John Wesbter, fl. 1620. No details of life known. Said to have been clerk of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, and to have belonged to the Merchant Taylors’ Company. Perhaps an actor as well as dramatist. Works (several lost): “The History of Sir Thomas Wyatt” (with Dekker), 1607; “Westward-Hoe” (with Dekker), 1607; “Northward Hoe” (with Dekker), 1607; “The White Divel,” 1612; “A Monumental Columne erected to the living Memory of … Henry, late Prince of Wales,” 1613; “The Devil’s Law-Case,” 1623; “The Tragedy of Dutchesse of Malfy,” 1623; “The Monument of Honour,” 1624; “Appius and Virginia,” 1654; “A Cure for a Cuckold” (with Rowley), 1661; “The Thracian Wonder” (with Rowley), 1661. Collected Works: ed. by A. Dyce (4 vols.), 1830; new edn., 1857.

Personal

  Seldom has the biographer greater cause to lament a deficiency of materials than when engaged on the life of any of our early dramatists. Among that illustrious band John Webster occupies a distinguished place; and yet so scanty is our information concerning him, that in the present essay I can do little more than enumerate his different productions, and adduce proof that he was not the author of certain prose-pieces which have been attributed to him.

  The abrupt withdrawal of Webster from writing for the stage—a step which he seems to have taken when he was little over thirty years of age—points to a sense of a want of harmony between his genius and the theatre…. If it were not absolutely certain that he flourished between 1602 and 1612, we should be inclined to place the period of his activity at least ten years earlier. Although in fact an exact contemporary of Beaumont and Fletcher, and evidently much Shakespeare’s junior, a place between Marlowe and those dramatists seems appropriate to him, so primitive is his theatrical art, so ingenuous and inexperienced his notion of the stage…. Webster is an impressive rather than a dexterous playwright; but as a romantic poet of passion he takes a position in the very first rank of his contemporaries.

The White Devil, 1612

  THE | WHITE DIVEL, | or | The Tragedy of Paulo Giordano | Vrsini, Duke of Brachiano, | With | The Life and Death of Vittoria | Corombona the famous | Venetian Curtizan. | Acted by the Queenes Majesties Seruants. | Written by John Webster. | LONDON, | Printed by N. O. for Thomas Archer, and are to be sold | at his Shop in Popeshead Pallace neere the | Royall Exchange 1612.

  To those who report I was a long time in finishing this tragedy, I confesse I do not write with a goose-quill winged with two feathers; and, if they will needs make it my fault, I must answer them with that of Euripides to Alcestides, a tragick writer: Alcestides objecting that Euripides had onely in three daies composed three verses, whereas himself had written three hundredth; Thou telst truthe (quoth he), but heres the difference, thine shall onely be read for three daies, whereas mine shall continue three ages.

  Methinks a very poor play.

  I never saw anything like the funeral dirge in this play, for the death of Marcello, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in the “Tempest.” As that is of the water, watery; so this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intenseness of feeling, which seems to resolve itself into the element which it contemplates.

  Although I cannot agree with those who regard this tragedy as the masterpiece of its author, it is beyond all doubt a most remarkable work…. The personages of this tragedy—above all that of the heroine—are conceived with the most striking original power and carried out with unerring consistency; but we crave—and crave in vain—some relief to the almost sickening combinations of awe and loathing created by such characters and motives as this drama presents.

  One of the most glorious works of the period. Vittoria is perfect throughout, and in the justly-lauded trial scene she has no superior on any stage. Brachiano is a thoroughly life-like portrait of the man who is completely besotted with an evil woman. Flamineo I have spoken of, and not favourably; yet in literature, if not in life, he is a triumph; and above all the absorbing tragic interest of the play, which it is impossible to take up without finishing, has to be counted in. But the real charm of “The White Devil” is the wholly miraculous poetry in phrases and short passages which it contains. Vittoria’s dream of the yew-tree, almost all the speeches of the unfortunate Isabella, and most of her rival’s, have this merit. But the most wonderful flashes of poetry are put in the mouth of the scoundrel Flamineo, where they have a singular effect.

