JOHN WEBSTER
and the
ELIZABETHAN DRAMA
liy
RUPERT BROOKE
1
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UNIVERSITY OF
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JOHN WEBSTER and the
ELIZABETHAN DRAMA
The
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JOHN LANE COMPANY
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JOHN WEBSTER and the
ELIZABETHAN DRAMA
By RUPERT BROOKE
JOHN LANE COMPANY
NEW YORK .-. .-. .-. MCMXVI
Copyright, 1916,
By John Lane Company
Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Company
New York, U.S.A.
V-;
NOTE
This hook was written in 1911-12, and was the
^dissertation' with which the author won his Fellow-
ship at King's College, Cambridge, in 1913.
The page-references are to Dyce's one-volume
edition.
E.M.
4 \J,*<^
C^"' *'"'
PREFACE
I HAVE tried to write a small book about John
Webster. That is to say, I have tried to say
the truth about him, as much of it as is
necessary to enable anyone who reads him to
understand him. I have not tried to explain him
entirely to anyone who has not read him, though
I hope that any person in that condition may
get a rough idea of him from this book.
I have tried to explain Webster for a reader,
but not to explain him away. So I have endeav-
oured to keep to my own province, and not to
trespass on ground reserved for worthier feet —
Webster's. I conceive that there is much that he
can explain better than I. So I have, at least,
abstained from paraphrasing.
To explain Webster's writings it is first neces-
sary to determine what he wrote, and also such
smaller questions as when he wrote it, and how
he came to write it. Such questions, the ques-
tions of "scientific" literary criticism, I deal with
in the Appendices. I have taken some care to
get the most probable answers in each case; for
there is such a lot of bad logic and fudging on
vii
viii PREFACE
such points in modern literary science, that one
always has to go over the whole ground com-
pletely for oneself.
When these points are settled, with as much
certitude as possible, there are still other points
on which it is necessary to have right opinions in
order to understand Webster. One must know
what a play is; one must laiow how the Eliza-
bethan drama arose; and one must know what
the Elizabethan drama was. I have given a
chapter to each of these points; not pretending
to cover the whole ground, or to do the work of
a whole book; but endeavouring to correct some
of the more misleading wrong ideas, and to hint
at some of the more important right ones. These
chapters, of course, though nominally not about
Webster, should be even more important to any
understanding of him than the Appendices. And
I have given two long chapters to the more
direct consideration of what Webster wrote, and
what its more usual characteristics are.
The Bibliography is, I think, fairly complete
with regard to Webster. I did not think it neces-
sary to make a bibliography of books on the
wider subjects.
It may seem, in some cases, as if I contra-
dicted myself in different parts of the book; as,
for instance, when I say that it is impossible to
PREFACE ix
understand a play wholly from the text, and later
seem to believe that I do understand plays wholly
from the text. I think I have not really contra-
dicted myself. Part of the business of the earlier
chapters is to prevent the necessity of continually
repeated qualifications throughout the work. To
express my exact meaning on each occasion
would have meant covering the page with
"in so far as it is possible's," and "I think's," and
"possibly's," and "perhaps's"; which makes the
style feeble and muffles the idea. I have, per-
haps, gone too far in this direction already.
CONTENTS
Preface ....••*
CHAPTEB
I. The Theatre ....
II. The Origins of Elizabethan Drama
III. The Elizabethan Drama .
»^IV. John Webster ....
i V, Some Characteristics of Webster
PAGE
vii
15
38
62
84
123
Appendices
A. The Authorship of the later Appius and Virginia l65
^^. Miscellaneous
C. Sir Thomas Wyatt
D. Westward Ho and Northrvard Ho
E. The Malcontent .
F. The White Devil .
G. The Duchess of Malfi .
H. A Monumental Column
I. The DeviVs Law-case .
J. A Cure for a Cuckold .
1/ Bibliography ....
211
214
222
234
237
246
254
255
260
277
JOHN WEBSTER and the
ELIZABETHAN DRAMA
JOHN WEBSTER
Chapter I
THE THEATRE
Anyone who has read, with any alertness, more
than a little of the mass of critical and editorial
comments, whether of the last three or of the last
three hundred years, upon Elizabethan plays,
must often have felt a helpless and bewildered
irritation at the absence of any standard or uni-
form grounds of judgment; both in the critics,
and, on inspection, in himself. This is not the
place to attempt to lay a deep aesthetic founda-
tion; but, I think, it will be useful to try to fix
the meanings of certain words and phrases, and
to give a provisional answer to some of the more
important questions.
"What is Art?" is a question which most
writers on subjects connected with literature,
painting, plays, music, society, or life, are ready
with an equal cheerfulness to ask or to answer.
They may be right; but to me they seem to make
15
16 JOHN WEBSTER
a gigantic, unconscious, and probably unjustifi-
able assumption. It is quite doubtful, and it is
nowadays continually more doubted, whether the
word "Art" has properly any meaning at all.
But it has so obsessed men's minds, that they
start with an inevitable tendency to believe that
it has a meaning. In the same way, those who
believe in Art are generally inclined to believe in
a single object at which all Art, that is to say all
the arts, aim: Beauty. It may turn out to be
true that both Art and Beauty are real and
useful names; but the attitude of mind that as-
sumes that they are is deplorable. The most
honest and most hopeful course to pursue, is to
say that there are certain kinds of human activity
which seem to hang together in classes, such as
reading books, hearing music, seeing pictures;
and to examine our states of mind while we fol-
low these pursuits, to see how far they are of
one kind in each "art," and in all, and whether
all successful works of art do seem to us to have
some quality in common which can be called
Beauty.
The situation seems to me as if men had agreed
to say "The emotions caused in human beings
by pins, walking-sticks, feathers, and crowbars,
acting through the tactile sense, are all of one
unique kind. It is called Grumph. Pins, etc.,
THE THEATRE 17
are called the grumphs. Grumph is one of the
holiest things in this melancholy world," and so
forth. And soon they'd say, "But, philosophi-
cally, what is Grumph?" Then they'd argue.
They would come to some conclusion which, as
you cannot tickle with a crowbar, would pre-
clude tickling with feathers; and they would ex-
communicate all those who used feathers for
tickling with the formula, "That is not
Grumph!" They would write Treatises on any
one grumph, on the "Pin-grumph," say, care-
fully keeping in mind all the time that what they
said would have to be more or less true of the
other grumphs too. Some would lay great im-
portance on the fact that, as you were tickled
with feathers, you were, in a way, also tickled by
being beaten with a walking-stick. Others
would discover the ferule of the pin, and the
quill, shaft, and two vanes of barbs of the crow-
bar. An Oxford don would arise to declare that
all grumph continually approximated to the con-
dition of pins. . . .
I have put the affair, as I see it, in a figure,
and with other names, in order to show its un-
reason more clearly, and far more shortly, than
is possible if the prejudice-clad and elusive word
"Art" is used. In either case, the sensible reply
to it all is, "We have sticks and pins, plays and
18 JOHN WEBSTER
poems. These we know. These are, as certainly
as anything is, real classes of things. Begin from
them, and from the emotions they move. And
see if thence you climb upwards to Grumph, to
Art.''
This attitude does, directly or indirectly, shut
out various bands of ideas and thinkers ; my ob-
jections to each of which I could state at length.
A short enumeration of these tendencies of mind
in viewing questions of "Art" may hint why,
psychologically at any rate, they seem to me non-
starters. In the first place, I do not admit the
claims of anyone who says, "There is such a
thing as Beauty, because when a man says,
'This is beautiful,' he does not mean, 'This is
lovely,' or, 'This provokes the cosmic emotion.'
There is such a thing as Art; because the sen-
tence: 'Pictures, Poetry, Music, etc., are Art,'
is not the same as 'Pictures, Poetry, Music, etc.,
are Music, Poetry, Pictures k. t. x.' " I am not
concerned with what men may mean. They fre-
quently mean and have meant the most astound-
ing things. It is, possibly, true that when men
say, "This is beautiful," they do not mean "This
is lovely." They may mean that the esthetic
emotion exists. My only comments are that it
does not follow that the aesthetic emotion does
THE THEATRE 19
exist, and that, as a matter of fact, they are
wrong.
But the only way to prove them right or wrong
is by introspection into our states of mind when
we hear music or see pictures.
It has been acutely said that, in philosophy,
it is important to give the right answers, but even
more important to ask the right questions. So
here. Better than to ask "What is Art?" is it
to ask "What do you feel before this picture?"
"Before that picture?" "Is there anything com-
mon between your feelings in these two cases?"
"What do you feel in hearing this, and that, piece
of music?" "Is there anything common?" and
then, "Is there anything common between what
you feel before all these pictures and what you
feel in hearing all this music?" "And if so, what
is it?" "Is it important?" One of the perils
attending on those who ask the first question is
that they tend, as all men do, to find what they
are looking for: a common quality in Art. And
also that they tend to exalt what they discover
for this quality, above the others that are to be
found in any of the arts. People who start in
this way are apt to be, practically, a most in-
tolerable nuisance both to critics and to artists;
whether it is Art or any one art that they would
tie to their rule. Art is Pattern; and a novel
20 JOHN WEBSTER
that lacks "pattern" is not Art, and therefore
bad. Art is the perception of the individual
case; so morality plays are illegitimate. Art is
the emphasising of the generality; so Hamlet,
except in so far as the hero represents all neuro-
paths, is a perverse and downward path from
the moralities. Art must be moral; so Shake-
speare's sonnets are what Hallam thought them.
Art has no connection with morality ; so Paradise
Lost and Pilgrim's Progress are, artistically,
worthless. A play must display a "develop-
ment,'' a tragedy must involve a conflict ; music
must have a tune ; a picture may not tell a story.
. . . The list of these perilous and presumptu-
ous a priori limitations could go on for ever. Of
the wrong ways of approaching the subject of
"Art," or even of any one art, this is the worst
because it is the most harmful.
But there are other ways in which precon-
ceptions and assumptions about the thing to be
looked for mislead, in the consideration of Art.
Croce rather naively begins by noting that "aes-
thetic" has been used both for questions of Art
and, in general and in accordance with its deriva-
tion, for perception. So he sets out to discover
what meaning it can really have, to apply to
both. He takes it for the one necessary condi-
tion a true answer about "^Esthetics" must sat-
THE THEATRE 21
isfy, that it shall explain how Art and Percep-
tion are both included. Having found such an
explanation, he is satisfied.
To take a different side, most of the uphold-
ers of the Einfiihlungsdsthetik seem to have
founded their view on the experiences of the spec-
tator of certain visual arts, especially painting
or architecture. In so far, it is valuable. But
when it is contorted to cover the other arts, the
result is ludicrous. So those who accept the
Nacherleben theory, would appear to be extend-
ing what is probably true about drama to spheres
where it is desperately irrelevant.
It is said that the figure of Helen, whom men
have so eagerly followed and sought, was a
phantasm, covered by which there lurked, in fact,
a knot of mercantile interests of Greece and the
Hellespont and the Black Sea; even as, some
claim, men who have died for the love of Eng-
land, or Germany, or Italy, have, in reality,
only given themselves for a few rich people. Art
and Beauty have proved such delusive Helens.
It is an extraordinary crowd, pouring along di-
verse roads, that has followed them. The on-
looker is moved to amazement and derision. Ros-
setti's "View Halloo!" was less lonely than he
dreamt. More than all illusory goddesses has
My Lady Beauty been chased or stalked, as a
22 JOHN WEBSTER
rule passionately, often irretrievably, "in what
fond flight, how many ways and days!" The
ingenuity of the chase has been stupendous.
"They sought her with thimbles^ they sought her with care;
They pursued her with forks and hope."
The thimble of an a priori generalisation has
not closed down on My Lady, nor the fork of
Dialectic impaled her. For the quest was vain
from the beginning. It is that conviction that
enables me so cursorily to leave such knight-er-
rants to their task — of "bounding along on the
tip of their tail" or "still clutching the inviola-
ble shade," according to the way you regard
them. We had best cultivate our gardens of
the arts. Then we may turn round one day to
discover Beauty at our elbow — if she exists at
all. If she doesn't, we shall at least have learnt
horticulture.
I can descend, then, with a clear conscience
to occupy myself with the single plots of ground
called Drama and Tragedy. But first I must
deal with two other ways of approaching the
question of the arts — for the arts, as human
activities, can be classed together, even though
there be no such obvious similarity discernible
in the states of mind they produce, no "aesthetic
emotion." There are some who would view it
THE THEATRE 23
all from the point of view of the artist. "Art,"
they say, "is primarily a creative function of the
artist; other people may profit, afterwards, if it
so happens. Cricket is a game played by twen-
ty-two men, under certain rules: which may or
may not be watched by a crowd. This is true,
even though the game would not have been
played but for the crowd. Art is no more to be
explained in terms of the chance result on the
spectators than cricket is to be explained in
terms of the feelings of the crowd. Art is an
amazing creative experience of the artist: what
happens to the result of his travail is neither here
nor there. A good picture is one in the creating
of which the artist had a good state of mind.
And the utmost a spectator can hope for is to
approximate, in beholding a work of art, to the
state of mind the artist had in creating it."
The last sentence, perhaps, expresses a view
that need not logically go with the foregoing
belief. For the whole position, I do not think
it can, ultimately, be refuted. It becomes a
question of words, or of the point of view. From
where I stand, I seem to see certain activities,
and I consider them according to the aspect that
seems to me most important. If another man
views and describes them from behind, I can only
lament it. There are things to be said against
24 JOHN WEBSTER
him. Certainly, if importance is to weigh in the
matter, the effects on the audience are more im-
portant than the state of the artist. He could,
cogently, answer that corn is corn, though the
most important thing about it is that it goes to
make bread. A greater difficulty is the extraor-
dinary variety of experience of the creative
artist. Blake thought he was taking down his
writings from the dictation of an angel. Some
writers solemnly think their things out. Others
are "inspired"; or proceed almost by automatic
writing. Some are highly excited and irrespon-
sible; others detached, cynical, and calculating.
Many artists, it would seem, are never aware
of their work of art as a whole, but build it up,
patching and revising in little pieces. A play
by Beaumont and Fletcher, with the scenes ap-
portioned out, would be difficult to judge by this
creative theory. Certainly, if you take the case
of a dancer, who can never quite see herself danc-
ing, it seems clear that the important whole con-
nected with this activity is in the state of mind
of the spectator.
Another common tendency, a fatal and ridicu-
lous one, is that of the historical school. Both
the psychology of the artist and the history of
the arts are interesting, and may be valuable,
topics of investigation. But it should be clearly
THE THEATRE 25
recognised that the history of the forms of the
arts has no direct connection with the arts as they
are. Football originated in a religious ritual;
but it is not, necessarily, religious. The cooking
of roast pork arose from the burning of a house ;
but he would be a foolish gastronomist who, in
considering cooking, laid great emphasis on the
fundamental element of arson in that art. So
there are some who say that the arts originated in
a need to let off the superfluous energies of man,
not needed to further or secure his livelihood;
and therefore are essentially of the nature of
play. Others declare that the sexual instinct
was at the bottom of the beginnings of the arts,
and that all Art is, fundamentally, sexuality.
Others again would, for similar reasons, find it
a religious activity. To all such we can only
reply, "If your historical analysis is true, it is
indeed a wonderful world in which we live; but
now, in 1912, poetry and football are not sex
or religion; they are poetry and football."
There are theatres; places where you see
things. The things you see there generally try
to represent or imitate reality, and are frequently
accompanied by words, in which cases they are
called "plays." One of the first and most im-
portant distinctions between plays, music, and
poetry on the one hand, and pictures and sculp-
26 JOHN WEBSTER
ture on the other, is that the element of duration
enters into the first group. There is no especial
point in a picture at which you begin or end look-
ing at it; no fixed order of sensations. There is
just the picture. But the order of sensations
which a play should arouse in you is fixed be-
forehand, and essential. This fact of duration
gives theatrical art two features. It can arouse
all the emotions that can be got through the con-
secution of events; and it can employ the suc-
cession of emotions in the mind. Both these
are important. Take the latter first. It is obvi-
ous that, though he may demand certain knowl-
edge in the spectator before the beginning of the
play, the artist cannot demand any definite state
of mind. He can only claim to be presented with
an expectant and fairly blank normal mind.
After that he is responsible. And at any moment
during the play, his choice of the emotions to
arouse is conditioned by the emotions already
aroused. Each situation must be planned, each
line written, with regard to the effect of what has
gone before, not only logically, but psychologic-
ally, on the audience. The continuity of the play
must be an emotional continuity, even more than
a rational one: not necessarily, of course, the
same emotion continuously, but necessarily har-
monious ones, I do not mean to suggest that the
THE THEATRE 27
spectator of a play experiences a number of defi-
nite emotions, one at a time, each lasting three
seconds, consecutive. His state of mind is com-
plex; and while some perceptions or emotions
flash with infinite swiftness through it, others last
and colour the contents of subsequent states of
mind for some time. It is these last that are
most important, but the whole mental and emo-
tional experience has a cumulative effect. It is
as if a stream of water of various heat was trick-
ling through a basin. The heat of the water in
the basin at any moment would be affected by
the heat of the basin, which in turn would be
a result of the past heats of all the water that
had gone through before. Only, heat is simple,
and the succession of emotions and sensations is
manifold and complex. The merit and kind of
the play, in a sense the play itself, lie in the whole
curve of these states of mind. That is the most
important thing about plays, to which every-
thing, ultimately, must be referred. I can more
easily imagine a play good in which all the char-
acters of the first four acts vanished, and entirely
new ones came on in the fifth, with an entirely
new plot, so long as the emotions aroused were
harmonious, than one in which the successive
states of mind clashed.
What a man generally refers to when he
28 JOHN WEBSTER
speaks of a play, and of the goodness and quali-
ties of it, is a memory of this succession of states
of mind, a kind of foreshortened view of it, an
emotional precis or summary. A good critic is
he who can both feel a play perfectly at the time,
and sum up its particular taste and intensity
perfectly, for his own reference, in this retro-
spective summary. The process of summarising
a play thus involves the abstraction of various,
more or less common elements of the successive
states of mind the play produces, and the con-
cocting them into one imagined taste or state of
mind, "the play." All these summaries are of
something the same kind; so the habit of think-
ing of plays thus leads men to think that there
is some common quality in all of them — at least,
in all serious ones — "beauty" and a common "ses-
thetic emotion" always in the mind of all spec-
tators of plays. I believe that honest introspec-
tion of one's states of mind during a play, will
show that there is no one quality one can call
"beauty" in all successful serious plays. If there
is any meaning at all in the word "beauty," my
emotion at lago's temptation of Othello, or
Lear's "Prithee, undo this button," is in no way
a consciousness of beauty; and though there is,
perhaps, something in my state of mind — the
shape of it, so to speak — which is the same when
THE THEATRE 29
I watch any tragedy, it is only due, I think, to
the fact that all tragedies I know have a certain
common quality of being partly like life; I do
not find this something in my mind when I am
watching pure dancing.
