable genre of tragicomedy in The Devil’s Law-Case, produced by Queen Anne's Men, now moved from the Red Bull to a more up-market venue in Drury Lane. These years probably also saw the writing of his lost play, Guise, which may have been either a tragedy drawn from French history, about one of the Machiavellian Dukes of Guise, or a comedy of fashionable behaviour: the title, mentioned by Webster in the preface to The Devil's Law-Case, will bear either interpretation. Webster eventually published The Duchess of Malfi in 1623, to a mixed response. Three of his colleagues contributed commendatory verses. Generalized witty praise was offered by the comic actor William Rowley and by John Ford, whom Webster would have known as a fellow contributor to the Overbury memorial industry of mid-1610s literary culture, and possibly also through Middle Temple connections; but Thomas Middleton’s poem uses a conceit drawn from Webster's favourite passage of Martial. A few years earlier, the two men had worked together for the first time since the Henslowe days, on the comedy Anything for a Quiet Life, and Webster had made a powerful imaginative impact on his collaborator (something apparent from Middleton's tragic writing of the early 1620s in Women Beware Women and The Changeling); now Middleton took the trouble to cast his praise for The Duchess of Malfi in terms which Webster would find especially flattering. Even so, the poems seem to have been mocked as an affectation; it is also possible that the volume was not well received by its dedicatee, Baron Berkeley. When he published The Devil's Law-Case later that year, Webster couched the dedication (to a different patron) in far more tentative terms, and made a point of remarking that the book was unadorned with "unbegged commendatory verses". As he reached his 40s, Webster went back to writing mainly in collaboration. As well as Middleton, he worked with Rowley on the comedy A Wedding (1624; later printed as A Cure for a Cuckold in 1661); with Ford, John Fletcher, and Philip Massinger on The Fair Maid of the Inn (1625); and perhaps with Heywood on the tragedy Appius and Virginia (1627?), though there is no external evidence for Heywood’s contribution. Perhaps surprisingly, he rarely worked with Dekker, who had finally emerged from prison, white-haired and traumatized, at the end of 1619; but he may have introduced his old friend to Ford, who was to be Dekker's most frequent writing partner during the 1620s. However, all three collaborated, along with Rowley, on Keep the Widow Waking (1624), a lost tragedy about a recent murder case which resulted in legal proceedings for libel. Webster also wrote Monuments of Honour, the elaborate city pageant which celebrated the installation of another Merchant Taylor Lord Mayor in 1624. There is no certain record of Webster after the mid-1620s. He wrote a set of verses for an engraving of the royal family which was printed after 1633, but some scholars believe this to be a revised reprint of a lost original issued in about 1624. In 1634, Heywood made a passing reference to him in the past tense, which is usually taken to mean that he was now dead. His two great tragedies lived on, revived and reprinted through the seventeenth century.'

        M.H. Butler, refers to Webster's plays as 'tragedies of state' and says that 'The classic tragedies of state are John Webster's, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and informers. His The White Devil (c. 1609 - c. 1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society; and the heroine in The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1612/13, published 1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the experience if its women.'

        In The Duchess of Malfi Webster deals with an innocent pair of lovers: The Duchess of Malfi and her steward. The widowed Duchess of Malfi is forbidden to marry again by her brothers because they covet her state. Unbeknownst to her brothers, the Duchess falls in love with her steward Antonio, and they marry secretly. The Duchess gives birth to three children, and they live happily for a time, until their marriage is discovered and The Duke Ferdinand and the Cardinal take revenge against the Duchess and murder the whole family except her eldest son, the sole survivor of the Malfi household. Her endurance and positiveness in death offers a shining contrast to the sordid murders with which the play concludes. The play is about two people, one a steward, the other a widowed Duchess, falling in love, getting married in secret and having children. The Duchess's remarriage provides the central conflict of the tragedy, yet it is not an illegal action. As a widow she is free to choose a husband and to marry again, and the ceremony, is perfectly valid. However, the secret marriage produce most tragic consequences: All but one of the family die.

        Although we have seen how some playwrights praised Webster's work, not all Webster's contemporaries were so generous, in fact, Henry Fitzgeffrey found his workmanship laborious, and the Venetian Orazio Busino, objected to his play on religious grounds.

        A Monumental Column, Webster's elegy on the death of Prince Henry -Prince of Wales (1594-1612)- the heir to the throne, appeared in 1613, it was dedicated to the king's favourite, Sir Robert Carr. Webster continued to write and collaborated with Sir Thomas Overbury. The sixth edition of Sir Thomas Overbury's Characters (1615) contained thirty-two new 'characters' including those of 'An Excellent Actor', 'A Reverent Judge' and 'An Ordinarie Widdow' which are attributed to Webster. 6 This group of 'characters' can be visited in The Oxford Text Archive, New and choice characters, of some severall authors, together with the poem, The Wife, written by Sir Thomas Overbury, (1581-1613), freely available for non-commercial use transcribed by Gunby, D.C. (David Charles) from: The complete works of John Webster, edited by F.L. Lucas, vol. 4, London: Chotto & Windus, 1927.