  In 1612 John Webster stood revealed to the then somewhat narrow world of readers as a tragic poet and dramatist of the very foremost rank in the very highest class. “The White Devil,” also known as “Vittoria Corombona,” is a tragedy based on events then comparatively recent—on a chronicle of crime and retribution in which the leading circumstances were altered and adapted with the most delicate art and the most consummate judgment from the incompleteness of incomposite reality to the requisites of the stage of Shakespeare. By him alone among English poets have the finest scenes and passages of this tragedy been ever surpassed or equalled in the crowning qualities of tragic or dramatic poetry—in pathos and passion, in subtlety and strength, in harmonious variety of art and infallible fidelity to nature.

  The sketchiness of this play, which is not divided into acts and scenes, and progresses with unaccountable gaps in the story, and perfunctory makeshifts of dumb show, has been the wonder of critics. But Webster was particularly interested in his own work as a romantic rather than a theatrical poet, and it must be remembered that after a long apprenticeship in collaboration, “The White Devil” was his first independent play. It reads as though the writer had put in only what interested him, and had left the rest for a coadjutor, who did not happen to present himself, to fill up. The central figure of Vittoria, the subtle, masterful, and exquisite she-devil, is filled up very minutely and vividly in the otherwise hastily painted canvas; and in the trial-scene, which is perhaps the most perfectly sustained which Webster has left us, we are so much captivated by the beauty and ingenuity of the murderess that, as Lamb says in a famous passage, we are ready to expect that “all the court will rise and make proffer to defend her in spite of the utmost conviction of her guilt.”

  Webster’s genius did not find full expression until he wholly freed himself from the trammels of partnership with men of powers inferior to his own. At an unascertained date between 1607 and 1612 he for the first time wrote a play singlehanded, and there evinced such command of tragic art and intensity as Shakespeare alone among Englishmen has surpassed.

Dutchesse of Malfy, 1623

  THE | TRAGEDY | OF THE DVTCHESSE | OF MALFY. | As it was Presented Priuatly, at the Black | Friers; and publiquely at the Globe, By the | Kings Maiesties Seruants | The perfect and exact Coppy, with diuerse | things Printed, that the length of the Play would | not beare in the Presentment | Written by John Webster. | LONDON: | Printed by Nicholas Okes, for Iohn | Waterson, and are to be sold at the | signe of the Crowne, in Paules | Church-yard 1623.

	Crown him a poet, whom nor Rome nor Greece
	Transcend in all their’s 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.

	I never saw thy Duchess till the day
	That she was lively bodied in thy play:
	Howe’er she answer’d her low-rated love
	Her brother’s anger did so fatal prove,
	Yet my opinion is, she might speak more,
	But never in her life so well before.

  All the several parts of the dreadful apparatus with which the death of the Duchess is ushered in, the waxen images which counterfeit death, the wild masque of madmen, the tombmaker, the bellman, the living person’s dirge, the mortification by degrees,—are not more remote from the conceptions of ordinary vengeance, than the strange character of suffering which they seem to bring upon their victim is out of the imagination of ordinary poets. As they are not like inflictions of this life, so her language seems not of this world. She has lived among horrors till she is become “native and endowed unto that element.” She speaks the dialect of despair; her tongue has a smatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale. To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit: this only a Webster can do. Inferior geniuses may “upon horror’s head horrors accumulate” but they cannot do this. They mistake quantity for quality; they “terrify babes with painted devils;” but they know not how a soul is to be moved. Their terrors want dignity, their affrightments are without decorum.

  “The Duchess of Malfy” abounds more in the terrible than “The White Devil.” It turns on the mortal offence which the lady gives to her two proud brothers, Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria, and a cardinal, by indulging in a generous, though infatuated passion, for Antonio, her steward. This passion, a subject always most difficult to treat, is managed in this case with infinite delicacy; and, in a situation of great peril for the author, she condescends, without being degraded, and declares the affection with which her dependant has inspired her, without losing anything of dignity and respect.