A play is good in proportion as the states of
mind during the witnessing of it are, in sum,
good. The good of these states of mind is, in
practice, very much dependent on the pleasur-
ableness of them, and proportionate to it. Much
more so than in real life, where the consciousness
of virtue makes some unpleasant states good.
But pleasure is not a perfect criterion of good,
even in the theatre. For a performance that pro-
vokes lust would move pleasant states of mind,
but not good ones.
If this is granted, the difficulty is: in whom
is a play to move good states of mind, in order
to be called good? Obviously, not only in me.
A play in Russian might be very good, and yet
only bore me, because I couldn't understand it.
On the other hand, I do not think it fair to call
a play good which can be understood by nobody
but the author. Everybody is familiar, in the
realm of literature, with the writer who is im-
mensely pleased with his own poem because of
the emotions it evokes in him. The phrase "the
sun is setting" recalls to him the purple and
30 JOHN WEBSTER
green glory that moved him to this inadequate
expression. But it will not affect anyone else in
the same way, so we rightly refuse to call the
poem good. Obscurity in an author is, ulti-
mately, a fault. A family of my acquaintance
uses a private and peculiar synonjTn of their
own childish invention for "hand," the word
"nopen." ^ If one of them wrote a poem con-
taining this word, it would affect him very much,
because of the aura of associations around it.
But the rest of the world would find it mean-
ingless. It would not be a good poem. One is
reduced to saying that a good play means a play
that would be likely to stir good states of mind
in an intelligent man of the same nation, class,
and century as the author. It follows that a
good Elizabethan play is a play that would have
been good in Elizabethan times; and not a play
that is good to us, with our different ideas. The
two categories coincide to a great extent. But
their differences are important.
And it follows that all those literary qualities
that answer to patine in works of art — quaint-
ness, old-fashionedness, interest as illustrating a
bygone age — are irrelevant. I had rather read
an interesting book originally worthless, than a
fine poem in a language I cannot understand.
* Because it opens.
THE THEATRE 31
But it would be misleading to call the former a
better book.
Whether the states of mind produced by a
play were good or not, must be decided by intro-
spection. The object of most critical enquiries
is to discover what sort of effect different things
in the theatre have on these states of mind. It
is obvious if one examines one's consciousness
during a play, that several different classes of
object fill and move it. There is sound. Music,
or the mere melody of words, impresses and
pleases. There is the further literary pleasure of
the language, apart from the mere sense; and
sometimes there is metre. There is movement,
varying from absolute dancing to mere imitation
of life. There is, in most theatrical perform-
ances, the story. And there is the realism of the
piece ; i.e. its value as impressing us with the sense
of its reality.
If we exclude pure dancing, all performances
in theatres have some value as connected with
reality. To discover what it is, one has to con-
sider one of the widest and most important psy-
chological questions connected with the theatre,
the question of convention.
To say that one feels the reality of an ordinary
play without believing it, is a fairly accurate de-
scription of one's attitude. It would be better
32 JOHN WEBSTER
to put it in this way: the feeling of reality, the
emotion of conviction, of faith, is a purely psy-
chological one. It is this that plays aim at pro-
ducing. It is not the same emotion we have in
real life. In real life one does not feel "He is
really there, talking to me!" One takes it for
granted. He is there. This is also present to
some degree when one is witnessing a play, but
it is the negative and less valuable side of the
emotion. The former, the positive feeling of
reality, does not tend to result in action. The
latter does permit of various emotions resulting
in action. So there has to be a permanent inhi-
bition of such action ; or, to put it in another way,
you accept the convention of the actors, the
absent fourth wall (on the modern stage), and
so on. It was in the want of this inhibition that
the wrongness of that Italian's attitude lay, who,
at a performance of Hamlet^ was so wrought
upon that he rose from his place in the pit, and
shot Claudius. Many find it difficult to under-
stand the attitude of the human mind about such
convention. They either say, "Absence of scen-
ery destroys the illusion," or "You must know
it isn't true." The accepting of a convention
means that one says, "Suppose Romans talked
English blank verse, then " and gives oneself
to the play; or, to put it another way, one puts
THE THEATRE 33
a lid on one's knowledge that Romans didn't talk
English blank verse. Ignorant of that, one can
believe the rest.
This is one of the most natural and deep-
rooted instincts in men. We do not want illu-
sion; we only ask that conventions should be
made and kept. But it is important that they
should be kept. The artist can make any amount
of conventions; but, once made, he must not
break them. It is obvious in children. A grown-
up can say, "Suppose you are a hen, and she is
a steam-roller, and I am the King of Portugal,"
and they will carry the play out with entire ac-
ceptance of this, absolute appreciation of the
drama ensuing. But if the grown-up breaks
from his regal speech and behaviour a moment
to address a remark, in his own person, to some
outsider or to the steam-roller in its private exist-
ence, the grief and dismay of the children is
prodigious and unexpected. Observation or
memory will assure one that their pain is purely
aesthetic. It is what we feel when a dramatist
breaks or misuses one of the conventions.
The artist's business, then, is to make these
various conventions, and, within them, to impress
the spectator as much as possible with the sense
of reality. There are many ways of doing this;
realism in any one one branch — in the chain of
34 JOHN WEBSTER
events, in the gestures of the actors, in the style
of speech, in the truth to life of the characters,
or in the scenery — will do to start the feehng of
reality, and it will then gather force from the
general power of the play. Or there are unreal-
istic ways of impressing the spectator with real-
ity, through mere literary or theatrical power.
It is to be noticed that in some of these things,
realism means breaking a convention and setting
up a more realistic one, and is consequently com-
parative. With speech, for example, realism
means more realistic speech than one is accus-
tomed to. Robertson's Caste was realistic in this
direction, in its day. When we had got used to
that, Mr. Shaw's plays, with their more natural-
istic speech, appeared, and seemed to us more
realistic. They, in their turn, ring now old-
fashioned by the side of more modern plays, the
dialogue of which seems to us, for a time, start-
lingly and triumphantly like real life.
If one keeps in mind the fact that the ultimate
classification of plays, for aesthetic purposes,
must be by the general tone of the states of mind
they evoke, the endeavour to distinguish Trag-
edy from Comedy, and to define Tragedy, by
subject-matter, appears rather misleading.
Tragedy may have to have a "hero," it may in-
volve death, it may require a conflict. All we
THE THEATRE 35
know is that, in the two or three varieties of
Tragedy we are acquainted with that have hith-
erto been evolved, these things are generally
present. The duty of critics is rather to decide
how far it is probable that a play with a hero will
evoke deeper "Tragic" feeling than a play with-
out one, and such half-technical and quantita-
tive questions.
The emotions of a spectator are produced in
various ways, and through the two channels of
the eye and ear. Performances can mix their
appeals through these channels in any propor-
tion. Pantomime can appeal, very powerfully,
through the eye alone. A blind man could get
a great deal of enjoyment out of some plays.
But honest introspection will convince anyone
that a very large part of the appeal made by a
performance of the kind of play Hamlet or The
Duchess of Malfi is, comes through the eye.
Would one rather be bhnd or deaf at such a
performance? It is a comprehensible and com-
mon, but dangerous fault, to over-emphasise the
importance of the printed text to the whole play.
It is true that the romantic halo and additions of
beauty to the general lines of the play, came, in
Elizabethan plays, very little in the things you
could look at; almost entirely in the words. But
the story itself was told visually as well as audi-
36 JOHN WEBSTER
bly. The Elizabethans were above all men of
the theatre, and planned performances. It is
important always to keep this in mind when read-
ing their "plays," always to be trying to visualise
the whole performance from the text, and to
judge it so, and always to look with suspicion on
those who judge the text as literature. It may
be good literature, sometimes ; but it was not pri-
marily that. To judge The Duchess of 3Ialfi
from the book of the words which we happen to
possess is a little like judging a great picture by
a good photograph of it. The general plan is
given you, and you see all the lines, and shapes,
and shading; and you have to supply the colour
by an effort of the imagination. Much genuine
aesthetic pleasure can be got from this; but no
one would be so rash as to assume that, after
that, he knew the picture. With plays, people
are more presumptuous. But an honest man
will sadly have to acknowledge that, in the text,
we have only the material for a rough, partial,
and hesitating appreciation of The Duchess of
Malfi; and that this is the truer because it is an
Elizabethan play, that is to say, it is written in
a language somewhat different from ours, and
pronounced differently too, and it was per-
formed in conditions we do not completely know
and cannot at all realise. It was composed for
THE THEATRE 87
an audience accustomed to the platform stage
and no scenery; which we can never be. It was
composed for the stage, and we judge it as liter-
ature ; we are only readers. It is right enough to
attempt to realise imaginatively Elizabethan
plays as plays. It is right enough to admire
their great literary merits and their rather acci-
dental power as study-drama. But, after all,
we have only the text — and that a not always
trustworthy one — one factor of several in the
play, a residue, fragments of the whole. We are
like men who possess sweet-smelling shards of
a jar which once held perfumes, and know how
fragrant it must have been; but the jar is broken,
and the perfumes lost.
Chapter II
THE ORIGINS OF ELIZABETHAN
DRAMA
It needs the imaginative sympathy of a good
anthropologist to understand the real nature of
the various progenitors of the Elizabethan
drama; and it needs the intuition of a good psy-
chologist to interpret it. Luckily much of the
outer history, names, dates, and facts, together
with a good deal of understanding explanation,
has been given us by such writers as Professor
Creizenach, and, above all, by Mr. Chambers.
Subsequent works, such as The Cambridge His-
tory of English Literature, merely follow on
his lines, sometimes slightly varying relative im-
portances, nothing more. But as one reads the
array of facts and the brilliantly powerful gen-
eralisations and inductions of JNIr. Chambers, or
the patient condensations of his successors, it is
impossible not to feel the full sea of scepticism.
Where we have records, do we really understand ?
It is hard enough, four-fifths of the books now
written on them witness, not to be wholly out of
38
ORIGINS OF DRAMA 39
touch with the Elizabethans themselves. But
they are our brothers and fathers. These others,
these white-faced savages who seem to beckon
and move in the fog of the Middle Ages or the
deeper night behind — what have they to do with
us? A surface likeness of name and tongue will
not hide their foreignness. Their hearts are dif-
ferent, and distant from ours. They live in an-
other universe. The unconscious worshippers
of a vegetation-god, the audience of a scoj), the
spectators of a miracle-play — what was really in
their minds? We triumphantly know that the
Feast of Fools was celebrated at Tournai on the
eve of Holy Innocents, 1498, that an interlude
was given at King's Lynn on Corpus Christi
1385, that the processional religious drama was
acted on "pageants," and so forth. But what
were the people thinking, as the waggons rolled
by or the actors came out? How like was it to
an Elizabethan's feeling as he watched The
Tragedy of Byron? or to ours when we see The
Importance of Being Earnest? It is absurd to
pretend we know.
Such are the misgivings with which the honest
student looks back on "the origins of the
drama." He can pretend he sees how the "plat-
form-stage" arose, and passed into the "picture-
stage"; he can cheat himself into believing he
40 JOHN WEBSTER
has established the generations of an Enghsh
dramatic form; but what, in our time and race,
is the history of those comphcated states of mind
the witnessing of Hamlet breeds in us — that he
dare only wonder.
If he looks beyond the Middle Ages he finds
at first more familiar things. Seneca's plays fall
recognisable on his modern hearing ; and if those
were never on the stage, other tragedies and
farces which we could, it is imaginable, under-
stand, if not applaud, held the Roman ear. And
the modern eye greets even more gladly finer,
less recorded, performances. The best taste in
Rome loved the intricate exquisite tragedies of
the x^^p^^o<f>oi, the dancers. We glibly call
them, allow literary people to call them, the
decadent successors of the drama. They may,
we can believe now, have awoken passionate
ecstasies of emotion, beyond our dreams; but
they could not be handed down. These "choreo-
drames" have perished. So we comfortably fall
in with the assumption of those who practise
literature, that drama, that queer and monstrous
birth, is the God of the theatre. Literary people
are very kind to each other; and all-powerful
over civilisation. Through them come our his-
tory, facts, ideas, and arguments; and so our
valuations. We see all things through their
ORIGINS OF DRAMA 41
mists. The feet of the dancers throb "No !", their
heads jerk argument and dialectic to us; we do
not heed. We have read of Talfourd, and he will
outlive Taglioni. The other arts present them-
selves naked, to be accepted as they are. Only
literature continually weaves laurels, and is for
ever crowning herself.
But the arts had always an enemy, especially
the arts of the theatre. The plays we know of
and the dancing we ignore were equally threat-
ened by religion, who brought with her the blind
forces of asceticism and morality. Any emo-
tional and absorbing view of the universe that
throws the value of life over into the next world,
naturally regards things of this world as means
rather than ends. And so it always tends to com-
bine with and use that deep instinct in human
nature, the instinct to treat all things as means,
which is called Puritanism. For eighteen hun-
dred years, religion, when it has been strong
enough, has persecuted or starved the arts. At
times, when it has grown shallow, it has allowed
a thin subservient art to flourish beneath it; an
art that, ostensibly educating men to be in some
way useful, for this life or the next, couldn't help
treating them, for a stolen moment, as ends.
Such, perhaps, was the pictorial art of the Mid-
dle Ages in Italy. But in general the arts have
42 JOHN WEBSTER
been kept pretty well under, especially the arts
of the theatre, creeping slowly out when religion
has slept, as in the eighteenth century, or some-
times liberated by such splendid bursts of irre-
ligion as produced the Elizabethan drama in
England.
The early fathers of the Church embodied the
spirit of religion, knew the Will of God, as
clearly in this as in most matters. It is amusing
to see that Arius alone went so far as pleading
for even a Christian theatre. Here, too, he was
a lonely light. All the orthodox makers of Chris-
tianity were venomous against spectacula. Like
children saving up for one great treat. Chris-
tians were consoled by Tertullian for the loss of
theatres in this world, by the promise of the
future spectacle of the exquisite and eternal suf-
fering or richly comic writhing of play-actors
and dramatists. The forces of evil triumphed.
And the theatre was lost more swiftly and com-
pletely than the rest of civilisation, when the
double night of barbarism and Christianity set-
tled down over Europe.
The long, long rebirth of the Theatre was a
process of roughly the same kind in nearly all
European countries. But at present I am chiefly
concerned with England. For this country the
forces that led to the reappearance of theatrical
ORIGINS OF DRAMA 4S
art and the drama are generally divided into four
groups. There were the various travelling min-
strels and entertainers; the folk- festivals and
folk-plays; the religious drama; and the influ-
ence of the classics. The relative importance of
some of the earlier fountains of the English
drama has been mistaken, through false psychol-
ogy. Great weight is always laid on the various
popular festivals and games, and the unconscious
relics of old religions. They are said to be ex-
amples of the beginning of mimetic art. If peo-
ple find a participant in a May-festival taking
the name of "The Queen," or a member of a
dance assuming a personality with the name of
"Ginger-breeches," they stretch delighted fin-
gers, crying, "The origins of drama!" It is an
error. It is not true that "the practice which
lies at the root of dramatic art and of the pleas-
ure to be gained from it" is "that of pretending
to be someone or something else." ^ That is
merely what lies at the root of being an actor;
and only one of the things even there, as anyone
who has known amateur actors can testify. As
such, it is but one of the human instincts which,
as it happens, enable us to satisfy our love for
seeing drama. It has no more to do with "the
pleasure to be gained from dramatic art" than
* C. H. E. L., vol. v., p. 28.
44 JOHN WEBSTER
the desire for fame which made Keats write, or
the desire for expression which made Wagner
compose, have to do with poetry or music. They
are conditions; at the most, indispensable condi-
tions. The point of an art is in the state of mind
of the recipient.
"The poet sings because he must;
We read because we will."
Certain pleasant and valuable states of our minds
when we see it, are what distinguishes dramatic
art. Only such causes as produced them, or
earlier forms of them, are directly relevant to a
history of the drama or the theatre. Folk-games
and festivals, and even folk-drama, have, there-
fore, it seems to me, nearly no relevance to the
history of the English drama.
What is much more important is, of course,
the religious drama. Religion, incessantly and
half-consciously hostile to the arts, has inces-
santly and half-consciously fostered them.
Every activity of the mind of man is both end
and means; and it is as impossible for religion
to confine art to be useful, as it is for the pure
"hedonist" to make it merely an end. When the
first moralist discovered that by putting his ad-
vice into a rhymed couplet he interested and im-
pressed the people more, he opened the flood-
ORIGINS OF DRAMA 45
gates. There soon came along somebody who
thought more of the jingle than of the morality.
The moralist was powerless to prevent him.
Thence follow Martial, Villon, English folk-
songs, the Earl of Rochester's play, Baudelaire,
and all the abominations of the holy. As the
earliest Christian artist sought, in illustrating
some incident from Christ's life, to enrich Truth
with Beauty, the ghostly, unborn fingers of the
Breughels and Felicien Rops guided his brush.
So while Christianity was busily disinfecting ""7
the front hall, the most dreadful smells were j
starting again in the scullery. As early as the i
fourth century, before she was yet able to tri-
umph completely in the defeat of the pagan
theatre, the Church had begun to show forth part
of the greatest drama in her universe, by repre-
sentation, and with all the pomp and wonder of
the highest dramatic art. Those who admit the
existence of other varieties of theatrical art be-
sides the entirely realistic, must recognise that
the state of mind of the spectator of the INIass is
strongly aesthetic. Other elements enter, but they
combine, not clash, wdth this. The fact the spec-
tator thinks that what is being represented is
true does not make the whole thing undramatic.
It becomes a variety of drama, as portrait-paint-
ing is a variety of pictorial art, but with less dis-
46 JOHN WEBSTER
cordant ends than the portraitist must try to
serve. That the importance of the Mass is quite
other than aesthetic is irrelevant. Considered in
the hght of the states of mind of the spectators
of that time, the Mass must have been great
drama as surely as Giotto's pictures of the life
of Christ were great pictorial art.