        Webster wrote The Devil's Law-Case (c. 1616), a serious play, though in the tragicomic mode, in which aspects of both tragedy and comedy are found. In this case, he addresses to the reader and says that he did not want his playwright friends to write poems to express approval or admiration for his work, he wanted the reader or the audience to judge by themselves. It was the third play written by himself and although the audience is encouraged to think this is going to be another tragedy , it ends in comedy. Webster continued interested in political events well known to his spectators and, like the other two plays, there is a lot of tension of gender, with women cast in the tragic role. It is said that this play is Webster's most undervalued work, although now is being recognized. In the epistle dedicatory of his tragicomedy The Devil's Law-Case, (dated c. 1617 ) 7, Webster mentions a play called Guise (c. 1616) a lost play, of whose date and genre nothing certain is known. 8

        Most of Webster's plays were written in collaboration with other playwrights, which was a common practice then, and only The White Devil (1612), The Duchess of Malfi (1614), and The Devil's Law-Case (c. 1616) were written by him alone. In September 1624 Webster, Dekker, William Rowley and John Ford quickly wrote The Late Murder of the Son upon the Mother, or Keep the Widow Walking, based on contemporary London trials, that got Webster and Ford into difficulties with the law. This play we only know about through the Proceedings of the Court of Star Chamber, 9 for no text survives, though it was acted often.

        As we have said, Webster wrote his pageant Monuments of Honour on 1624. On 29 October 1624, the Guild of Merchant Taylors celebrated the inauguration of one of their members, Sir John Gore, as Lord Mayor of London with this pageant prepared by John Webster, the pageant wagons for which were probably supplied by his brother Edward. It cost them over a £1,000 : 'a greater sum than they had ever spent for such a purpose in three centuries'. 10

        It is thought that Webster may have had a collaborating hand in Middleton's comedy Anything for a Quiet Life, 11 c. 1620-21, and The Fair Maid of the Inn (1626), which was licensed for production in 1626 an printed in the Beaumont and Fletcher first folio in 1647. 12 The dates of his other extant plays are uncertain. 13 Probably between 1624 and 1625 he collaborated with Rowley and perhaps Heywood on the comedy A Cure for a Cuckold (1624/5), and wrote some part of the minor tragedy Appius and Virginia (1627?). Though he was the author of some occasional verses, Webster seems to have written no other plays, and he never equalled the tragic mastery of his first two independent plays: The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi.

        The Encyclopaedia Britannica in its web-page called Shakespeare and the Globe: Then and Now says about Webster's tragedies that 'The White Devil (c. 1609-c. 1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1612/13, published 1623) are generally regarded as the paramount 17th-century English tragedies apart from those of Shakespeare' and also that ' The White Devil, like Macbeth, is a tragedy of action; and The Duchess of Malfi, like King Lear, is a tragedy of suffering'.

        Hammond says that Webster continued collaborating and publishing plays throughout the first two decades of the 17th century and the years '1623-1624 mark the high point of Webster's public celebrity'. These years mark the publication of both The Duchess of Malfi and The Devil's Law-Case, as well as Webster's prefixed verses to Henry Cockeram's The English Dictionary. Thanks to the influence of the new mayor Gore in 1624, Webster was more publicly active, his organization of the Lord Mayor's Pageant represents 'the uniting of his poetical career with his position as a Merchant Taylor and important citizen of London'.

        We do not know when Webster died, although it is presumed that he probably died in the 1630s, but no certainty exists, somebody says that he may have been the John Webster buried at St James's, Clerkenwell, on 3 March 1638, though the fact that in 1634 Heywood's Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels refers to him, as to other dramatists then dead, in the past tense, has led scholars to conclude that he died earlier than this. Gunby says that 'Webster's hero-villains die, characteristically 'in a mist'. The dramatist does the same. 14

        Eight extant plays and some nondramatic verse and prose are wholly or partly his; the most standard edition is The Complete Works of John Webster, edited by F.L. Lucas, vol. 4, London: Chotto & Windus, 1927.

        After Webster's death, the Elizabethan theatre began to decline, in 1642, the Puritans closed the public theatres, and there was darkness. Webster has sometimes been criticized for the limited scope of his plays. They said 'that he knows nothing, for instance, of the tenderness and pleasant fantasy of Shakespeare, and that it was mankind's anguish and evil alone which capture his imagination. But his verse is poetry of the highest order and holds its own with the best of Marlowe and Shakespeare'.

  A Chronology of Webster's time

  Webster's works: Play Productions

  Images used in John Webster's Life

  Electronic Sources and books used in Webster's Biography

  The Elizabethan Context: Elizabethan and Early Stuart Literature.

  The Elizabethan Context: Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

  The Elizabethan Context: Elizaberthan actors and Playwrights.

  The Elizabethan Context: Theatres and types of plays.

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