  The “Duchess of Malfi” is certainly in a pure and loftier strain; but in spite of the praise which has been lavished on her, we must take the liberty to doubt whether the poor Duchess is “a person” at all. General goodness and beauty, intense though pure affection for a man below her in rank, and a will to carry out her purpose at all hazards, are not enough to distinguish her from thousands of other women; but Webster has no such purpose. What he was thinking and writing of was, not truth, but effect; not the Duchess, but her story; not her brothers, but their rage; not Antonio, her major-domo and husband, but his good and bad fortunes; and thus he has made Antonio merely insipid, the brother merely unnatural, and the Duchess, (in the critical moment of the play,) merely forward. That curious scene, in which she acquaints Antonio with her love for him, and makes him marry her, is, on the whole, painful. Webster himself seems to have felt that it was so; and, dreading lest he had gone too far, to have tried to redeem the Duchess at the end by making her break down in two exquisite lines of loving shame: but he has utterly forgotten to explain or justify her love, by giving to Antonio, (as Shakspeare would probably have done,) such strong specialties of character as would compel, and therefore excuse his mistress’s affection. He has plenty of time to do this in the first scenes, time which he wastes on irrelevant matter; and all that we gather from them is that Antonio is a worthy and thoughtful person. If he gives promise of being more, he utterly disappoints that promise afterwards. In the scene in which the Duchess tells her love, he is far smaller, rather than greater than the Antonio of the opening scene, though (as there) altogether passive. He hears his mistress’s declaration, just as any other respectable youth might; is exceedingly astonished, and a good deal frightened; has to be talked out of his fears till one naturally expects a revulsion on the Duchess’s part into something like scorn or shame, (which might have given a good opportunity for calling out sudden strength in Antonio:) but so busy is Webster with his business of drawing mere blind love, that he leaves Antonio to be a mere puppet, whose worthiness we are to believe in only from the Duchess’s assurance to him that he is perfection of all that man should be; which, as all lovers are of the same opinion the day before the wedding, is not of much importance.

  The total impression left upon the mind by the tragic action of “The Duchess of Malfi” is unsurpassed in depth by anything else known to have been achieved by Webster; nor is the hope unreasonable that so masterly a work may permanently recover possession of the English stage.

  Webster’s “Duchess of Malfi” teaches both the triumphs and the dangers of the dramatic fury. The construction runs riot; certain characters are powerfully conceived, others are wild figments of the brain. It is full of most fantastic speech and action; yet the tragedy, the passion, the felicitous language and imagery of various scenes, are nothing less than Shakespearean. To comprehend rightly the good and bad qualities of this play is to have gained a liberal education in poetic criticism.

  Webster’s masterpiece is “The Duchess of Malfy,” of which it may confidently be alleged that it is the finest tragedy in the English language outside the works of Shakespeare…. It is curious that in a writer so distinguished by care in the working out of detail, we should find so lax a metrical system as marks “The Duchess of Malfy.” Here, again, Webster seems to be content to leave the general surface dull, while burnishing his own favourite passages to a high lustre…. The horrible dumb shows of “The Duchess of Malfy”—the strangled children, the chorus of maniacs, the murder of Cariola, as she bites and scratches, the scuffling and stabbing in the fifth act, are, it appears to me—with all deference to the eminent critics, who have applauded them—blots on what is notwithstanding a truly noble poem, and what, with more reserve in this respect, would have been one of the first tragedies of the world.

  Was first printed in the memorable year which witnessed the first publication of his collected plays. This tragedy stands out among its compeers as one of the imperishable and ineradicable landmarks of literature. All the great qualities apparent in “The White Devil” reappear in “The Duchess of Malfy,” combined with a yet more perfect execution, and utilized with a yet more consummate skill. No poet has ever so long and so successfully sustained at their utmost height and intensity the expressed emotions and the united effects of terror and pity. The transcendent imagination and the impassioned sympathy which inspire this most tragic of all tragedies save “King Lear” are fused together in the fourth act into a creation which has hardly been excelled for unflagging energy of impression and of pathos in all the dramatic or poetic literature of the world.

The Devil’s Law-Case, 1632

  THE DEUILS LAW-CASE. | or, | When Women goe to Law, the | Deuill is full of Businesse, | A new Tragecomœdy. | The true and perfect Copie from the Originall. | As it was approouedly well Acted | by her Maiesties Seruants | Written by Iohn Webster. | London, | Printed by A. M. for Iohn Grismand, and are | to be sold at his Shop in Pauls Alley at the | Signe of the Gvnne. 1623.

  Despite fine passages, a mere “salmagundi.”

  If the playwright took a step forwards in his Roman play, he took several backwards in his incoherent tragi-comedy of “The Devil’s Law-Case.” Here no charm attaches to the characters; the plot moves around no central interest; the structure of the piece, from a stage point of view, is utterly at fault. None the less, this strange play will always have its readers, for Webster’s literary faculty is nowhere exhibited to greater perfection, and the poetry of the text abounds in verbal felicities.