Other services and ceremonies of the Church
followed in admitting more or less of drama.
The history of them, the Quem quceritis trope and
the rest, had been worked out and often related.
The progress from few to many occasions for
gratifying the theatrical instinct in men was in-
evitable. More elaborate as well as more numer-
ous, as the centuries went on, grew the liturgical
dramas. They soon began to be transported out-
side the churches; finally to be played by lay-
men. More and more scenes from the Bible and
from legend were dramatised and performed.
They became definitely amusing and interesting
for the people, quite apart from the lessons
they might teach. Rather too much stress has
been laid, naturally, on the great cycles, of Ches-
ter, York, Coventry, and elsewhere, that have
survived. The accident of their existence must
not make us forget that, in church and out, espe-
cially l out, there were innumerable miracle and
mystery plays continually being played through
ORIGINS OF DRAMA 47
England in the two or three hundred years be-
fore Elizabeth. Every little town and village
seems to have had them. They were the ordinary
food of the theatrical instincts of the people. We
cannot understand them now — what there is left.
They are far from our ideas of drama, and by
our standards they fail. We can see that some
of the episodes were funny, that others had
pathetic or tragic value, or a queer vitality of
characterisation. But the whole seems incoher-
ent, disjointed, and "inartistic." Careful writers
go through them, picking out bits of "realistic
humour" in one place, and "true literary feeling"
in another. It is meaningless; a prattling rela-
tion of which parts of these plays appeal to a
twentieth century professor. What did those
curious mediasvals feel when they were watching
them? We cannot tell. They may have had as
profound and passionate emotions as a play of
Ibsen's stirs in us. But as we do not know we
cannot affirm that this mediaeval drama was good
or bad; any more than we can for the Greek
drama. Which of the two, for instance, was the
greater? It is like a deaf mute having to judge
whether Strauss or Mozart is the greater opera-
maker. Judging from the librettos, and from
watching conductors, he might guess that Strauss
was more interesting, Mozart more melodious.
48 JOHN WEBSTER
. . . He could play with inferences. ... So
(whatever may be claimed by Greek scholars)
must we confess almost complete ignorance about
the medieval drama. Some things can be said.
It was certainly narrow; and it cannot have had
those qualities of concentration and "dramatic
unity," that are necessary for great dramatic art
as we are used to know it. But I think there
may have been, to the contemporary, more con-
nection and significance in many of these series
of plays than the modern will allow. Or rather,
the modern sometimes will admit it intellectually,
but he does not realise it emotionally. I can
conceive the mediaeval mind (the exceptional
mediaeval mind, I admit, for the ordinary childish
one must have viewed scene after scene with that
transient delight, on a background of reverence,
with which schoolboys read Henry the Fourth —
they find bits very interesting, and they know it's
all for their education) tasting in each episode
both the episode itself and the whole, in such a
way that, finally, that whole loomed out pecu-
liarly solid, majestic, and impressive. The mind
would, from its ordinary bent of religious and
moral thought, be prepared to receive the play
(or cycle) in just this way; and the whole thing
would fall into these predestined mental channels
with immense accumulating force and power.
ORIGINS OF DRAMA 49
Just as the Agamemnon was meant for, had its
significance for, a mind naturally thinking in
terms of v(3pL<s and art]; so, perhaps, a mediaeval
series of plays could only find their value in a
mind thinking naturally and immediately in
terms of the whole Bihlical story, theologically
interpreted. To the Greek mind the rugs laid
down for Agamemnon trailed clouds of horror;
to the mediaeval the incident of Cain and Abel
may have suggested straightly and sincerely, in
a way we could never feel it, the entire ancestry
of Christ, or the meaning of a later greater sacri-
fice, and may have illuminated and caught light
from the whole tremendous process of the work-
ing out of the Will of God. I do not know if
the mediaeval cycles consciously tried to produce
an effect of this kind, or if they ever succeeded,
enough to make them worthy, in their narrow
kind, to stand by the great dramatic products of
other styles and other ages. I only suggest that,
aesthetically, they may have been of this nature.
It is a method, this subordinating the parts to the
whole, in such a way that the parts have no neces-
sary connection with each other except through
the whole, that is strange to us who are used to
"plots" that centre about one incident or situa-
tion, or one or two characters. In it Time or Fate
is the protagonist. It might have, but never did.
50 JOHN WEBSTER
come off in those dreary chronicle-plays, that
increase the desolation of the early Elizabethan
drama. It is a method that has been used in
later days with greater success. Wagner in The
jRing gets something of this effect. And Hardy
in TJie Dy7iasts and Schnitzler in Der Junge
Medardus have used these apparently discon-
nected, episodic scenes, with or without commen-
tary, for a resultant whole as different from
them as a face is from its parts, nose, eyebrows,
ears and the rest. They show you a street-scene,
some friends, two lovers — all irrelevant — and
you know Vienna of 1809. Or they pick out,
perhaps, and light up, a few disconnected objects
on the stream of time, and you are suddenly, ter-
ribly aware of the immense black unreturning
flood, sliding irrevocably between darknesses.
Such a method, however, if it existed in
mediaeval times, did not influence the Elizabethan
drama. The disconnected narrative form was in-
deed an Elizabethan inheritance from mediaeval
religious drama; but merely as narrative. The
narrative was transferred from sacred subjects
to historical; the line is pretty clear. The chron-
icle-plays, indeed, appear to be artistically a
retrogression. In incidents and in the whole
they are more pointless. The loose narrative
style, the limber and many- jointed acts, and the
ORIGINS OF DRAMA 51
habit of bringing everything on the stage, lasted
in the plays of the great period — the beginning
of the seventeenth century. Besides this, the mir-
acle and mystery plays gave little to the Eliza-
bethan drama. They handed on the possibility
of tragedy and comedy; but that gift was not
needed. They bequeathed, too, a certain rather
admirable laxity and vagueness with regard to
locality in drama; and a tiresome, confusing
tendency to make plays illustrate a moral, a ten-
dency which fitted in only too well with the
theory of Elizabethan times; less, fortunately,
with its practice.
These miracles and mysteries in their various
forms lasted, in country parts at least, to over-
lap with the Elizabethan drama. But there was
another form of the religious play which actually
formed the chief link with the later style, the
morality. It was a late growth, and it rather
superseded the miracles and mysteries. It was
aided, though not originated, by the revival of
learning and moral fei^our that followed the
Renascence and accompanied the Reformation;
and, coming at this time, it soon widened from
merely religious ideas to all kinds of secular in-
tellectual notions. It is distinctly of the age
of Protestantism, and so we can understand it,
better at least than its predecessors, in the same
52 JOHN WEBSTER
way that we can understand Erasmus. It deals
less with God and more with man and the ab-
stractions that were thought to surround his life.
By such strange ways the arts came home.
JNIoralities and moral interludes, in their turn,
could have produced ( and did produce in Every-
man at least) great drama in their kind. But
again, it was a narrow kind. Had that tide
flowed on unchecked, we might now look back
on an immense English Drama of types and
personifications, a noble utterance, in this nar-
row sort, of all the human desires and dreams
and interpretations of life for centuries. The
crown and glory of the English theatre would
have been Milton — Comus, even now, is, in dis-
guise, the most noble example of morality. We
might have achieved the most solemn and noble
drama of the world — a nobility astonishingly dif-
ferent from the glory we have achieved, its direct
opposite. For the transformation of the moral-
ity into the Elizabethan play was a complete re-
versal of direction. The whole point of the
former is that it deals with the general; you
find all your experience drawn together and illu-
minated; you are pervaded, rather than shaken,
with the emotion of the philosopher who sees the
type through the individual. Love beneath the
lover. The latter gives you the particular; some
ORIGINS OF DRAMA 53
definite person or circumstance so poignantly
that you feel it; the reality for those vaporous
abstractions, not Love but William in love, not
Death but some fool, rather untidily, dying. The
one shows you Everyman, the other Hamlet.
Each way is good; but to go from one to the
other, is as if English art twenty-five years ago
had suddenly swung from Watts to Whistler.
Those who are fond of comparing epochs in
history with stages in the life of a man will be
pleased to liken the medieval miracles and mys-
teries to the narratives that delight children, the
period of the moralities to that invariable love
of youth for generalities and proverbial wisdom
— for Love, Death, Fate, Youth, and all the
wonderful heart-lifting abstractions — and in the
Elizabethan's climb to that chief abode of art,
the heart of the individual, they will find the
middle-aged turning, with the strength as well
as the bitterness of agnosticism, to all that on^^
can be certain of, or, after a bit, interested in, /
men, women, places, each as a "special case.'
But if the moralities are taken on their own
merits and not as a step in a process, it is doubt-
ful whether they are, artistically, an advance on
miracles and mysteries. Dodsley's point, that
they were a better kind, as giving the author
greater freedom, enabling him to invent his plots,
54 JOHN WEBSTER
has been often repeated. There is not much in
it. The Greeks and most of the Elizabethans did
not, in that sense, "invent" their plots. In the
Christian stories and legends the greatest drama-
tist could have found enough to last him a life-
time. Any old story does for the framework of
a play. The moralities, in fact, in putting the
dramatist to the trouble of inventing a "plot,"
rather tended to divert his attention from more
important things. In other ways, however, they
did widen the ground for the dramatist; and in
making plaj^s more wholes and less narratives,
and insisting on dramatic unity, they prepared
very efficiently for the Elizabethan kinds of
drama. It might, indeed, have been better if their
legacy of dramatic unity had been more strictly
observed. Their other characteristic, of thinking
in types and abstractions, instead of individuals,
had a longer influence, of no very healthy kind,
than is at first obvious. Dr. Faustus is only
Everyman, or at least Every-philosopher, with
a name and a university degree. And there was
also a moralising effect; which is not quite the
same thing. An art which proceeds by personi-
fications of abstract ideas need not moralise,
though in this instance it nearly always did. A
modern morality in which the characters were
Evolution, The-Survival-of-the-Fittest (his
ORIGINS OF DRAMA 55
comic servant), Man, and the various Instincts,
might be very impressive without conveying any
moral at all. The Elizabethan drama, however,
started with the burden of this idea among
others, that a play rather ought to specify a
moral generalisation. It took some time to shake
it off.
The third more or less dramatic activity
through the Middle Ages was provided by the
minstrels and strolling entertainers of various
kinds. The ancesters of these were on the one
hand the actors of Rome, the mimi, who, when
the theatres ceased, took to wandering about and
giving entertainments, and on the other the more
reputable and probably less dramatic Teutonic
scop. These minstrels were a great feature of
the whole medieval period, but their importance
in the history of the theatre has always been
under-estimated. There are two reasons, I think.
One is that their performances have left very lit-
tle record. The history of religious drama can
be traced fairly fully. Minstrels of all kinds
may have been giving unceasing dramatic enter-
tainments throughout Europe during the same
centuries. We have nothing to say about it.
There are no traces to investigate, no written
text of the performances to comment on. So, as
we continually hear of the religious perform-
56 JOHN WEBSTER
ances and never of these others, we insensibly
grow to attach great importance to the former
and to omit the latter altogether in our view.
The second reason lies in the error in psychology
I have discussed. It is supposed that, while any
band of rustics dressing up is relevant to the his-
tory of drama, no entertainment given by min-
strels is, unless it is full-blown realistic acting.
I think that careful consideration of the imagined
states of mind of a mediaeval, or indeed of a
modern, audience, will show that the theatrical
emotion begins far before that. Even a single
minstrel reciting a tragic story seems to me
nearer to evoking it than many apparently more
"mimetic" activities. And directly he introduces
any representation or imitation — as reciters
always tend to do — drama is, in embryo, there.
I think it is certain that a single performer can
produce all the effects of drama, by represent-
ing, conventionally, several characters in turn.
Mile. Yvette Guilbert does it. You get from
her the illusion of seeing, with extraordinary
insight and vividness, first the prisoner of
Nantes, and then the gaoler's daughter, quite as
much as you would in an opera. The thing can
go further. I myself have seen a mere amateur
represent at one time and in his one person two
lame men, each lame in a different way, walking
ORIGINS OF DRAMA 57
arm-in-arm, with almost complete realism. And
when it comes to dialogues and estrifs between
two or more performers, it seems to me absurd
pedantry, a judging by forms instead of realitie^_
to deny the presence of drama.
In any case, the miifii went into the darkness,
at the end of Rome, performing plays; and the
same class reappears, performing plays, as soon
as we can discover anything about them, cen-
turies later. The influence of the farces these
wanderers were playing towards the end of the
middle ages, on early English comedy, is more
or less recognised. I think it is very probable
they had a great influence also on tragedy and
on drama as a whole. Some of them, it is known,
used to perform puppet-plays wherever they
went. The importance of these in keeping drama
and the taste for tragedy and comedy alive in
the hearts of the people is immense. These
strolling professional entertainers took their part
also in other kinds of dramatic performances.
We find them helping in folk-plays and festi-
vals; and when the religious plays were secular-
ised, they often appear as aiding the amateurs.
Indeed, the "interlude," the favourite dramatic
form which develops out of the secularised relig-
ious plays, and which led straight to the Eliza-
bethan drama proper, fell largely into the hands
58 JOHN WEBSTER
of the "minstrels." About that time they were
reinforced, and rivalled, by the various local com-
panies of actors v^ho began touring in a semi-
professional way. They were also strengthened
during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by
being enrolled in the service of various great
lords. Under both popular and aristocratic cir-
cumstances these professionals, after severe com-
petition with amateurs during the first part of
the sixteenth century, settled, some of them, into
theatres, and became the actors of the Eliza-
bethan drama. Their importance in this light is
obviously very great. But their true position can
be guessed by inspecting Mr. Chambers' appen-
dices of medieval plays and Mr. Tucker Mur-
ray's more recent researches. It was they that
were responsible for continual dramatic perform-
ances of every kind throughout England. How
good or bad these were vv^e cannot tell. The
forces of religion opposed them, with varying
vigour at different periods, and probably suc-
ceeded in degrading them to a low level. But
they must have prepared the mind of the people
to exj^ect certain things in tragedy or comedy;
and they may account for various aspects of
Elizabethan plays that neither the religious nor
the classical influence explains.
By the middle of the sixteenth century, then,
ORIGINS OF DRAMA 59
the drama was in an inchoate condition. Inter-
ludes of all kinds, moral, religious, controversial,
and farcical, were being played by all sorts of
audiences, besides the rough beginnings of popu-
lar tragedy and comedy, and many survivals of
the old religious plays. In the sixties the real
Elizabethan drama began; and one of the chief
influences in working the change was the classical
one. It came from above, and from amateurs.
It was started, it is noteworthy, by people with
a fixed, conscious, solemn, artistic aim. They
wanted to have tragedies in the real classical way ;
so they imitated, queerly enough, Seneca! Eng-
lish Hterature has always been built on a rever-
ent misunderstanding of the classics. Anyhow,
anyone is good enough to be a god. The worst
art has always been great enough to inspire the
best. The iron laws of heredity do not affect
literature; and Seneca may father Shakespeare
as Macpherson fathered the Romantic Move-
ment.
The dates of the Senecan movement in Italy,
France, and England have been elaborately
worked out. They do not concern us now. The
influence of Seneca, and, vaguely, what was
thought to be the classical tradition, in accord-
ance with the misunderstood laws of Aristotle,
came primarily by two streams, through Italy
60 JOHN WEBSTER
and France. Tancred and Gismunda was influ-
enced by the Italian Senecans; Kyd translated
Gamier. Italy, of course, the romantic home
of all beauty and art, had the most influence. But
culture came from France. The English began
translating Seneca for themselves in the sixties
and seventies. As far as can be seen, the posi-
tion in the eighties, when Marlowe and Kyd were
about to fling English tragedy as we know it
shouting into the world, was that the popular
stage was scarcely touched at all by this classical,
Senecan movement; the children's companies and
ordinary court plays were only partly and patch-
ily affected; but private performances in the
Inner Temple and Gray's Inn had proudly and
completely adopted the Senecan (or, generally,
classical) style. As these were often given be-
fore the Queen, they had great influence in
spreading the impression that this type of trag-
edy was the highest, the only type intellectual
and cultivated people could aspire to. The Sene-
can boom did not leave much directly to Eliza-
bethan drama; far less than is generally made
out. It left perhaps a ghost tradition, the much-
advertised and over-valued "revenge motive,"
and the tendency to division into five acts. But
indirectly it had value in tightening up the
drama, pulling the scattered scenes which appeal
ORIGINS OF DRAMA 61
to the English, a httle, but not too much, into
one play. And it was of vast use as an ideal.
It enabled the dramatists to write for their audi-
ences but above them. It set the audiences an
aesthetic standard, shook them into artistic moral-
ity. Left to itself, this movement would have,
and did, become academic, cold, dead. But
Fulke Greville, Alexander, even Ben Jonson,
did not get the full benefit of it. The best of it,
and the best of the popular stage, were torn out,
combined, and revitalised by Kyd and Marlowe.
Towards that the times were ripening. The
drama was getting a standing, the first important
step. It was at once popular and fashionable.
And, though a few Puritan fanatics had started
a protest, the main mass of the people were
against them. That gradual depletion of the
theatre-audiences which took place during the
next century, when bourgeois democracy slowly
became one with Puritanism, had not com-
menced. The establishment of fixed theatres in
London must have raised the level of the per-
formances; and, the second important step, it
was educating and preparing an audience. For
an audience must be trained and trained together,
as much as a troupe of actors. It is equally one
of the conditions of great drama.
Chapter III
THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA
There are many ways of considering a subject
like the Elizabethan drama. You can take the
plays by authors. Naturally, it is one of the best
ways ; and it is the only way that was employed
up to quite recently. To use that method alone
leads to queer blindnesses. And it is apt to end
in the "our Shakespeare" business, an easy and
unprofitable way of taking art.
Then there is division by subjects, the method
of Professor Schelling and of Polonius. This
counteracts the evils of the first way; but it is
often rather unmeaning: Measure for Measure
gets grouped with the "Romantic Comedies."
That is to say, the fault is in the unreality of the
classes. They should rather be grouped by taste.
An arrangement under purely fanciful names
would be more practical. Love's Labour Lost
would go with Lyly under "Court Butterfly";
Measure for Measure might jostle The Fawn or
Hamlet in the "Brass-on-Tongue" sub-division
of the "Leaves-a-Taste-in-the-Mouth" group.
THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 63
And there is the reader's way, liamb's way,
of just picking out the best plays. It has a lot
to be said for it.
