John Webster

John Webster

    One of the more shadowy figures of the Jacobean period, John Webster was born in London, probably in 1580, to a family in the business of carriage building. This flourishing business, close by the city wall and near to the law courts, served the nearby fashionable houses. It was part of a bustling, thriving, bargaining world of law, nobility and commerce, with private scandals and sensations mingling with the ceremony and dignity of court and parliament.

    So little was chronicled about Webster's life that most details of his biography are conjecture only.

    Webster was probably educated at Merchant's Taylor School, prominent because of the educational theories of its first headmaster, Richard Mulcaster. Mulcaster's belief in a broadly-based curriculum meant the young Webster was, perhaps, given an early taste for literature and language, an acquaintance with dramatic texts and an introduction to the world of theatre. We do know that at one time the school's acting company was commanded to perform before the Queen at Hampton Court.

    Webster may have entered the Middle Temple in 1598, one of the law-training establishments in the Inns of Court. We know little of his legal career but the Middle Temple, with its strong tradition of entertainment and celebrations ranging from the formal to the light-hearted, would have contributed to Webster's interest in drama. Alongside this, the city nobility and officers of law and government gave Webster the experience of living in a sophisticated, worldly, rich society.

    The first recorded appearance of Webster came in the 1602 diary of theatre manager and financier Philip Henslowe. Henslowe records a payment to John Webster, Anthony Munday, Michael Drayton and Thomas Middleton for their play Caesar's Fall.

    Among Webster's early works were an Induction to Marston's The Malcontent, and several collaborations with Thomas Dekker, including Westward Ho! and Northward Ho! However, as his first independent plays were to attest, his natural inclination was to a more scholarly drama than the citizen comedy of Dekker. In his own preface to The White Devil (published in 1612) Webster recorded his debt to a number of contemporary authors.

    Webster's reputation rests principally on two plays: The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. The White Devil was performed by the Queen's Men in 1612 at the Red Bull Theatre in Clerkenwell. The Duchess of Malfi was performed by the King's Men, privately at Blackfriars and publicly at the Globe, in 1613/14.

    During the next ten years Webster produced two plays, The Guise (a tragedy, now lost) and The Devil's Law Case (a tragi-comedy, 1617/19), some occasional pieces, including an elegy on the death of Prince Henry, and a staging of the Lord Mayor's Pageant (1624). In 1624 he returned to collaboration with Dekker, Rowley and Ford to work on Keep the Widow Waking (The Late Murder in Whitechapel) and he probably worked with Rowley again on A Cure For A Cuckold (1624/25). Appius and Virginia, performed sometime in the 1630s, is thought to have been the last play on which Webster worked.

    The date of Webster's death is uncertain. Heywood, in The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels (1634), speaks of Webster in the past tense, which has generally been taken to mean that he was dead by that date, though he may have died as early as 1625. Like his hero-villains, Webster died in a mist.

Reprinted with permission of the Sydney Theatre Company