Appius and Virginia, 1654

  In “Appius and Virginia,” printed in 1654, probably after its author’s death, we may consider ourselves justified in recognising a work of his later manhood, if not of his old age. The theme is indeed one which might readily be supposed to have commended itself to Webster’s love of the terrible; but he has treated it without adding fresh effects of his own invention to those which he found ready to his hand. Yet the play has genuine power; and were it not that the action seems to continue too long after the death of Virginia, this tragedy might be described as one of the most commendable efforts of its class. The evenness, however, of its execution, and the absence (except in the central situation) of any passages of a peculiarly striking or startling character, exclude “Appius and Virginia” from the brief list of Webster’s most characteristic productions.

  While the romantic and literary glow of language is severely restrained, there is here a very noticeable advance in every species of dramatic propriety, and “Appius and Virginia” is by far the best constructed of Webster’s plays…. The scenes are largely set, the characters, especially those of Virginius and of Appius, justly designed and well contrasted, while the stiffness of Roman manners, as seen through a Jacobean medium, is not in this case sufficient to destroy the suppleness of the movement nor the pathos of the situation. “Appius and Virginia,” as a poem, will never possess the attractiveness of the two great Italian romances, but it is the best-executed of Webster’s dramas.

  A work which would alone have sufficed to perpetuate the memory of its author among all competent lovers of English poetry at its best.

  “Appius and Virginia” differs largely from the other plays in diction and figure. It is more rhetorical and declamatory, it contains fewer striking and original similitudes; and with a sort of dramatic propriety its language is more latinized and conventional. The attempt is obviously in another vein than the Italianate tragedies of “The White Devil” and “The Duchess of Malfi.”

General

  An Author that liv’d in the Reign of King James the First; and was in those Days accounted an Excellent Poet. He joyn’d with Decker, Marston, and Rowley, in several Plays; and was likewise Author of others, which have even in our Age gain’d Applause…. Mr. Philips has committed a great Mistake, in ascribing several Plays to our Author, and his Associate Mr. Decker; One of which belong to another Writer, whose Name is annexed, and the rest are Anonymous.

  In his pictures of wretchedness and despair, he has introduced touches of expression which curdle the very blood with terror, and make the hair stand erect. Of this, the death of The Dutchesse of Malfy, with all its preparatory horrors, is a most distinguishing proof. The fifth act of his “Vittoria Corombona” shows, also, with what occasional skill he could imbibe the imagination of Shakspeare, particularly where its features seem to breathe a more than earthly wildness.

  Webster has a gloomy force of imagination, not unmixed with the beautiful and pathetic. But it is “beauty in the lap of horror:” he caricatures the shapes of terror, and his Pegasus is like a nightmare.

  His “White Devil” and “Dutchess of Malfi,” upon the whole, perhaps, come the nearest to Shakspeare of any thing we have upon record: the only drawback to them, the only shade of imputation that can be thrown upon them, “by which they lose some colour,” is, that they are too like Shakspeare, and often direct imitations of him, both in general conception and individual expression.

  “Westward Ho” and “Northward Ho” … are full of life and bustle, and remarkable for the light they throw on the manners and customs of the time. Though by no means pure, they are comparatively little stained by that grossness from which none of our old comedies are entirely free. In them the worst things are always called the worst names: the licentious and the debauched always speak most strictly in character; and the rake, the bawd, and the courtezan, are odious in representation as they would be if actually present.

  Is one of the best of our ancient dramatists.

  He possessed very considerable powers, and ought to be ranked, I think, the next below Ford. With less of poetic grace than Shirley, he had incomparably more vigor; with less of nature and simplicity than Heywood, he had a more elevated genius and a bolder pencil. But the deep sorrows and terrors of tragedy were peculiarly his province.

  Webster was formed upon Shakspere. He had no pretensions to the inexhaustible wit, the all-penetrating humour, of his master; but he had the power of approaching the terrible energy of his passion, and the profoundness of his pathos, in characters which he took out of the great muster-roll of humanity and placed in fearful situations and sometimes with revolting imaginings almost beyond humanity…. It is clear what dramatic writers were the objects of Webster’s love. He did not aspire to the “full and heightened style of Master Chapman,” nor would his genius be shackled by the examples of “the laboured and understanding works of Master Jonson.” He belonged to the school of the romantic dramatists.