All three methods, and others, have their com-
plemental merits. But I think the most useful
way of surveying material like this is by a com-
bination, in the following way. One should
divide the plays, roughly chronologically, accord-
ing to their style or taste, the general Stimmung
of them, with a certain reference to authorship,
and distinct emphasis on the merits and possibili-
ties of the various styles. For though, of course,
when you stop to consider any particular part,
these questions of influence, "schools," styles,
periods, and the rest, immediately sink into their
proper subordination, yet, for a rapid survey,
they do correspond to certain realities. It is
important to know that a writer was aiming at a
certain atmosphere, or influenced by it. And
some of these atmospheres, and these aims, are
much healthier for art than others. At any rate,
I think that to explain what Webster's plays
really are, it is necessary to show where they fit
in with the rest of the Elizabethan drama. And
as I do not know of any survey of this drama
that seems to show the main outlines right, espe-
cially with regard to comparative goodness — the
scientific literary historian makes every play
64 JOHN WEBSTER
equally dull, the Swinburnian critic makes every
author equally supreme — I shall try to give, very
briefly, my own views.
Soon after Lyly began to breathe into comedy
(with which I am not concerned) a movement
that was near to being life, and a prettiness that
was still nearer beauty, Kyd and Marlowe blew
life, strength, and everything else into tragedy.
To say that they grafted the energy of popular
tragedy on the form of classical, would be to
wrong by a soft metaphor their bloody and vital
violence. It was rather as if a man should dash
two dead babies together into one strident and
living being. Kyd, of course, does not really
stand by Marlowe. But he seems further below
him than is fair, because Marlowe's genius was
more literary, and so lives longer. Both brought
light and life to tragedy. Kyd filled Seneca's
veins with English blood. He gave his audience
living people, strong emotions, vendetta, murder,
pain, real lines of verse, and, stiffly enough, the
stateliness of art. He thrilled a torch in the
gloom of the English theatre. Marlowe threw
open a thousand doors, and let in the sun. He
did it, in the prologue to Tamhurlaine, with the
superb insolence and lovely brutality of youth.
His love of the body, his passion for the world
of colour and stuff, his glorious atheism, "giant-
THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 65
ism 'gainst Heaven," were trumpets in that
morning. The blood still sings to them. Mar-
lowe is less representative, stands clearer of his
period, than almost any Elizabethan. He was
of no school, had no followers. Others, Shake-
speare, for instance, caught something of his
trick of blank verse, or tried a play or two in
his manner. But there was no body of drama
that partook of the atmosphere of ferocious,
youthful, passionate tragedy that distinguishes
Marlowe's work. He stands rather, in his joy
of the world, and irreligion, as the herald of the
whole age, and of that short song of passion it
could utter before the beginning of the night.
His loneliness is explicable. It was not only
that no contemporary was old and great enough
to take all he had to give. But his dramatic
method was unique. He was not a dramatist in
the way the others were. He was — in this some-
thing like the young Shakespeare, but far more
so — a lyric writer using drama. "Plot" does not
matter to him. Each scene he works up into an
intense splendid lyric. They are of different
kinds, but put together they have unity. The
whole is a lyric drama. No one else, except, con-
ceivably, Webster, in a slight degree, used this
artistic method. Marlowe was an extreme poin-
tilliste. He produced his whole effect by very
66 JOHN WEBSTER
large blobs of pure colour, laid on side by side.
The rest were ordinary semi-impressionists, with
a tale to tell. Only Webster more than rarely
achieved expressionism.
One other gift Kyd and Marlowe, especially
JMarlowe, gave their contemporaries; blank
verse. Before them was the Stone Age; they
gave the poet a new weapon of steel. Marlowe
was drunk on decasyllabics, the lilt and clang and
rhetoric of them. How he must have shouted,
writing each line of Tamhurlaine! It all fits in
with the rest of this outburst of true great trag-
edy in the eighties. But it was only an outburst
of youth ; and the sentimentality and tediousness
of youth had to be gone through before the best
times could be won. The rest of the history of
the drama during this century is mainly con-
cerned with the histories and chronicles. Some-
thing — it may have been the Spanish Armada —
made the audiences demand this dreary kind of
play. Their other cry (I have only space to dis-
cuss the best audiences and plays) seems to have
been for a slight kind of romantic comedy. They
swallowed everything, of course, as at all periods
of this eighty years. But these two types of
play, were, perhaps, most prominent.
Critics have always idiotically thought it their
duty to praise these histories; partly because
THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 67
Shakespeare, in obedience to popular demand,
wrote some; partly because they are supposed
to exemplify the patriotism of the Elizabethans,
and we are supposed to enjoy that patriotism.
These chronicle-plays fit in, it is not very clear
how, with Drake, Hawkins, and the rest of the
"island story." And those numerous literary or
dramatic critics who do not care for literature or
the drama, nod their sentimental approbation.
It sounds too fantastic for truth, but it is true,
that the ultimate defence of Elizabethan drama
offered by many writers on it, is that it holds up
so faithful a glass to the "bustling, many-sided
life of that wonderful time." Such wretched
antiquaries beam mild approval on these new
proofs of the Elizabethan's interest in his coun-
try's history.
It must be clearly decided that these histories
were a transient, dreary, childish kind. They
preserved the worst features of Elizabethan
drama in their worst form ; the shapelessness, the
puerility, the obvious moralising, the succession
of scenes that only told a narrative, the entire
absence of dramatic unity, the mixture of farce
and tragedy that did not come off. I do not
mean (for the moment) to say that the Eliza-
bethan type of play was bad, as such; only that
when done in this form it was silly and without
68 JOHN WEBSTER
value. One or two tragedies that were written
in the form of histories are some good; Richard
II and Edward II, And, of com'se, in his worst
efforts Shakespeare always leaves touches of
imagination and distinction. But as a whole
these histories are utterly worthless.
Something similar is the case with the romantic
comedies. Neither in themselves, nor as a sign
of the taste of the times, have they much value.
Occasionally they achieve a sort of prettiness, the
charm of a stage-spring or an Academy allegory
of youth. And Shakespeare threw a pink magic
over them. But it should be left to girls' schools
to think that the comedies he obligingly tossed
off exist in the same universe with his later
tragedies. The whole stuff of this kind of play
— disguises, sentimentality, girls in boys' clothes,
southern romance — was very thin. It might,
perhaps, under different circumstances, have
been worked up into exquisite, light, half -passion-
ate comedy of a limited kind. It did not achieve
even this success.
There are one or two isolated good plays of
indefinable genus, like A Midsummer Niglifs
Dream. But on the whole this period of silliness
or undistinguished prettiness between the great
years of Marlowe (c. 1588) and the wonderful,
sultry flower-time of the next century, is only
THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 69
redeemed by one kind of drama that was seri-
ously trying to move serious artistic emotions.
It is a kind that is despised by the refinement of
modern criticism, condemned by the word
"crude"; what is called "domestic tragedy."
These indigenous plays, descendants probably of
unknown myriads of popular tragedies in Eng-
land, were nearly always dramatisations of re-
cent occurrences. Some are bad, and all are as
"crude" as life. But they kept people in touch
with realities, with the brutality of blood and
death. The theatre might so easily have gone
irrevocably soft during these years. They kept
it fit for the tragedy that was to come ; and they
profoundly influenced that tragedy for the eighty
years of "Elizabethan drama." But it was at
this time that they were especially common. The
only long study of the subject ^ contains a list of
the plays of this nature. There are twenty-four
known; fourteen of them occur in the period
1592-1603, two earlier, eight later. It is note-
worthy that of the three best we know, one,
Arden of Fever sham, comes at least at the begin-
ning of the period, almost in Marlowe's time;
the second, A Woman Killed with Kindness
* Das hilrgerliclie Trauersjnel in England. Singer. The list
counts Arden of Feversham as 1592. It is probably earlier, 1586
or so.
70 JOHN WEBSTER
(Hey wood's best play), comes right at the end,
in the golden years of the next century, and the
third, A Yorkshire Tragedy, is generally dated
as right in the middle of that great age, in 1605.
For there was a period — 1600-1610 are the
rough inside limits — that stood out an infinity
above the rest. Nearly all the good stuff of
Elizabethan drama was in it or of it. Except
in comedy, there are only the lonely spring of
Marlowe and the Indian summer of Ford out-
side it. And it is not only that it was Shake-
speare's great time. That is partly both cause
and effect, and our great good fortune.
The whole age, in drama and beyond, was alive
with passion and the serious stuff of art. Nor
was it only that so much of great merit was pro-
duced in this short time. Nearly all the work of
the period shared, apart from its goodness, in a
special atmosphere. It is extremely important
to recognise the absolute distinctness and su-
preme greatness of this period, its sudden ap-
pearance and its swift and complete end. There
is only space here to hint at its characteristic
features. It was heralded (poetry is generally
a few years ahead of drama) by Shakespeare's
sonnets, and the poems of Donne — who, in spite
of Ben Jonson, did not write all his best things
before 1598. Poets, and men in general, had
THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 71
reached a surfeit of beauty. The Renaissance
joy in loveliness, the romantic youthfulness of
the age, the wave of cheerful patriotism, all
passed at the same time. Boyhood passed. Im-
agination at this time suddenly woke to life. Its
flights were to the strangest corners and the
pitchiest barathrum of the deep. Intellect was
pressed into the service of the emotions, and the
emotions were beaten into fantastic figures by
the intellect. The nature of man became sud-
denly complex, and grew bitter at its own com-
plexity. The lust of fame and the desire for
immortality were racked by a perverse hunger
for only oblivion; and the consummation of
human love was observed to take place within
the bright, black walls of a flea. It seemed
as though all thought and all the arts at
this time became almost incoherent with the
strain of an inhuman energy within them, and a
Titanic reaching for impossible ends. Poetry
strove to adumbrate infinity, or, finding mysti-
cism too mild, to take the most secret Kingdom
of Heaven by storm. Imagination, seeking
arcane mysteries, would startle the soul from its
lair by unthinkable paradoxes. Madness was
curiously explored, and all the doubtful coasts
between delirium and sanity. The exultations of
living were re-invigorated by the strength of a
72 JOHN WEBSTER
passionate pessimism ; for even scepticism in that
age was fecund and vigorous, and rejoiced in the
whirling gloom it threw over life. The mind,
intricately considering its extraordinaiy prison
of flesh, pondered long on the exquisite tran-
siency of the height of love and the long decom-
position that death brings. The most gigantic
crimes and vices were noised, and lashed immedi-
ately by satire, with the too-furious passion of the
flagellant. For Satire flourishes, with Trag-
edy, at such times. The draperies of refinement
and her smug hierarchy were torn away from the
world, and Truth held sway there with his ter-
rific court of morbidity, scepticism, despair, and
life. The veils of romanticism were stripped
away: Tragedy and Farce stood out, for men
to shudder or to roar.
In a time so essentially healthy for all that is
fine in man, and especially in his arts, it is no
wonder that the best in a great many different
styles was being done. But each of these bests
has some trace of the spirit of the times. Chap-
man, for instance, was doing his finest serious
work. Bussy D'Amhois comes near the begin-
ning of the period, the two Byron plays later on,
The Revenge of Bussy at the end. Chapman is
of the time in his intellect, but not in his emo-
tions. His devotion to the "Senecal man," and
THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 73
the archaistic austerities of his style, are his
alone. He was too moral for the morbidity of
the others, and too dispassionate for their gloom.
He was not interested in the same feelings. But
his mind delighted in the same intricate convolu-
tions of thought and half-absurd, serious para-
doxes. And occasionally he strikes into those
queer horrors that delighted Donne and Mar-
ston, and Tourneur and Webster and Shake-
speare. He never made a great success of drama,
because he thought in a literary and rhetorical
rather than dramatic way. He is good reading,
but he would not be good seeing. 'There are two
ways of displaying character in literary drama,
through words and through action. Chapman
has only the first ; Webster had something of the
second too. Webster revered Chapman, but he
was not much influenced by him. Ben Jonson
also is at first sight apart from the spirit of this
period, although his best work belongs to it. His
theories of tragedy prevented him from con-
tributing to the Marston-Tourneur- Webster
type of play. He would have condemned the
atmosphere which is their great virtue as un-
classical. They probably did so — we know Web-
ster did so — themselves. But he is very relevant,
all the same. In the first place that attitude of
professionalism in art and respect for the rules
74 JOHN WEBSTER
which he stood for all his life, was a great factor
in raising the dignity of drama and the standard
of the dramatists. But Jonson's chief influence
and achievement in English drama was in found-
ing the Comedy of Humours ; and both this kind
of play and his examples fit in with the rest of
the time. It is so far from sentimentalism, such
a breaking with romantic comedy, this boisterous
personification of the "humours" of mankind,
with its heartiness and rough strength. It has
the life of the time. Jonson brought comedy
home to England and to men. The characters
in his comedy were not complete men, but they
were human caricatures, the right stuff for farce
and loud laughter. Their vigour grew amazing
under his handling. In result he gave the stage
the best comedies of all the age. Their coarse
splendour of life was never approached till
twenty years or more had passed, and his influ-
ence again was strong, in the work of some of
his "sons." There, comedy survived the floods of
sweetness under which tragedy utterly perished.
But if Epicoene and The Alchemist are admi-
rably complementary in this Pantheon to
Sophonisha and The Duchess of Malfi and
Timon of Athens and Macbeth, other works of
Jonson are something more. It is probable that
the additions to the 1602, The Spanish Tragedy,
THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 75
are Jonson's. If so, he is responsible for some
of the finest scenes of imaginative horror in that
hterature. These few pages (written in 1600)
contain most of the terror and splendour of the
next ten years. They set the tune unfalteringly.
And Jonson did also what Marston never quite
succeeded in doing, he wrote a good comedy
which had more of this seventeenth century
pungency in it than any tragedy, a comedy that
is a real companion to the tragedies of Webster.
The mirth of Tourneur is horrible; Languebeau
SnufFe poises one sickly between laughter and
loathing. Volpone is like one long laugh of
Tourneur's, inspired by a tenfold vitality. It is
amazing, one of the few complete works of genius
of the Elizabethan age. The hot cruelty and
vigorous unhealthiness of it! Its very artistic
perfection is frightening and exotic.
But perhaps the main current of strength in
the drama during these years, and certainly the
most important for this essay, is that which ran
through Marston and Tourneur to Webster.
Donne was in connection with it, too, from the
side of poetry and thought. The relation of
Shakespeare with the whole of this period, of
which he, then at his greatest, was, to our eyes,
the centre, is curious. His half -connections, the
way he was influenced and yet transmuted the
76 JOHN WEBSTER
influences, would require a good deal of space to
detail. But in this, his "dark period" — whatever
it was, neuralgia, a spiritual crisis, Mary Fitton,
or literary fashion, that caused it — he was not
unique or eccentric in the kind of his art. His
humour was savage, he railed against sex, his
tragedies were bloody, his heroes meditated curi-
ously on mortality. It was all in the fashion.
His gloom was not conspicuous in the general
darkness. He had, in Hamlet especially, affini-
ties with this ISIarston- Webster group. His ter-
rific and morbid studies of madness influenced
theirs.
Marston is one of the most sinister, least un-
derstood, figures in Elizabethan literature. More
than anybody else, he determined the channels
in which the great flood of those ten years was to
flow. His life was curious. He started, like so
many of them, by writing vivid, violent, crabbed
satire. He went on to play-making, which he
pursued for eight years with great success. He
was much admired and very influential, but he
always presented himself to the world with a typ-
ical, passionate ungraciousness. At the end of
the eight years he renounced the applause that
he so liked disliking, and went into the Church.
He had a queer lust for oblivion. His tombstone
bears Oblivioni Sacrum, It was his personality
THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 77
rather than his powers that was the most stupen-
dous thing about him. To us he seems nearly
always just not to bring his effects off; but his
contemporaries, whatever they thought, could
not escape him.
He started the movement of this period by
resuscitating the old blood-and-thunder revenge
tragedy. It was precisely what was needed, but
he clothed it with his own peculiar temperament
of violent and bloody satire. It was this that
really attracted the writers of the time. He gave
them several plays steeped in it, both comedies
and tragedies by the ordinary classifications,
really only of one kind. The horror and inhu-
man violence of his laughter lit up those years
like a vivid flash of lightning. He is responsible
for that peculiar macabre taste, like the taste of
copper, that is necessary to, if it is not the cause
of, their splendour. But he was of his age in its
strength as well as in its morbidity.
"My God's my arm ; my life my heaven, my grave
To me all end,"
says Syphax. Chapman could scarcely have
equalled the strong nobility of it.
Marston's chief passion was for truth. He
preferred it if it hurt; but he loved it anyhow.
It comes out in the snarling speculations and
78 JOHN WEBSTER
harangues of those satirical malcontents he was
so fond of. He bequeathed the type to Tourneur
and Webster. For Marston, who was a wit and
a scholar and a great poet, was pre-eminently a
satirist. It was because he loved truth in that
queer, violent way that some men do love, desir-
ous to hurt. It fits in with his whole tempera-
ment — vivid, snarling, itching, dirty. He loved
dirt for truth's sake; also for its own. Filth,
horror, and wit were his legacy; it was a splendid
one. Some characters too, besides the Malcon-
tent, were his offspring. He may have origi-
nated the heroine who was wicked or non-moral,
fascinating and not a fool. It was a type that
was refreshingly and characteristically promi-
nent in the great period. Cleopatra, Vittoria,
the Insatiate Countess — the womanly heroine
fades to a watery mist when they sweep on.
Marston is more famous for what he lent than
what he had, but what he had is superb.
Of Tourneur (the dates of whose play, or two
plays, are most uncertain) less need be said.
Nowadays he is thought better than JNIarston.
He is really far his inferior. He does not shock
you in the same way by hideously violent con-
trasts. He is more level; he is more conscious
of his purpose; and it may be ti'ue that none of
Marston's plays is as good as his (if he did write
THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 79
The Revenger's Tragedy) . But Marston is the
greater genius. Still, Tourneur with his brilliant
and feverish morbidity carried on the line. He
did not influence Webster so deeply as Marston
did. It was natural. He used for the most part
external horrors for horror's sake. He could not
comprehend those horrors of the mind and soul
that Shakespeare and Webster knew and Mar-
ston glimpsed. But Tourneur was in sight of the
end of greatness ; the period of horrors was com-
ing to a close.