  John Webster, a mighty and funereal genius, is the next author we shall mention. We can compare his mind to nothing so well as to some old Gothic cathedral, with its arches soaring heavenward, but carved with monsters and angels, with saints and fiends, in grotesque confusion. Gleams of sunlight fall here and there, it is true, through the huge window, but they are coloured with the sombre dies of painted glass, bearing records of human pride and human nothingness, and they fall in long slanting columns, twinkling silently with motes and dusty splendour, upon the tombs of the mighty; lighting dimly up now the armour of a recumbent Templar or the ruff of some dead beauty, and now feebly losing themselves amid the ragged coffins and scutcheons in the vaults below. His fancy was wild and powerful, but gloomy and monstrous, dwelling ever on the vanities of earthly glory, on the nothingness of pomp, not without many terrible hints at the emptiness of our trust, and many bold questionings of human hopes of a hereafter.

  Wesbter’s most famous works are “The Duchess of Malfy” and “Vittoria Corombona,” but we are strongly inclined to call “The Devil’s Law-Case” his best play. The two former are in a great measure answerable for the “spasmodic” school of poets, since the extravagances of a man of genius are as sure of imitation as the equable self-possession of his higher moments is incapable of it. Webster had, no doubt, the primal requisite of a poet, imagination, but in him it was truly untamed, and Aristotle’s admirable distinction between the Horrible and the Terrible in tragedy was never better illustrated and confirmed than in the “Duchess” and “Vittoria.” His nature had something of the sleuth-hound quality in it, and a plot, to keep his mind eager on the trail, must be sprinkled with fresh blood at every turn…. He has not the condensing power of Shakespeare, who squeezed meaning into a phrase with an hydraulic press, but he could carve a cherry-stone with any of the concettisti, and abounds in imaginative quaintnesses that are worthy of Donne, and epigrammatic tersenesses that reminds us of Fuller. Nor is he wanting in poetic phrases of the purest crystallization.

  Webster was one of those writers whose genius consists in the expression of special moods, and who, outside of those moods, cannot force their creative faculties into vigorous action. His mind by instinctive sentiment was directed to the contemplation of the darker aspects of life. He brooded over crime and misery until his imagination was enveloped in their atmosphere, found a fearful joy in probing their sources and tracing their consequences, became strangely familiar with their physiognomy and psychology, and felt a shuddering sympathy with their “deep groans and terrible ghastly looks.” There was hardly a remote corner of the soul, which hid a feeling capable of giving mental pain, into which this artist in agony had not curiously peered…. He is such a spendthrift of his stimulants, and accumulates horror on horror, and crime on crime, with such fatal facility, that he would render the mind callous to his terrors, were it not that what is acted is still less than what is suggested, and that the souls of his characters are greater than their sufferings or more terrible than their deeds. The crimes and the criminals belong to Italy as it was in the sixteenth century, when poisoning and assassination were almost in the fashion; the feelings with which they are regarded are English; and the result of the combination is to make the poisoners and assassins more fiendishly malignant in spirit than they actually were.

  A sombre man, whose thoughts seem incessantly to be haunting tombs and charnel-houses…. No one has equalled Webster in creating desperate characters, utter wretches, bitter misanthropes, in blackening and blaspheming human life, above all, in depicting the shameless depravity and refined ferocity of Italian manners.

  In passing onward to John Webster, we come into the presence of a poet to whom a foremost place has been rarely denied among the later writers of the great age of our drama, and in whom it is impossible not to recognise a genius of commanding originality, though apparently of not very versatile powers. It is most unfortunate that but few plays should have been preserved of which he was the sole author; for it is in these that his most distinctive gifts stand forth with incomparably the greatest clearness, and, as is pointed out by the most adequate of his modern critics, he seems, like Shakspere and Jonson, to have preferred to work alone…. Webster’s most powerful plays and scenes are characterised by something besides their effective appeal to the emotion of terror. He has a true insight into human nature, and is capable of exhibiting the operation of powerful influences upon it with marvellous directness. He is aware that men and women will lay open the inmost recesses of their souls in moments of deep or sudden agitation; he has learnt that on such occasions unexpected contrasts—an impulse of genuine compassion in an assassin, a movement of true dignity in a harlot—are wont to offer themselves to the surprised observer; he is acquainted with the fury and the bitterness, the goad and the after-sting of passion, and with the broken vocabulary of grief. All these he knows and understands, and is able to reproduce, not continually or wearisomely, but with that unerring recognition of supremely fitting occasions which is one of the highest, as it is beyond all doubt one of the rarest, gifts of true dramatic genius.

  He becomes the best critic, almost the discoverer, of Webster, a dramatist of genius so sombre, so heavily coloured, so macabre.

	Thunder: the flesh quails, and the soul bows down.
	Night: east, west, south, and northward, very night.
	Star upon struggling star strives into sight,
	Star after shuddering star the deep storms drown.
	The very throne of night, her very crown,
	A man lays hand on, and usurps her right.
	Song from the highest of heaven’s imperious height
	Shoots, as a fire to smite some towering town.
	Rage, anguish, harrowing fear, heart-crazing crime,
	Make monstrous all the murderous face of Time
	Shown in the spheral orbit of a glass
	Revolving. Earth cries out from all her graves.
	Frail, on frail rafts, across wide-wallowing waves,
	Shapes here and there of child and mother pass.

  John Webster excelled in the delineation of strange and fantastic horrors. He was pre-eminently the dramatist of Death. But his works abound in passages of surprising tenderness and beauty. The vices and crimes which he delighted to paint have, notwithstanding their extravagance, an appearance of terrible reality; and he had the wonderful faculty of surmising and looking into the inmost thoughts and springs of action in the human mind. He was an artist of the highest type.

  Of all these later dramatists, the most Shakespearean is Webster, an artist of agony.

  John Webster, one of Shakspere’s dramatic disciples, delighted in nothing so much as in full-length studies of tragic female figures. There are indeed wonderful creations in his plays beside these—sinister and cynical faces of men apparent in the gloom. But in his greatest dramas all exists for the sake of the one woman after whom each drama is named—the Duchess of Malfi, Webster’s lady of sorrow, and his White Devil, Vittoria Corombona, on whom, splendid in her crime, he turns a high light of imagination that dazzles while we gaze.

  Webster rises to Shakespeare’s shoulder by his sincerity, nobility, and unerring truth to life in its most thrilling moments.

  There are, indeed, wondrous flashes of dramatic power; by whiles, too, there are refreshing openings-out to the light or sinlessness of common day—a lifting of thought and consciousness up from the great welter of crime and crime’s entanglements; but there is little brightness, sparse sunshine, rare panoply of green or blooming things; even the flowers are put to sad offices, and

	“do cover
	The friendless bodies of unburied men.”

When a man’s flower culture gets reduced to such narrow margin as this it does not carry exhilarating odors with it.

  This poet’s morbid imagination affects us like that touch of the dead man’s hand in one of the hideous scenes of his own most famous play.

  Nothing so much as a close and careful study of his imagery can bring home to one the extraordinary originality and power of Webster in his particular sphere. Webster worked consciously, deliberately, and with a thorough command of his materials. His pages are strewn with tropes, and, in spite of their profusion, such is the keenness of his marvelous “analogical instinct” and the dramatic force of his imagination that scarcely ever do they seem forced or out of keeping. Language here seems to reach the extreme of ruthless and biting intensity. There is scarcely any faded imagery, and there are very few conventional tags; everything stands out in sharp lines, as if etched. The characteristic fault of Webster’s imagery, the defect of his peculiar quality, is that he errs if anything on the side of the bizarre, or even of the grotesque. This criticism could be enforced by many citations…. The acrid nature of Webster’s genius is everywhere felt in his pungent use of similitudes. The sardonic character of Flamineo in “The White Devil” is heightened by the irony of his incessant similes. So in “The Duchess of Malfi” Antonio’s rather colorless virtues are artfully depicted through his fondness for sententious comparisons.

  Greater in some respects than any but Shakespeare, is John Webster, who requires but a closer grasp of style and a happier architecture to rank among the leading English poets…. Webster has so splendid a sense of the majesty of death, of the mutability of human pleasures, and of the velocity and weight of destiny, that he rises to conceptions which have an Æschylean dignity; but, unhappily, he grows weary of sustaining them, his ideas of stage-craft are rudimentary and spectacular, and his single well-constructed play, “Appius and Virginia,” has a certain disappointing tameness.

  Webster lacked Shakespeare’s sureness of touch in developing character, and his studies of human nature often suffer from over-elaboration. With a persistence that seems unjustifiable in a great artist, Webster, moreover, concentrated his chief energies on repulsive themes and characters; he trafficked with an obstinate monotony in fantastic crimes. Nevertheless he had a true artistic sense…. Is rarely coarse. In depicting the perversities of passion he never deviated into pruriency, and handled situations of conventional delicacy with dignified reticence.