For Beaumont and Fletcher were beginning
their fatal reign. At first cleanness and great-
ness were still there; and while Beaumont lived
the degradation could not go far, for he had a
sense of humour and satire. His sentimentality
had strength beneath it. He could handle metre
like an Elizabethan. None of these things could
be said of Fletcher. He had only a kind of wit,
a kind of prettiness, and an inelastic sub-variety
of the blank verse line. But for the first six years
or so, from 1608-1614, they, principally Beau-
mont, were doing fairly good work. It is good
work of a fatally new kind, but the vices of the
new have not yet grown to their full. To these
years The Faithful Shepherdess, The Knight of
the Burning Pestle, Philaster, and The Maid's
80 JOHN WEBSTER
Tragedy belong; but drama was on a downhill
course.
It has sometimes been said that the most ex-
traordinary gap in the history of our literature,
or of any other, is the one between the beginning
and the end of the seventeenth century. That
little break of twenty years in the middle seems
at first sight to have made a tremendous differ-
ence. Dry den's inability to understand Shake-
speare and his fellows is a commonplace; and
one can see how inevitable it was from their
minds. The cataclysm of the Civil War, social
changes, and the sojourn of the generation
abroad, are generally held responsible. (Sir
George Etherege saw the premieres of Moliere
in Paris.) Closer inspection shows the wrong-
ness of this view. Anyone familiar with the life,
literature, and drama of court circles just before
the outbreak of the Civil War, will realise that
the extraordinary thing is how like they are to
the products of the Restoration period. There
was no gap. Sir John Denham's The Sophy
(1641) is almost indistinguishable from a Res-
toration play. The true gap is far more remark-
able and far earlier. It is hidden by over-lap-
pings, but its presence is obvious about the year
1611. Five years before that, England was
thunderous with the most glorious tragedy and
THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 81
the strangest passion. Five years after that,
Fletcher and the silly sweetness of tragi-comedy
were all-powerful. The path, unmistakeably the
same path, led on and down, through Massinger
and Shirley. Five years before that, the intel-
lect and the imagination had been dizzily and
joyfully up-borne on that wit Chapman thinks
so fine :
"Your wit is of the true Pierian spring,
That can make anything of anything."
It was exhilarating, if sometimes irritating.
The wit that succeeded it was Court humour,
born of the fancy, touched with softness,
feeble-winged. Heart supplanted brain, and
senses sense.
For all this Fletcher was to blame, or, if the
causes were deeper, he stands a figurehead for
our abuse. What the causes of such movements
are, it is always difficult to say. The gradual
change in the personnel of the theatre and its au-
diences may have had something to do with it.
Puritanism and democracy were becoming grad-
ually and deplorably identified. This meant that
the theatre was being based on only one class.
The audiences were becoming upper-class, or
of the upper-class party; it is even more note-
worthy that the same thing was happening to the
82 JOHN WEBSTER
dramatists. Henceforward they were almost en-
tirely drawn from court circles and the upper
classes. Or the reason for the degeneracy may
have lain in some deeper weariness of men's
hearts. Anyhow, the degeneracy was there.
Splendour became softness and tragedy tragi-
comedy. These later dramatists were like
Ophelia.
"Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself.
She turns to favour and to prettiness."
It was in this sinking to prettiness and to ab-
sence of seriousness that the "degeneracy" of the
later Elizabethan drama lies, not, as some mod-
ern critics say, in the selection of such admirable
subjects as incest for their dramas. Comj^are a
typical Fletcherian tragedy, Bonduca, with one
of its predecessors. It is the absence of serious
intention, the only desire to please, the lack of
artistic morality, that make such plays, with
their mild jokes, their co-ordinate double plots,
and their unreality, so ultimately dreary and
fifth-rate to a sensible reader. But such stuff
overwhelmed England. That vulgarest of writ-
ers, Middleton, who had been doing admirable,
coarse, low-level comedy, rather Jonsonian and
quite realistic, turned about 1609 to romantic
THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 83
comedy. And by 1612 even Tourneur had writ-
ten a tragi-comedy, Tlie Nobleman.
But even when the triumph of prettiness was
on its way to completion, there was one shghtly
old-fashioned figure still faithful to that larger
prime. Serious tragedy seems only to have
reached Webster, after it had left everybody
else. In 1612 and 1613 he wrote two of the most
amazing products of that amazing period. His
powerful personality coloured what he wrote,
and yet these two plays are more representative
than any that had led to them, of the period be-
hind them. The stream swept straight on from
Marston and Tourneur to Webster. With him
the sinister waves, if they lost something of their
strange iridescence, won greater gloom and pro-
fundity. After him they plunged into the depths
of earth. He stands in his loneliness, first of
that long line of "last Elizabethans." As the
edge of a cliff seems higher than the rest for
the sheer descent in front of it, Webster, the
Webster of these two plays, appears even
mistier and grander than he really is, because
he is the last of Earth, looking out over a sea
of saccharine.
Chapter IV
JOHN WEBSTER
John Webster is one of the strangest figures
in our literature. He was working for quite
twenty years. We have at least four plays in
which he collaborated, and three by him alone;
but through all the period and in all his work
he is quite ordinary and undistinguished, except
for two plays which come quite close together
in the middle. For two or three years, about
1612, he was a great genius; for the rest he was,
if not indistinguishable, entirely commonplace.
Coleridge does not more extraordinarily prove
Apollonian fickleness. Webster makes one be-
lieve successful art depends as much on a wild
chance, a multiple coincidence, as Browning
found love did. If he had not had time in that
middle period ; if it had come a little later, under
the Fletcherian influence; if he had been born
twenty years later; if — . . . He was just in
time; the subject just suited him; the traditional
atmosphere of the kind of play called out his
greatest gifts; the right influence had preceded
84
JOHN WEBSTER 85
him; he was somehow not free to write the "true
dramatic poem" or "sententious tragedy" he
wanted to. And so these two great tragedies
happened to exist. That easy and comfortable
generalisation of the Philistine "genius will out!"
finds signal refutation in Webster. I shall give
a short general account of his life and activities,
and then examine his work more closely.
We know a great deal about Webster's life.
He was born in the latter half of the sixteenth
century, and died some time before the end of
the seventeenth. He was an Elizabethan
dramatist, a friend of Dekker and Chapman and
Heywood. He was an odd genius who created
slowly and borrowed a great deal. He was not
very independent. . . .
It is, unimportantly, true that fewer "facts"
than truths are known about him. We are luck-
ily spared the exact dates of his uninteresting
birth and death, and his unmeaning address and
family. We have not even enough to serve as
a frame-work for the elaborate structure of
"doubtless" and "We may picture to ourselves
young — " that stands as a biography of Shake-
speare and others. It could, of course, be done
by throwing our knowledge of Elizabethan con-
ditions and our acquaintance with the character
of the author of The Duchess of Malfi together.
86 JOHN WEBSTER
It would not be worth it. We know that Web-
ster was a member of the Merchant Tailors' Com-
pany, and born free of it. There is a late legend
that he was clerk of St. Andrew's, Holborn. At
one time it seemed possible to identify him (con-
temporary enemies tried to) with an ex-army
chaplain who wrote fanatical religious tracts and
was a University reformer, in the middle of the
seventeenth century. Superb thought! It is
hard to degenerate nobly; and his contempo-
raries, after reaching their summit, went down-
hill (as writers) in various ways. Some became
dropsical; others entered the Church; others
went on writing; a few drank. But this, this
would have been an end worthy of a fantastic
poet! Alas! Mr. Dyce investigated too thor-
oughly, and pretty certainly disproved the iden-
tification. After his last play, Webster slips
from us inscrutably round the corner. He may
have lived on for years and years. He may have
died directly. It does not matter to us.
For the life of Webster the dramatist, how-
ever, as opposed to Webster the private man,
we have a few facts. He comes into our notice
— fairly young, it is to be presumed — in 1602.
He was then very busily one of the less important
of a band of hack playwrights employed by
Henslowe. He had a hand in several plays that
JOHN WEBSTER 87
we know of during that year : Ccesar's Fall, Two
Shapes,^ Christmas comes hut once a year, and at
least one part of Lady Jane, His collaborators
were Munday, Drayton, Middleton, Heywood,
Chettle, Smith, and Dekker. It was the begin-
ning, as far as we know, of a close connection
with Dekker and a long one with Heywood.
Webster was writing for both Henslowe's com-
panies, Ccesar's Fall and Two Shapes for the
Admiral's men, Christmas comes but once
a year and Lady Jane for Worcester's men.
Writing for Henslowe was not the best school
for genius. No high artistic standard was ex-
acted. It rather implies poverty, and certainly
means scrappy and unserious work. It may
have given Webster — it would have given some
people — a sense of the theatre. But he emerged
with so little facility in writing, and so little
aptitude for a good plot (in the ordinary sense) ,
that one must conclude that his genius was not
best fitted for theatrical expression, into which
it was driven. There are other periods and liter-
ary occupations it is harder to imagine him in.
But I can figure him as a more or less realistic
novelist of the present or the last eighty years,
preferably from Russia. His literary skill, his
* Perhaps the same play. See Appendix B.
88 JOHN WEBSTER
amazing genius for incorporating fragments of
his experience, his "bitter flashes" and slow
brooding atmosphere of gloom, would have been
more tremendous untrammelled by dramatic
needs. His power of imaginative visualisation
was often superfluous in a play. Like most of
his gifts it is literary. It is just what one keenly
misses in most novels. One can see, almost quote
from, a rather large grey-brown novel by John
Webster, a book full of darkly suffering human
beings, slightly less inexplicable than Dostoieff-
sky's, but as thrilling, figures glimpsed by sud-
den flashes that tore the gloom they were part
of; a book such that one would remember the
taste of the whole longer than any incident or
character. . . . But these imaginations are fool-
ish in an Heraclitan world, and the phrase "John
Webster in the nineteenth century" has no mean-
ing.
Webster seems to have had the ordinary train-
ing, collaborating in classical tragedy, history,
and low comedy. None of his collaborators left
much mark on his style. He was more sub-
servient than impressionable. The only play
of this lot that we have is Lady Jane, printed
in a cut form as Sir Thomas Wyatt. Webster
probably had a good deal to do with two Scenes,
JOHN WEBSTER 89
2 and 16*/ he may be responsible for more, but,
if so, it is indistinguishable. The whole play is
a ramshackle, primitive (for 1602), ordinary
affair. The parts we think Webster's are rather
different from the rest, but no better. Metri-
cally they are hopeless, but that may be due to
the state of the play. There is a sort of sleepy
imagination in —
"Lo, we ascend into our chairs of state,
Like funeral coffins^ in some funeral pomp.
Descending to their graves !"
It gratifies one with a feeling of fitness, that
Webster should have been thinking of funerals
so early as this. Perhaps one is sentimentally
misled, and it is really someone else's work. The
whole thing is equally uncertain and unimpor-
tant.
The Induction to The Malcontent (1604),
our earliest example of Webster's unaided writ-
ing, is a slight piece of work, and valueless. The
stiff involved sentences are characteristic. The
humour is commonplace. It all shows up dully
by the rest of the play, which is restive and in-
^Sc. 2 is from p. 186, col. 1, "Enter Guildford," to p. 187,
" 'cave.' Exeunt."
Sc. 16 is from p. 199, end, "Enter Winchester," to p. 201,
" 'dumb.' Exeunt,"
90 JOHN WEBSTER
flamed with the vigorous, queer, vital, biting style
of Marston.
Webster seems to have gone on in the profes-
sion of a hack author. He must have collab-
orated in dozens of plays in these years, perhaps
written some of his own. He next comes to
light writing two comedies of London life with
Dekker, Westward Ho (1604) and Northward
Ho (1605) . This time it is good work he is con-
cerned with, though out of his true line. They
were written for the Children of Paul's. Web-
ster seems to have been a free-lance at this period,
going from company to company. But he must
somehow have got a sort of reputation by this
time, to be joined with Dekker in this friendly
skirmish against Chapman, Jonson, and Mar-
ston {Eastward Ho), who were all eminent.
And in 1607 it seems to have been worth a pub-
hsher's while to put his and Dekker's names
on the title-page of Sir Thomas Wyatt, and
leave out Chettle, Smith, and Heywood. In
Westward Ho and Northward Ho there are a
few scenes I think we can be pretty certain are
mainly Webster's; Northward Ho, II. 2 and V.
1, very probably Westward Ho, I. 1 and III.
3, and quite probably Northward Ho, I. 1 and
III. 1. One seems to catch a sight of him else-
where in the plays; but it is difficult to be cer-
JOHN WEBSTER 91
tain. In the scenes we attribute to him the sound
^pf a deeper, graver, and duller voice than Dek-
Jicr's seems to be heard. It is not altogether
fancy. The lightness goes. The bawdy jokes
change their complexion a little ; they come more
from the heart and less from the pen. The peo-
ple in the play do not live any the more or the
less, but they become more like dead men and
less like lively dolls. The whole thing grows less
dramatic; the characters become self-consciously
expository — Webster w^as always old-fashioned
in this — instead of talking to each other, half-
face to us, they turn towards the audience and
stand side by side, addressing it. Justiniano's
jealousy grows more serious and real when Web-
ster takes charge of him, more unpleasantly r^al
to himself, and fantastically expressed. And
{Northward Ho, II. 2) Mistress Mayberry's
sudden disappearance to cry stirs you with an
unexpected little stab of pathetic reality not un-
like the emotion the later Webster can
arouse when he will. But the whole outlines an
atmosphere of the plays, and the characters and
incidents are far nearer Dekker than Webster.
It is only possible to say either that Webster
was merely assisting Dekker in these plays, or
that his peculiar individuality was either un-
grown or dormant. No doubt his romantic clas-
92 JOHN WEBSTER
sical ideas made him feel he was writing very
far down to the public. But he need not have
been ashamed, and it may very well have done
him good. Good farce is a worthy training for
a tragic writer; and these plays are excellent
comic farce. The wit is not subtle, the plots
have no psychological interest, and the ragging
of Chapman is primitive. But the characters
have a wealth of vitality, spirits, and comic value.
The jokes are often quite good, especially the
bawdy ones, and the sequence of events keeps
your mind lively and attentive. The general at-
mosphere in these two plays has a tang of de-
lightful, coarse gaiety, like a country smell in
March. They are really quite good, for the
rough knock-about stuff they are; among the
best in their kind, and that no bad kind. It
would be amusing, if it were not so irritating,
that many who are authorities in Elizabethan
literature are violently and angrily shocked by
these two plays, and condemn them as filth.
Dr. Ward throws up hands of outraged refine-
ment. Professor Schelling has an incredibly
funny passage. "They mark the depth of gross
and vicious realism to which the comedy of man-
ners descended. . . . Some of the figures we
would fain believe, in their pruriency and out-
spoken uncleanhness of speech, represent an oc-
JOHN WEBSTER 93
casional aberration, if not an outrageous exag-
geration, of the manners of the time. ... In
our admiration of the ideal heights at times at-
tained by the hterature of the great age of Ehza-
beth we are apt to forget that the very amplitude
of its vibrations involves an extraordinary range,
and that we must expect depths and morasses
as well as wholesome and bracing moral heights.
. . ." If literary criticism crosses Lethe, and
we could hear the comments of the foul-mouthed
ghosts of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Webster
on this too common attitude, their outspoken un-
cleanliness would prostrate Professor Schelling
and his friends. Anger at this impudent attempt
to thrust the filthy and degraded standards of
the modern middle-class drawing-room on the
clean fineness of the Elizabethans, might be ir-
relevant in an Essay of this sort. What is
relevant is a protest that such thin-lipped writ-
ers are not only ridiculous on this point, but
also, for all their learning and patience, with-
out sufficient authority in Elizabethan literature.
It is impossible to trust them. Even in deciding
a date, it may be necessary to have sympathy
with the Elizabethans. The Elizabethans liked
obscenity; and the primness and the wickedness
that do not like it, have no business with them.
There is a silence of some six years after
94 JOHN WEBSTER
Northward Ho, We do not know what Web-
ster was doing. Somehow he was gaining posi-
tion, and preparing himself. In 1611 or 1612
he produced The White Devil, the first of the
two plays which definitely and uniquely give
the world Webster. Last heard of he was a
subordinate collaborator; now he is a great, very
individual dramatist. The step was enormous;
but he had a long time to make it in. If Fate
had spared us some of his interim works, we
might not be so surprised.
The preface to The White Devil is important
for the light it throws both on Webster and on
the general critical ideas of the period. "Evi-
demment," says M. Symmes, "Webster dans
ce passage est un des premiers a connaitre Fim-
portance, le merite, et I'individualite du theatre
anglais romantique, comme genre separe." ^ It
is too strong. But he does seem to hover in a
queer way, between intense pride in his own
work and fine appreciation of the best among his
contemporaries, and scorn of all these in com-
parison to a "true dramatic poem" in the clas-
sical style. He shows himself wholly of the
Jonson-Chapman school of classicists, in agree-
ment with the more cultivated critics. His gloom
* Symmes: Les Debuts de la Critique Dramatique en Angle-
terre, etc.
JOHN WEBSTER 95
fires up at the imaginary glories of these Satur-
nian plays; he is superb in his scorn of his own
audience. "Should a man present to such an
auditory the most sententious tragedy that ever
was written, observing all the critical laws, as
height of style, and gravity of person, enrich it
with the sententious Chorus, and, as it were, life
in death in the passionate and weighty Nuntius ;
..." His arrogance was partly due, no doubt,
to pique at the failure of the play and partly
to the literary fashion. But it had something
natural to him. Even in these plays he so
scornfully wrote for the "uncapable multi-
tude" of those times there is a sort of classicism.
His temperament was far too romantic for it;
he was not apt to it, like Chapman. Yet, espe-
cially in The White Devil, the unceasing coup-
lets at the end of speeches, both in their number
and their nature, have a curious archaic effect.
One line is connected with the situation, and ex-
presses an aspect of it; the next, with the pat
expected rhyme, goes to the general rule, and
turns the moral. It belonged to Webster's ideal
ntemperament in poetry to turn readily and con-
jftinually to the greater generalisations. These
last lines or couplets always lead out on to them.
They went, the classicists, with a kind of glee;
96 JOHN WEBSTER
they liked to be in touch with permanent vague-
nesses.
Webster's praise of his contemporaries is, how-
ever, very discriminating. The order he gives
them is instructive: — Chapman; Jonson; Beau-
mont and Fletcher; Shakespeare, Dekker, and
Heywood. He tells us in this preface, what we
could have guessed, that he wrote very slowly.
It was natural, as he compiled, rather than com-
posed, his plays; working so laboriously from
his note-book. He may be imagined following
doggedly behind inspiration, glooming over a
situation till he saw the heart of it in a gesture
or a phrase. He casts the sigh of the confirmed
constipate at Heywood and Dekker and Shake-
speare for their "right happy and copious in-
dustry." His agonies in composition are amus-
ingly described in a passage in Fitzjeffry's Notes
irom Blachfriars (1620).'
The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi
rare often described as "revenge-plays," a re-
cently-invented genus. Dr. Stoll deals at great
length with them in this light, and Professor
Vaughan devotes two or three pages of his short
essay to summing up the history of the type.
There is something in the idea, but not much;
and it has been over-worked. To begin with,
* Given in Dyce's 1857 edition. Introduction, p. xvi.
JOHN WEBSTER 97
there are far fewer examples of this type than
these critics believe. And it is not quite clear
what is the thread of continuity they are thinking
of. Is it the fact that revenge is the motive in
each play? Or is it a special type of play, the
criterion of which is its atmosphere, and which
generally includes vengeance as a motive? If
the second, they must include other plays in their
list; if the first, drop some out. The truth is
that there is a certain type of play, the plot of
which was based on blood-for-blood vendetta,
and the atmosphere of which had a peculiar tinge.
Kyd started it; it dropped for a bit, and then
Marston revived it, rather differently, with great
foresight, at an opportune moment. It had a
brief boom with Marston, Shakespeare, and
Chettle. The atmosphere became indistinguish-
able from that of a good many plays of the pe-
riod. Tourneur took the atmosphere, and dis-
carded the revenge-plot, in The Atheist's Trag-
edy, So did The Second Maiden's Tragedy,
Chapman happened to take the revenge-motive,
and went back to Seneca on his own account.
He gives a characteristic account of the meta-
physics of the revenge-motive in the Revenge of
Bussy,"- Webster used it a little in one of two
plays that in other ways resemble the work of
» Chapman's Tragedies, ed. Parrott, pp. 131-2.
98 JOHN WEBSTER
other people who used the revenge-plot. That
is all. To call The Duchess of Malfi a revenge-
play is simply ridiculous. If it is raked in, you
must include Othello and a dozen more as well.
The whole category is a false one. It would be
much more sensible to invent and trace the
"Trial-at-law" type, beginning with the Eumen-
ides, going down through The Blerchant of Ven-
ice, The White Devil, Volpone, The Spanish
Curate, and a score more, till you ended with
Justice,
The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi
are so similar in atmosphere that it is sometimes
difficult for the moment to remember in which
of them some character or speech occurs. But
it is convenient to consider them separately; and
to take The White Devil first.
The story is simple. Brachiano conceives a
passion for Vittoria, and wins her. She suggests,
and he plans, the death of Camillo and Isabella.
Their love is discovered by Vittoria's mother,
Cornelia. Isabella's brothers, Francisco and
Monticelso, try to put an end to it, by giving it
rope to hang itself. Before this plan can take
effect the murders are committed. Francisco
and Monticelso arraign Vittoria for complicity
in the murders and for adultery. She is con-
demned to imprisonment ; but Francisco, to bring
JOHN WEBSTER 99
the two nearer final ruin, plots so that she and
Brachiano escape together to Padua and marry.
Thither he follows them, with some friends, in
disguise; and accomplishes their deaths.
Webster did not handle this tale very skilfully,
from the dramaturgic point of view. The play
is almost a dramatised narrative. Occasionally
the clumsiness of his hand is uncomfortably mani-
fest. Generally it does not matter, for his virtues
lie in a different aspect of plays from plot-mak-
ing. The motives of the various characters are
more obscure than they are wont to be in Eliza-
bethan plays. On the whole this is a virtue; or
seems to be to the modern mind. Characters in
a play gain in realism and a mysterious solem-
nity, if they act unexplainedly on instinct, like
people in real life, and not on rational and pub-
licly-stated grounds, like men in some modern
plays.
The play begins with a bang. From the point
of view of the plot it is an unusual and unhelpful
beginning. Count Lodovico (who turns out later
in the play to be an unsuccessful lover of Isa-
bella, and who becomes the chief instrument in
the downfall of Brachiano and Vittoria) has just
been branded. He enters with a furious shout.
"Banished!" In this scene there is an instance
of a favourite dramatic trick of Webster's, to
100 JOHN WEBSTER
add liveliness. When some long speech has to
be made, where Chapman would give it to one
person, Webster divides it between two, con-
tinually alternating with a few lines each. It
makes the scene "go" in a most remarkable man-
ner. In this case Gasparo and Antonelli do it
to Lodovico. In The Duchess of Malfi Ferdi-
nand and the Cardinal treat the Duchess in this
way.
The next scene introduces the chief characters
and the chief emotion. This fatal love, the cause
of the whole tragedy, enters most strikingly.
Vittoria leaves the stage, Brachiano turns, with
a flaming whisper, to Flamineo. He wastes no
words. He does not foolishly tell the audience,
"I am in love with that woman who has just gone
off."
Brachiano. "Flamineo '*
Flamineo. "My lord?"
Brachiano. "Quite lost, Flamineo."
A
Webster thought dramalicaHyr-
Flamineo, a typicar"taave of Webster's, fills
the next few pages with a chorus of quotations
from Montaigne. Dramatic is the juxtaposition
of the passionate scene between Brachiano and
Vittoria, broken by the prophetic Cornelia, the
baiting of Brachiano by the Duke and the Cardi-
JOHN WEBSTER 101
nal, and the pitiful interview of Brachiano and
his deserted wife. In the last Webster shews
that he can turn to more untroubled tragedy
when he wants to :
"I pray, sir, burst my heart; and in my death
Turn to your ancient pity, though not love."
Rather swiftly, Vittoria (perhaps) and
Brachiano, certainly, accomplish the murders;
and Vittoria is arrested and tried. The trial
scene is prodigiously spirited. There is no hero
to enhst our sympathy; it is merely a contest
between various unquenchable wickednesses.
The rattle of rapid question and answer, sharp
with bitterness, is like musketry. Vittoria is
wicked; but her enemies are wicked and mean.
So one sides with her, and even admires. Her
spirit of ceaseless resistance and fury, like the
wriggling of a trapped cat, is astonishing.
"For your names
Of whore and murdress, they proceed from you.
As if a man should spit against the wind ;
The filth returns in's face."
Flamineo's subsequent affectation of madness
and melancholy is made too much of; for the
purpose of amusing, perhaps. At this point in
the play, the two "villains" part company. Fran-
102 JOHN WEBSTER
Cisco pursues his way alone. The scene between
Brachiano, in his groundless jealousy, and Vit-
toria, is tremendous with every kind of beauty
and horror; beginning from the extraordinarily
iin- Websterian :
"How long have I beheld the devil in crystal!
Thou hast led me, like an heathen sacrifice.
With music and with fatal yokes of flowers.
To my eternal ruin. Woman to* maiT^
Is either a god or.a^wolf." ^^^
The taming of the wild cat, Vittoria, is shown
with wonderfully precise and profound psychol-
ogy; and all made horrible by the ceaseless and
eager prompting of Flamineo.
"Fie, fie, my lord!
Women are caught as you take tortoises;
She must be turned on her back."
The scene of the election of the Pope is an ir-
relevant ornament. It is noteworthy that to
some extent Webster improved in dramatic craft
with time. The Duchess of Malft has fewer such
scenes than The White DeviL
The last part of the play, after it removes to
Padua, is one long study of the horror of death.
It takes it from every point of view. There is
the pathetic incomprehension of Cornelia over
young Marcello. "Alas! he is not dead; he is
JOHN WEBSTER 103
in a trance. Why, here's nobody shall get any-
thing by his death. Let me call him again for
God's sake."
There is the difficulty and struggle of the death
of so intensely live a man as Brachiano:
"Oh, thou strong heart!
There's such a covenant 'tween the world and it.
They're loath to break."
There is the grotesque parody of death, in
Flamineo's
"Oh I smell soot,
Most stinking soot ! The chimney is afire. . . .
There's a plumber laying pipes in my guts, it scalds."
There is the superbness of Vittoria's courage;
"Yes I shall welcome death
As princes do some great ambassadors ;
I'll meet thy weapon half-way-"
There are the "black storm" and the "mist"
which drive around Vittoria and Flamineo in the
last moments of all.
The Duchess of Malfi is on the whole a better
play than The White Devil. It does not have
more of Webster's supreme dramatic moments,
but the language is more rich and variously mov-
ing — in a dramatic, not merely a literary way.
l<
JOHN WEBSTER
It is, even more than The White Devil, in the
first half a mere simple narrative of events, lead-
ing up to a long-continued and various hell in
j the second part. It is often discussed if the plots
of The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi
are weak. Webster's method does not really
take cognisance of a plot in the ordinary sense
of the word. He is too atmospheric. It is like
enquiring if there is bad drawing in a nocturne
of Whistler's.
The Duchess of JVIalfi is a young widow, for-
bidden by her brothers, Ferdinand and the Car-
dinal, to marry again. They put a creature of
theirs, Bosola, into her service as a spy. The
Duchess loves and secretly marries her steward,
Antonio, and has three children. Bosola ulti-
mately discovers and reports this. Antonio and
the Duchess have to fly. The Duchess is cap-
tured, imprisoned, and mentally tortured and
put to death. Ferdinand goes mad. In the last
Act he, the Cardinal, Antonio, and Bosola are
/ all killed with various confusions and in various
horror.
The play begins more slowly than The White
Devil, Bosola appears near the beginning, and
plays throughout a part like that of Flamineo.
The great scene in the first Act is the scene
of the Duchess's proposal to Antonio. It is full ^
JOHN WEBSTER 105
of that perfect, tender beauty which the stormy
Webster could evoke when he liked; from the
Duchess's preliminary farewell to her maid,
"Good dear soul,
Wish me good speed;
For I am going into a wilderness
Where I shall find nor path nor friendly clue
To be my guide."
to the maid's concluding comment:
"Whether the spirit of greatness or of women
Reign most in her, I know not; but it shows
A fearful madness : I owe her much of pity." .^
-^^yJ ' , / ^ ■ . ' ' • ' -^; -'---^•^- •
There is rather hideous and very typical trag-
edy in the scene of Bosola's device to discover
the Duchess's secret. The meeting of Bosola and
Antonio, at midnight, after the birth of the child,
is full of dramatic power and of breathless sus-
pense that worthily recalls Macbeth,
Ant. "Bosola! . . .
heard you not
A noise even now?
Bos. From whence ?
Ant. From the Duchess's lodging.
Bos. Not I : did you ?
Ant. I did, or else I dreamed.
Bos. Let's walk towards it.
Ant. No: it may be 'twas
But the rising of the wind.
Bos. Very likely. . . ."
106 JOHN WEBSTER
When the news is brought to the brothers that
the Duchess has had a child, their anger is hide-
ous and, as with passionate people, too imagina-
tive.
After this, and before the events which lead
to the catastrophe, that is, between the second
and third Acts, there is a long and somewhat
clumsy interval. This was rather in the dra-
matic fashion of the time. Ferdinand's discovery
of the Duchess's guilt breaks finely across a
lovely scene of domestic merriment. The plot
unravels swiftly. The final parting of the Duch-
ess and Antonio is full of a remarkable quiet
beauty of phrase and poetry. It is a mere acci-
dent that we have discovered that it is entirely
composed of fragments of, and adaptations from,
Sidney, Donne, Ben Jonson, and others. The
scenes of the various tortures of the Duchess
form an immense and not always successful sym-
phony of gloom, horror, madness, and death. It
is only redeemed by the fact that the Duchess can
never be quite broken:
j/^ "I am Duchess of Malii still."
Only once, just before death, does she let an
hysterical cry escape her:
"any way, for Heaven's sake.
So I were out of your whispering."
JOHN WEBSTER 107
, The superhuman death of the Duchess is finely
anti-climaxed by the too human death of Cariola,
[who fights, kicks, j)rays, and lies.
" After the death of the Duchess, there is a
slight lull before the rest of the tragedy rises
again to its climax. It contains a queer scene of
macabre comedy where Ferdinand beats his fan-
tastic doctor, and a curious, rather Gothic, ex-
jtraneous scene of quietness, where Antonio talks
to the echo. The end is a maze of death and
madness. Webster's supreme gift is the blind-
ing revelation of some intense state of mind at
a crisis, by some God-given phrase. All the last
half of The Duchess of Malfi is full of them.
The mad Ferdinand, stealing across the stage in
the dark, whispering to himself, with the dev-
astating impersonality of the madman, "Stran-
gling is a very quiet death," is a figure one may
not forget. And so in the next scene, the too
sane Cardinal: —
"How tedious is a guilty conscience!
When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden
'/Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake
That seems to strike at me."
It is one of those pieces of imagination one can-
not explain, only admire.
But it is, of course, in or near the moment
108 JOHN WEBSTER
of death that Webster is most triumphant. He
•^ adopts the romantic convention, that men are,
\ in the second of death, most essentially and sig-
\ "nificantly themselves. In the earher play the
whole angry, sickening fear of death that a man
feels who has feared nothing else, lies in those
terrific words of Brachiano's when it comes home
to him that he is fatally poisoned: —
"On pain of death, let no man name death to me:
It is a word infinitely terrible."
Webster knows all the ways of approaching
death. Flamineo, with the strange carelessness
of the dying man, grows suddenly noble. "What
dost think on?" his murderer asks him.
Flamineo. "Nothing; of nothing; leave thy idle
questions.
I am i' the way to study a long silence:
To prate were idle. I remember nothing.
There's nothing of so infinite vexation
As man's own thoughts."
And Webster, more than any man in the world,
has caught the soul just in the second of its
decomposition in death, when knowledge seems
transcended, and the darkness closes in, and
boundaries fall away.
"My soul," cries Vittoria, "like to a ship in a black storm,
Is driven, I know not whither."
JOHN WEBSTER 109
And Flamineo —
"While we look up to Heaven we confound
Knowledge with knowledge, O, I am in a mist."
So in this play Ferdinand "seems to come to
himself," as Bosola says, "now he's so near the
bottom." He is still half-mad; but something
of the old overweening claim on the universe
fires up in the demented brain :
"Give me some wet hay : I am broken-minded.
I do account this world but a dog-kennel:
I will vault credit and affect high pleasures
, Beyond death."
For some six years again, after The Duchess
of Malfi, we know nothing of Webster's activi-
ties. When he comes once more into sight in
The Devil's Law-Case (1620) he has shared the
fate of the whole drama. It is an attempt to
write in the Massinger-Fletcher genus of tragi-
comedy. The plot is of so complicated a nature
that it would take almost the space of the whole
play to set it out fully. Indeed there is scarcely
a plot at all, but a succession of plots, interwoven,
and each used, in the debased way of that period,
almost only to produce some ingeniously start-
ling scene, some theatrical paradox. It was,
probably, Fletcher who was responsible for this
no JOHN WEBSTER
love of a succession of dramatic shocks. It suited
a part of Webster's taste only too well.
The main incident of the play is a malicious
suit brought by a mother, Leonora, against her
son, Romelio, trying to dispossess him on the
(false) ground of bastardy. Tacked on to that
are various minor affairs, a duel between friends
in which both are supposed to have been killed
and both marvellously survive, a virgin pretend-
ing to be with child, a sick man miraculously
cured by an assassin's unintentionally medicinal
knife, and so on. The most central incident may
have been suggested to Webster by an old play,
Lusfs Dominion; the cure he got from a transla-
tion of some French yarns. But the question
of his originality is unimportant. All his inci-
dents aim at that cheap fantasticality which
marked this Jacobean drama. And his topics
are its well-rubbed coins, romantic friendship,
sudden "passion," virginity, duelling, seduction.
A most dully debonair world. However, he
could not handle them w4th the same touch.
Webster stepped the same measures as his con-
temporaries, willingly enough — conceitedly even,
as his dedication and preface show; but with
earlier legs. His characters alternate between
being the sometimes charming lay-figures of the
time, and wakening to the boisterous liveliness
JOHN WEBSTER 111
of fifteen years before. Several scenes are very
noticeably Jonsonian interludes of farce, sand-
wiched between comedy. The vigorous flow of
Act II, Scene 1 (pages 114-116) is wholly remi-
niscent of the comedy of humours. This is part-
ly due to the purely satiric character of some of
the passages. The dramatists of the beginning
of the century loved to play Juvenal. They
would still be railing. Webster was especially
prone to it. Repeatedly, in The DeviVs Law-
Case, this habit of abuse, directed against one
person or the world, recalls Webster's two great
plays. There are a score of passages where you
immediately cry "Webster!" the note is so indi-
vidual. And they are mostly of this satiric kind.
Who else could have written (I. 1) :
"With what a compell'd face a woman sits
While she is drawing ! I have noted divers,
Either to feign smiles, or suck in the lips,
To have a little mouth; ruffle the cheeks
To have the dimple seen; and so disorder
The face with affectation, at next sitting
It has not been the same : . . ."
The "I have noted" of the professional satirist
is unmistakeable.
But, indeed, the essence of Webster pervades
this "tragi-comedy." And the result is that it
is as far diiFerent from other tragi-comedies in
112 JOHN WEBSTER
its spirit, as Measure for Measure is from the
comedies among which it is numbered. His vo-
cabulary and peculiar use of words peep out
on every page; "passionately," "infinitely,"
"screech-owl," "a lordship," "caroche," "mathe-
matical," "dung-hill," "foul" a hundred times;
and all in sentences that have the very run of his
accents. There are scores of short passages.
Webster's characters have the trick of comment-
ing on themselves when they are jesting. "You
see, my lord, we are merry," cries Romelio (p.
Ill), and so Sanitonella (p. 114), "I am merry."
The Duchess inevitably comes to one's mind, in
that happy moment before her world crumbled
about her, "I prithee, when were we so merry?"
It is a trick that makes the transience or the un-
reality of their merriment stand out against the
normal and real gloom. Continually in this play,
as in the others, Webster is referring to women
painting their faces. The subject had a queer
fascination for him. Those other, more obvious,
I thoughts of his reappear, too ; his broodings on
vdeath and gi^aves. There is the same savagery
in his mirth :
"But do you not think"
says Jolenta, suddenly, when she has acceded to
Romelio's horrible plannings,
JOHN WEBSTER 113
"I shall have a horrible strong breath now?"
RoMELio. "Why?"
JoLENTA. "O, with keeping your counsel^ 'tis so terrible
foul."
"Bitter flashes" Romelio rightly calls such out-
bursts. But he himself achieves wit most suc-
cessfully in the same mood and manner. When
the Capuchin worries him, before his duel, about
religion, he, "very melancholy," retorts with a
question about swords —
"These things, you know," the Capuchin re-
plies, "are out of my practice."
"But these are things, you know,
I must practise with to-morrow."
Romelio sardonically returns. It is very clear
throughout that the bitterer Webster's flashes
are, the brighter. And in a similar way he livens
up when he approaches any emotion such as
Jolenta describes, in herself, as "fantastical sor-
row." It is the fantastical in emotion or char-
acter that inspires him, while the fantastical in
situation leaves him comparatively cold. He es-
says the latter, dutifully — the usual intellectual
paradoxes and morbid conventions of impossible
psychology which this kind of drama demanded.
In that typically-set Websterian scene (Act III.
Scene 3 — A table set forth with two tapers, a
114 JOHN WEBSTER
death's-head, a book.) between Romelio and Jo-
lenta, love, hate, passion, anger, and grief play
General Post with all the unnatural speed the
Jacobeans loved. He has even invested the starts
and turns of the trial-scene with a good deal of
interest and much dramatic power. But the an-
guish that apes mirth and the mirth that toys
with pain wake his genius. He even laughs at
himself. You feel an almost personal resentment
at being sold, towards the end of the play. Ro-
melio's sullen but impressive stoicism is broken
by Leonora's entrance with coffins and winding-
sheets and that incomparable dirge.
**. . . Courts adieu, and all delights.
All bewitching appetites !
Sweetest breath and clearest eye.
Like perfumes, go out and die;
And consequently this is done
As shadows wait upon the sun.
Vain the ambition of kings,
Who seek by trophies and dead things
To leave a living name behind.
And weave but nets to catch the wind/*
Romelio, like any reader, is caught by the ut-
ter beauty of this. He melts in repentance, per-
suades his mother, and then the priest, to enter
the closet, and then — locks them in with entire
callousness and a dirty jest, and goes off to his
duel. It is, literally, shocking. But Romelio is
JOHN WEBSTER 115
one of the two or three characters into whom
Webster has breathed a spasmodic life and force.
The ordinary dolls of the drama, like Contarino
and Ercole, remain dolls in his hands. But the
lust and grief of Leonora have some semblance
of motion, the suffering of Jolenta has an hys-
terical truth, and the figure of Romelio lives
sometimes with the vitality of an intruder from
another world. He comes out of the earlier
drama. He is largely the sort of monster Ben
Jonson or Marlowe, or Kyd or Tourneur, or tl^ ,
earlier Webster likes to picture, malign, immoral,
grotesque, and hideously alive. Winifred also
is older than 1620. She has an unpleasant vi-
vacity, a rank itch of vulgarity, as well as the
office of commentator, which reminds one of
characters in Webster's two great plays. She
is aJBosola in skirts. A sure sign, she grows
more excited when love-making is to hand. It _
is typical of Webster that he should smirch with ^
his especial rankness, not only the baser char-
acters of this play, but the love-making between
his hero and heroine, as he does through Wini- /
fred's mouth in the second scene of the play. ^ J
Like any Flamineo, she interprets between us
and the puppets' dallying, a little disgustingly:
''O sweet-breath'd monkeys^ how they grow together !" . . .
116 JOHN WEBSTER
A few incidents stand out, marked by the
darker range of colours of the earlier drama.
Contarino's groan that announces that he is not
dead (III. 2):
Con. "Or
First Surgeon. "Did he not groan?"
Second Surgeon. "Is the wind in that door still?'*
has something of the terror and abrupt ghostli-
ness of the midnight scene in The Duchess of
Malfi (II. 3), or Macbeth, or Jonson's additions
to The Spanish Tragedy. And Leonora's mad
flinging herself on the ground in III. 3, and ly-
ing there, is an old trick that the early Eliza-
bethan audiences almost demanded as an essen-
tial of Tragedy. It goes back through Ferdi-
nand, Bussy, and Marston's heroes, to old Hier-
onimo herself.
Webster's note-book is perhaps a little less
apparent in this play than in the two previous.
But there are a good many passages we can iden-
tify, and a lot more we can suspect. He had
fewer "meditations" of the old railing order to
compile from his pages of aphorisms and modern
instances. But we find repetitions from A Mon-
umental Column, The White Devil, and espe-
cially The Duchess of Malfi; and Ben Jonson
and Sidney have found their way through the
JOHN WEBSTER 117
note-book into these pages. He still employs
soliloquy and the concluding couplet to an extent
and in a way that seem queer in a play of this
period. But he seems to have become a little
more sensible to violent incongruity. He never
offends so harshly as he had used. Occasionally
still, the stage-machinery creaks loudly enough
to disturb the theatrical illusion rather unpleas-
antly. Sanitonella is a little abrupt and blunt
in exacting information from Crispiano for our
benefit: — "But, pray, sir, resolve me, what should
be the reason that you . . ."etc. (II. 1). And
Romelio's asides are occasionally rather too obvi-
ous. In III. 3, when his various proposals to
Jolenta have been ineffectual, he is non-plussed ;
but only for a second:
RoMELio (aside) *'This will not do.
The devil has on the sudden furnished me
With a rare charm^ yet a most unnatural
Falsehood: no matter, so 'twill take. — "
But at the end, when everybody reveals who he
is, and begins explaining everything that has hap-
pened, the tedium of these disentanglings is cut,
and the apparently inevitable boredom dodged,
by a device that is so audacious in its simplicity
as to demand admiration. Leonora, who has ap-
parently made good use of her imprisonment
118 JOHN WEBSTER
in the closet to jot down a jorecis of all the plots
in the play, interrupts the growing flood of ex-
planations with
"Cease here all further scrutiny. This paper
Shall give unto the court each circumstance
Of all these passages !"
One is too relieved to object.
Metrically this play is very similar to its two
forerunners; though here, as in the handling,
Webster seems a little quieter. He is unaffected
by the Fletcher influence in metre. The run of
his lines is still elusive and without any marked
melody, except in one or two passages. The be-
ginning lines with w w _ the continual shift-
ing and sliding of accent, and the jerky effect
of conversation, continue. It was always a blank
verse for talking rather than reading. One trick
Webster seems to have developed further, the fill-
ing out of feet with almost inadequate syllables.
Twice in the first five pages "marriage" is a
trisyllable. ^'Emotion" fills two feet; and so on.
This habit, common between 1580 and 1595, was
revived by some writers j^fter 1615. It fits in
very queerly with that opposite tendency to the
use of trisyllabic feet that Webster greatly in-
dulged in. Sometimes the combination is rather
piquant. But "marriage" is, perhaps, a symp-
JOHN WEBSTER 119
torn of an increased steadiness and mastery of
rhythm. There are two or three passages where
his blank verse is abler and better, in considerable
periods, not in short fragments and exclamations,
than it had been before. And this is accompa-
nied by a greater evenness. Leonora's great
speech (III. 3) begins with something of the
old ripple: but it dies away:
". . . Is he gone then?
There is no plague i' the world can be compared
To impossible desire; for they are plagu'd
In the desire itself. . . .
O, I shall run mad!
For as we love our youngest children best.
So the last fruit of our affection,
Where-ever we bestow it, is most strong.
Most violent, most unresistable.
Since 'tis indeed our latest harvest-home.
Last merriment 'fore winter. . . ."
The beauty and pathos of these hues, the com-
plete and masterful welding of music and mean-
ing, show what fineness is in The DeviVs Law-
Case, One could quote many other things as
noble, or as admirable, from Romelio's glorious
**I cannot set myself so many fathom
Beneath the height of my true heart, as fear,"
or the sagacious and horrid rightness of his
120 JOHN WEBSTER
"doves never couple without
A kind of murmur/'
to Jolenta's cry,
"O, if there be another world i' the moon
As some fantastics dream. . . ."
Yet the play is not a good play. These good
bits illuminate, for the most part, nothing but
themselves, and have only a literary value. A
good play must leave an increasing impression
of beauty or terror or mirth upon the mind,
heaping its effect continually with a thousand
trifles. This does not so. It is a play without
wholeness. Its merits are occasional and acci-
dental. If you read closely, there is the ex-
traordinary personality of Webster plain enough
over and in it all. But he was working in an
uncongenial medium. It is a supreme instance
of the importance of the right form to the artist.
The Fletcher-Massinger "tragi-comedy" was
the product of an age and temper as unsuitable
to Webster as the tragedy of blood and dirt had
been suitable. The Devil's Law-Case is not even
a fine failure, as, for instance, Timon of Athens
is. In the first place a tragi-comedy is not a
thing to make a fine failure of. And in the sec-
ond place Webster's nature and methods de-
manded success in a right form, or nothing. He
JOHN WEBSTER 121
had to suffuse the play with himself. He was
not great enough and romantic enough to con-
fer immortality upon fragments. His bitter
flashes required the background of thunderous
darkness to show them up ; against this grey day-
light they are ineffectual.
Beyond the uninteresting and unimportant A
Monumental Column (1613), which only shows
how naturally Webster turned to the imitation
of Donne when he turned to poetry, the uncer-
tain and featureless Monuments of Honour, and
a few rather perfunctory verses of commenda-
tion, we have nothing more of Webster's except
A Cure for a Cuckold, This must have been
written shortly after The Devil's Law-Case, It
is almost entirely unimportant for throwing light
on the real Webster. All we know is that he
had something to do with the play; how much
or little it is impossible to tell from reading it.
He may be responsible for the whole of the main
plot. That it is not so obscure and unmotivated
as has sometimes been supposed, I have shown
in an Appendix ; but it is not good. Parts have a
slight, unreal, charm for those who are interested
in antiquities. The way in which in IV. 3 (p.
310) Lessingham suddenly sulks, and goes off
122 JOHN WEBSTER
to make mischief, in order to spin the play out
for another act and a bit, is childish.
It is a pity we cannot barter with oblivion and
give A Cure for a Cuckold for Ford and Web-
ster's lost murder play. This was one of the
last, and it must have been one of the best, of
the Elizabethan domestic tragedies. What a
superb combination. Ford and Webster! And
on such a subject! It may have been again, after
all those years, the last cry of the true voice of
Elizabethan drama. Once, in 1624, there was,
perhaps, a tragedy of blood, not of sawdust.
It is beyond our reach.
Chapter V
SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF
WEBSTER
It happens, with some writers, that when you
come to examine their less-known works, your
idea of them suffers considerable change, and
you realise that the common conception of them
is incomplete, distorted, or even entirely wrong.
This is not the case with Webster. He is known
to everyone by two plays — The Duchess of Malfi
and The White Devil The most diligent study
of the rest of his authentic works will scarcely
add anything of value to that knowledge of him.
jHe is a remarkable dramatist, with an unusually
[individual style and emotional view of the world.
What "Webster," the literary personality, means
to us, its precise character, and its importance,
can be discovered and explained from these two
plays. So I shall chiefly consider and quote them,
with an occasional sidelight from The Devil's
Law-Case.
It is one task of a critic, no doubt, to communi-
cate exactly his emotions at what he is criticising,
123
124 JOHN WEBSTER
to express and define the precise savour. But it
is not a thing one can go on at for long. Hav-
ing tried to hint once or twice what "Webster"
precisely is, I had better analyse various aspects
of him, and not tiresomely, like some political
speaker, seek about for a great many ways of
saying the same thing. And after all, Webster
carries his own sense and savour. A showman,
"motley on back and pointing-pole in hand," can
but draw attention, and deliver a prologue. If
I can explain briefly to anyone the sort of plays
Webster was writing, the sort of characters that
he took delight in, the kind of verse he used, the
kind of literary effect he probably aimed at —
as I see all these things — I can then only take
him up to a speech of the Duchess and leave him
there. One cannot explain
"What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut
With diamonds? or to be smothered
With cassia ? or to be shot to death with pearls ?
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits ; and 'tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges
You may open them both ways : . . ."
To paraphrase it, or to hang it with epithets,
would be silly, almost indecent. One can only
quote. And though quotation is pleasant, it is
a cheap way of filling space; and I have written
CHARACTERISTICS 125
this essay on the assumption that its readers
will be able to have at least TJie Duchess of Malfi
and The White Devil before them.
So I shall only attempt, in this chapter, to men-
tion some of Webster's most interesting charac-
teristics, and to analyse one or two of them.
His general position, as the rearguard of the
great period in Elizabethan drama and Htera-
ture, I have already outlined. He took a certain
kind of play, a play with a certain atmosphere,
which appealed to him, and made two works of
individual genius. Beyond this type of play
and the tradition of it, there are no very im-
portant "influences" on him. Shakespeare's
studies of madness may have affected him. The
Duchess,
"I'll tell thee a miracle;
I am not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow;
The heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass,
The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad,"
has a note of Lear in it, but also, and perhaps
more definitely, of Antonio and Mellida. From
Ben Jonson and Chapman he borrowed. And
something of their attitude to drama became his.
But he does not imitate them in any important
individual quality. He pillaged Donne, too, as
much of him as was accessible to a middle-class
dramatist, and occasionally seems to emulate the
126 JOHN WEBSTER
extraordinary processes of that mind. The char-
acters in Webster's plays, hke the treatment of
the story, in as far as they are not his own, are
the usual characters of the drama of eight years
before. Once only does he noticeably seem to
take a figure from the popular gallery of the
years in which he was writing. The little prince
Giovanni, like Shakespeare's Mamillius, is
adopted from the Beaumont and Fletcher chil-
dren. He has the same precocity in wit (it seems
a httle distressing to modern taste), and more
of their sentimentality than Hermione's son.
But, against that background, he is, on the whole,
a touching and lovely figure.
The one influence upon Webster that is al-
ways noticeable is that of satire. His nature
tended to the outlook of satire; and his plays
give evidence that he read Elizabethan, and in
some form Latin satire with avidity. Hamlet,
the Malcontent, and all the heroes of that type
of play, "railed" continually. But with Webster
every character and nearly every speech has
something of the satirical outlook. They de-
scribe each other satirically. They are for ever
girding at the conventional objects of satire, cer-
tain social follies and crimes. There are several
little irrelevant scenes of satire, like the malevo-
lent discussion of Count Malatesti {D.M,, III.
CHARACTERISTICS 127
3). It is incessant. The topics are the ordinary
ones, the painting of women, the ingratitude of
princes, the swaggering of blusterers, the cow-
ardice of pseudo-soldiers. It gives part of the
peculiar atmosphere of these plays.
This rests on a side of Webster's nature, which,
in combination with his extraordinary literary
gifts, produces another queer characteristic of his ,
— his fondness for, and skill in comment. HeJ
is rather more like a hterary man trying to write'
for the theatre than any of his contemporaries.
Theatrically, though he is competent and some-
times powerful, he exhibits no vastly unusual
ability. It is his comments that bite deep. Such
gems as Flamineo's description of Camillo:
"When he wears white satin one would take him
by his black muzzle to be no other creature than a
maggot;"
or of the Spanish ambassador :
"He carries his face in's ruff, as I have seen a
serving man carry glasses in a cipress hat-band,
monstrous steady, for fear of breaking: he looks
like the claw of a black-bird, first salted, and then
broiled in a candle;"
or Lodovico's of the black woman Zanche in love :
"Mark her, I prithee ; she simpers like the suds
A collier hath been washed in;"
128 JOHN WEBSTER
have frequently been quoted. They have a
purely literary merit. In other places he
achieves a dramatic effect, which would be a lit-
tle less in a theatre than in the book, by com-
ment. When Bosola brings the terrible discov-
ery of the secret to Ferdinand and the Cardinal,
he communicates it to them, unheard by us, up-
stage. We only know, in reading, how they take
it, by the comments of Pescara, Silvio, and Delio,
who are watching, down-stage —
Pesc. "Mark Prince Ferdinand:
A very salamander lives in's eye,
To mock the eager violence of fire."
SiL. "That cardinal hath made more bad faces with his
oppression than ever Michael Angelo made good
ones: he lifts up's nose like a foul porpoise before
a storm."
Pes. "The Lord Ferdinand laughs."
Del. "Like a deadly cannon
That lightens ere it smokes . . ."
it goes straight to the nerves. "The Lord Ferdi-
nand laughs." It is unforgettable.
Webster had always, in his supreme moments,
that trick of playing directly on the nerves. It
is the secret of Bosola's tortures of the Duchess,
and of much of Flamineo. Though the popular
conception of him is rather one of immense gloom
and perpetual preoccupation with death, his
power lies almost more in the intense, sometimes
CHARACTERISTICS 129
horrible, vigour of some of his scenes, and his
uncanny probing to the depths of the heart. In
his characters you see the instincts at work jerk-
ing and actuating them, and emotions pouring
out irregularly, unconsciously, in floods or spurts
and jets, driven outward from within, as you
sometimes do in real people.
The method of progression which Webster
used in his writing, from speech to speech or
idea to idea, is curiously individual. The ideas
do not develop into each other as in Shakespeare,
nor are they tied together in neatly planned
curves as in Beaumont and Fletcher. He seems
to have, and we know he did, put them into the
stream of thought from outside ; plumping them
down side by side. Yet the very cumbrousness
of this adds, in a way, to the passion and force
of his scenes, as a swift stream seems swifter and
wilder when its course is broken by rocks and
boulders. The craft of Shakespeare's genius
moves with a speedy beauty like a yacht running
close into the wind ; Websters is a barge quanted'
slowly but incessantly along some canal, cum-
brous but rather impressive.
This quality of the progression of Webster's
thought, and, in part, of his language, contrasts
curiously with his metr6. The Elizabethan use of
blank verse was always liable to be rather fine;
130 JOHN WEBSTER
but there was only a short period, and it was
only in a few writers, that it got really free —
until its final dissolution in the thirties. Web-
ster was one of these writers, probably the freest.
Only Shakespeare can approach him in the lib-
erties he took with blank verse ; but Shakespeare's
liberties conformed to higher laws. Webster
^probably had a worse ear for metre, at least in
blank verse, than any of his contemporaries. His
I verse is perpetually of a vague, troubled kind.
Each line tends to have about ten syllables and
about five feet. It looks in the distance like a
blank verse line. Sometimes this line is extraor-
dinarily successful ; though it is never quite scan-
nable. Brachiano's
"It is a word infinitely terrible,**
is tremendously moving. But sometimes Web-
ster's metrical extravagance does not justify it-
self, and rather harasses. The trick of beginning
a line with two unaccented syllables, if repeated
too often in the same passage, does more to break
the back of the metre than almost any other pos-
sible peculiarity.
On the whole it is probable that Webster did
all this on purpose, seeing that a larger licence
of metre suits blank verse in drama than is per-
missible in literature. When he turned poet,
CHARACTERISTICS 131
in A Monumental Column, he is equally unmet-
rical; but that, can probably be attributed to
the very strong influence of Donne. Certainly
the lyrics in his plays would seem to show that
as a lyric poet he could have been among the
greatest, a master of every subtlety, at least of
that lyric metre which he did use. It is the one
which the Elizabethans, almost, invented, and
upon which they performed an inconceivable va-
riety of music. Milton, who learnt so much from
them in this respect, made this metre the chief
part of his heritage. But even he could not in-
clude all that various music. It is the metre of
L' Allegro, II Penseroso, and the end of Comus,
No man ever got a stranger and more perfect
melody from it than Webster in his dirges.
Webster's handling of a play, and his style of
writing, have something rather slow and old-
fashioned about them. He was not like Shake-
speare or Beaumont and Fletcher, up-to-date and
"slick." He worried his plays out with a grunt-
ing pertinacity. There are several uncouth char-
acteristics of his that have an effect which halts
between archaism and a kind of childish awk-
wardness, like "primitive" art of various nations
and periods. Sometimes he achieves the same
result it can have, of a simplicity and directness
refreshingly different from later artifice and ac-
132 JOHN WEBSTER
complishment. Sometimes he only seems, to the
most kindly critic, to fail hopelessly for lack of
skill. One of these characteristics is the use of
couplets, usually to end the scene, and commonly
of a generalising nature. This is, of course, old-
fashioned. The frequency of such couplets is
an often-noticed feature of the early Elizabethan
drama: and the plays of such a writer as Shake-
speare are dated by the help of the percentage
of rhyming to unrhyming lines. Even as late
as Webster, other authors sometimes ended the
play, or a scene, with a couplet. But they did
it with grace; using it almost as a musical de-
vice, to bring the continued melody of their verse
to a close. And in the earlier plays, where one
or more rhyming couplets end most scenes and
many speeches, and even, especially in the more
lyrical parts, come into the middle of passages,
the rest of the versification is of a simple, rhyth-
mical end-stopped kind; and so the couplets
seem scarcely different from the rest, a deeper
shade of the same colour. Webster's couplets
are electric green or crimson, a violent contrast
with the rough, jerky, sketchy blank verse he
generally uses. Some of them are so incongru-
ous as to be ridiculous. At the end of a stormy
passage with the Cardinal, Ferdinand says :
CHARACTERISTICS 133
"In, in; I'll go sleep.
Till I know who leaps my sister, I'll not stir;
That known, I'll find scorpions to sting my whips.
And fix her in a general eclipse." [Exeunt.
If you consider the general level of Webster's
writing, this rings almost childish. In llie
White Devil there are two instances of rhyming
couplets close to each other, one superbly suc-
cessful, the other a failure. The rather hideous
and queerly vital wooing-scene between Brachi-
ano and Vittoria leads up to a speech of the
former's that ends:
"You shall to me at once,
Be dukedom, health, wife, children, friends, and all."
Cornelia, Vittoria's mother, who has been listen-
ing behind, unseen, breaks the tension with a
rush forward and the cry:
"Woe to light hearts, they still forerun our fall!"
It has a Greek ring about it. It brings the fresh
and terrible air of a larger moral world into the
tiny passionate heat of that interview. And
withal there is a run of fine music in the line.
The rhyme helps all this materially. It enhances
and marks the moment, and assists the play. But
a dozen lines later, after some burning speeches
of reproach in ordinary blank verse, Corneha
1
134 JOHN WEBSTER
drops into rhyme again to show the moral of
it all:
"See, the curse of children !
In life they keep us frequently in tears;
And in the cold grave leave us in pale fears." ^
The end of the play affords even more ex-
traordinary examples of these couplets. Sand-
wiched in between the dying Vittoria's tremen-
dous
"My soul, like a ship in a black storm.
Is driven, I know not whither,"
and Flamineo's equally fine sentence — an exam-
ple of generalisation rightly and nobly used —
"We cease to grieve, cease to be fortune's slaves.
Nay, cease to die, by dying,"
comes the smug and dapper irrelevancy of
"Prosperity doth bewitch men, seeming clear;
But seas do laugh, show white, when rocks are near."
It is beyond expression, the feeling of being let
down, such couplets give one.
In three places a diif erent and very queer side
of Webster's old-fashionedness or of his occa-
sional dramatic insensibility, is unpleasantly
*This couplet seems even absurdcr to us than it should, because
the word "frequently" has since Webster got a rapid colloquial
sense of "quite often."
CHARACTERISTICS 135
manifest. Here it becomes plainer, perhaps, that it
is rather a childish than an old-fashioned tendency
which betrays him to these faults. Three times,
once in The White Devil, and twice in The Duch-
ess of Malfi, the current of quick, living, realistic
speeches — each character jerking out a hard, bit-
ing, dramatic sentence or two — is broken by long-
winded, irrelevant, and fantastically unrealistic
tales. They are of a sententious, simple kind,
such as might appear in ^Esop. Generally they
seem to be lugged in by their ears into the play.
They are introduced with the same bland, start-
ling inconsequence with which some favourite
song is brought into a musical comedy, but with i
immeasurably less justification. The instance in /
The White Devil is less bad than the others."
Francisco is trying to stir Camillo against the
indignity of horns. He suddenly tells him a long
tale how Phoebus was going to be married, and
the trades that don't like excessive heat made
a deputation to Jupiter against the marriage,
saying one sun was bad enough, they didn't want
a lot of little ones. So, one Vittoria is bad
enough ; it is a good thing there are no children.
It is pointless and foolish enough, in such a play.
But the instances in The Duchess of Malfi sur-
pass it. In the tremendous scene in the bed-
chamber when Ferdinand accuses the Duchess
136 JOHN WEBSTER
of her marriage, the mad frenzy of his reproaches
is excellently rendered. She replies with short
sentences, bursting from her heart. Each of his
taunts carries flame. The whole is hving, terse,
and affecting. In the middle of this Ferdinand
breaks into a long old-fashioned allegory about
Love, Reputation, and Death, a tale that (but
for a fine line or two) might have appeared in
any Elizabethan collection of rhymed parables.
The point of it is that Reputation is very easy
to lose, and the Duchess has lost hers. It is as
irrelevant and not so amusing as it would be if
Michael Angelo had written a Christmas cracker
posy on the scroll the Cumaean Sibyl holds. In
the third instance the Duchess mars the end of
a lovely and terrible scene (III. 5) by a would-
be funny moral tale about a dogfish and a sal-
mon. Here there is a sort of pathetic suitability
in the Duchess, half broken with sorrow^ almost
unconsciously babbling childish tales to her ene-
mies. But, with the other tales in mind, one
finds it hard to believe Webster meant this. If
he did, he did not bring his effect off. The tale
is too incongruous with the rest of the scene.
There are still further instances of Webster's
occasional extraordinary childishness in drama,
namely his shameless use of asides, soliloquies,
and other devices for telling his audience the
CHARACTERISTICS 137
motives of the actors or the state of the plot.
The Elizabethans were always rather careless.
The indiscriminate soliloquy or aside were part
of their inheritance, which they but gradually got
rid of. If soliloquies, and even asides, are
handled rightly, in a kind of drama like the
Elizabethan, they need not be blemishes. They
can add greatly to the play. Hamlet's solilo-
quies do. The trend of recent dramatic art has
been' unwise in totally condemning this stage de-
vice. There are two quite distinct effects of
soliloquy in a play. One is to tell the audience
the plot; the other is to let them see character or
feel atmosphere. The first is bad, the second
good. It is perfectly easy for an audience to ac-
cept the convention of a man uttering his
thoughts aloud. It is even based on a real occur-
rence. When the man is alone on the stage it
is an entirely simple and good convention. Even
if there are other characters present, i.e. when the
soliloquy approaches the aside, the trick only
needs careful artistic handling. But the essen-
tial condition is that the audience feels it is over-
hearing the speaker, as much, at least, as it over-
hears the dialogue of the play. In soliloquies
or in dialogues the characters may, to a certain
extent, turn outward to the audience, and ad-
dress them ; in the same way as they forbear from
138 JOHN WEBSTER
often turning their backs on them. But solilo-
quies must go no further. So far, they are ac-
ceptable. If we can accept the extraordinary
convention that a man's conversation shall be
coherent, and in blank verse to boot, we can
easily swallow his thoughts being communicated
to us in the same way. It is only when the
dramatist misuses this licence, and foists improb-
able and unnaturally conscious thoughts on a
man, in order to explain his plot, that we feel
restive. The fault, of course, lies in the unnat-
uralness and the shameless sudden appearance
of the dramatist's own person, rather than in
the form of a soliloquy. Only, soliloquies are es-
pecially liable to this. A legitimate and superb
use of soliloquy occurs near the end of The
Duchess of Malfi, in a passage from which I
have already quoted, where the Cardinal enters,
alone, reading a book:
"I am puzzled in a question about hell:
He says^ in hell there's one material fire,
And yet it shall not burn all men alike,
Lay him by.
— How tedious is a guilty conscience!
When I look into the fish-pond in my garden,
Methinks I see a thing arm'd with a rake.
That seems to strike at me."
[Enter Bosola and Servant hearing Antonio's hodyJ]
CHARACTERISTICS 13&
This is an entirely permissible and successful
use of soliloquy. The words and thought are
mysteriously thrilling. They sharpen the agony
of the spectator's mind to a tense expectation;
which is broken by the contrast of the swift pur-
pose of Bosola's entry, with the sei^ant and the
body, and the violent progression of events en-
suing. The whole is in tone together; and the
effect bites deep, the feeling of the beginning of
sheeting rain, breaking the gloomy pause before
a thunderstorm. But there are cases of Webster
using the soliloquy badly. In The White Devil,
when the servant has told Francisco that Brachi-
ano and Vittoria have fled the city together, he
goes out. Francisco is left alone, exclaiming,
"Fled! O, damnable!" He immediately alters
his key:
"How fortunate are my wishes ! Why, *twas this
I only laboured! I did send the letter
To instruct him what to do," etc., etc.
One finds the dramatist rather too prominently
and audibly there. But his presence becomes
even more offensive when he is visible behind two
characters and their dialogue, as in the instance
from The DeviVs Law-Case, II. 1. A worse
case of this, both in itself and because it comes in
a tragedy, occurs in The White Devil, where
140 JOHN WEBSTER
Francisco and Monticelso explain their actions
to each other, after Camillo, charged with the
commission against the pirates, has made his
exit.
Francisco. "So, 'twas well fitted: now shall we discern
How his wish'd absence will give violent way
To Duke Brachiano's lust."
Monticelso. "Why, that was it;
To what scorned purpose else should we make choice
Of him for a sea-captain.''" etc.
But having informed us of their motives in
this, Webster suddenly remembers that we may-
say, "But why should they start on such a line
of action at all?" So Monticelso, later in the
conversation, apropos of nothing in particular^
remarks —
"It may be objected, I am dishonourable
To play thus with my kinsman; but I answer,
For my revenge I'd stake a brother's life.
That, being wrong'd, durst not avenge himself."
A very similar instance of a pathetic attempt
•to make the audience swallow the plot, by care-
jfully explaining the motives, is in the fourth act
of The Duchess of Malfi, a play distinctly less
disfigured by these childishnesses of Webster's
than The White Devil. There Ferdinand, in
what purports to be a conversation with Bosola,
goes back in his mind and rakes out, all unasked,
CHARACTERISTICS 141
his two motives for persecuting the Duchess.
His behaviour, though badly portrayed, is less
unconvincing and improbable than The White
Devil instance. But such blunders make even
the asides of Flamineo, when he is explaining his
antic behaviour to the audience, flagrant as they
are, seem mild and legitimate stage-devices.
A special class of unrealistic asides and con-
versations, and one very much affected by the
Elizabethans, is the situation when A., B., and
C. are on the stage, and B. and C. are carrying
bn a conversation, interspersed with asides be-
tween A. and B. which C. does not notice. Peo-
ple who have experience of the stage know how
almost impossible this is to manage with any
show of probability. In a comedy or farce the
absurdity matters less. But the scene between
Lodovico, Francisco, and Zanche, after Brachi-
ano's death, though it partakes of farce, makes
one uneasy.
All these childishnesses and blunders in Web-
ster's plays, soliloquies, asides, generalisations,
couplets, and the rest, are due, no doubt, to care-
lessness and technical incapacity. His gifts were
of a different kind. But the continual general-
isations arise also from a particular bent of his
mind, and a special need he felt. It is normal in
142 JOHN WEBSTER
the human mind, it was unusually strong in the
Elizabethans, and it found its summit in Webster
of all of that time — the desire to discover the
general rule your particular instance illustrates,
and the delight of enunciating it. Many people
find their only intellectual pleasure in life, in the
continued practice of this. But drama seems,
or seemed, to demand it with especial hunger;
most of all the poetic drama. The Greeks felt
this, and in the form of drama they developed
this was one of the chief intellectual functions of
the chorus. I say "intellectual," meaning that
in their music and movement they appealed
through other channels to the audience — though
here, too, in part, to something the same taste
in the audience, that is to say, the desire to feel
a little disjunct from the individual case, and
to view it against some sort of background.
Metre itself has, psychologically, the same effect,
a little. But the brain demands to be told ^o m^
ffyvpaL vLKo. or fxlfivet. Se jjiifxpovro^ ly xpov^ff Aios iro-deiv rov epiavTa^
or any of the other deductions and rules.
The Greeks, then, received, to their satisfac-
tion, the knowledge of other instances or of the
general rule or moral, from the chorus. It is
interesting to see the various ways of achieving
the effects of a chorus that later drama has used.
For to some extent the need is always felt,
CHARACTERISTICS 143
though not violently enough to overcome the
dramatic disadvantages of an actual chorus.
Sometimes one character in a play is put aside
to serve the purpose, like the holy man in Max-
im Gorki's The Lower Depths. Or the char-
acters sit down and, a little unrealistically, argue
out their moral, as in Mr. Shaw's plays. Mr.
Shaw and a good many modern German, Eng-
lish, and Scandinavian writers, also depend on
the spectator having picked up, from prefaces
and elsewhere, the general body of the author's
views against the background of which any par-
ticular play is to be performed. Ibsen had two
devices. One was to sum up the matter in some
prominent and startling remark near the end,
like the famous "People don't do such things!"
The other was to have a half-mystical back-
ground, continually hinted at; the mountain-
mines in John Gabriel Borkman, the heights in
When We Dead Awaken, the sea in The Lady
from the Sea, the wild duck. In certain catch-
words these methods met; "homes for men and
women," "ghosts," "you don't mean it!" and the
rest. The temptation to point a moral in the
last words of a play is almost irresistible; and
sometimes justified. A well-known modern play
called Waste ends, "the waste! the waste of it
all!" The Elizabethans were very fond of doing
144 JOHN WEBSTER
this. They had the advantage that they could
end with a rhymed couplet. But they were liable
to do it at the end of any scene or episode. It
has been pointed out how much Webster was
addicted to this practice. Towards their close
his plays became a string of passionate generali-
ties. Antonio and Vittoria both die uttering
warnings against "the courts of princes." Other
characters alternate human cries at their own
distress with great generalisations about life and
death. These give to the hearts of the spectators
such comfort and such an outlet for their con-
fused pity and grief as music and a chorus afford
in other cases. But Webster also felt the need
of such broad moralising in the middle of his
tragedies. Sometimes he pours through the
mouth of such characters as Bosola and Fla-
mineo, generalisation after dull generalisation,
without illuminating. Greek choruses have
failed in the same way. But when a gnome that
is successful comes, it is w^orth the pains. The
solidity and immensity of Webster's mind behind
/the incidents is revealed. Flamineo fills this part
at the death of Brachiano. But often he and
Bosola are a different, and very Websterian, cho-
rus. Their ceaseless comments of indecency and
mockery are used in some scenes to throw up by
contrast and enhance by interpretation the pas-
CHARACTERISTICS 145
sions and sufferings of human beings. They pro-
vide a background for Prometheus ; but a back-
ground of entrails and vultures, not the cliffs
of the Caucasus. The horror of suffering is in-
tensified by such means till it is unbearable. The
crisis of her travail comes on the tormented body
and mind of the Duchess (II. 1) to the swift
accompaniment of Bosola's mockery. Brachi-
ano's wooing, and his later recapture, of Vittoria,
take on the sick dreadfulness of figures in a
nightmare, whose shadows parody them with ob-
scene caricature; because of the ceaseless ape-
like comments of Flamineo, cold, itchy, filthily
knowing.
Light has interestingly been thrown of late on
Webster's method of composition. It had long
been known that he repeats a good many lines
and phrases from himself and from other peo-
ple: and that a great deal of his writing, espe-
cially in his best and most careful work, has the
air of being proverbial, or excerpt. John Ad-
dington Symonds remarked with insight a good
many years ago that Webster must have used
a note-book. His plays read like it. And now
Mr. Crawford has discovered some of the sources
he compiled his note-book from.^
* Crawford, Collectanea, i. 20-46, ii. 1-63.
146 JOHN WEBSTER
It would be useless to repeat Mr. Crawford's
list with a few additions, or to examine the in-
stances one by one. Nearly, not quite, all his
cases seem to me to be real ones. There are cer-
tainly quite enough to enable one to draw impor-
tant inferences about Webster's way of working.
These instances of borrowing are very numerous,
and chiefly from two books, Sidney's Arcadia,
K and Montaigne — favourite sources of Eliza-
bethan wisdom. They are very clearly marked,
and consist in taking striking thoughts and
phrases in the original, occasionally quite long
ones, and rewriting them almost verbally, some-
times with slight changes to make them roughly
metrical. It is a quite different matter from the
faint "parallels" of ordinary commentators. I
give one of the more striking instances, to illus-
trate :
Arcadia, Bk. II.:
"But she, as if he had spoken of a small matter
when he mentioned her life, to which she had not
leisure to attend, desired him, if he loved her, to
shew it in finding some way to save Antiphilus. For
her, she found the world but a wearisome stage
unto her, where she played a part against her will,
and therefore besought him not to cast his love
in so unfruitful a place as could not love it-
self. . . ."
CHARACTERISTICS 147
Arcadia, Ek. III.:
"It happened, at that time upon his bed, towards
the dawning of the day, he heard one stir in his
chamber, by the motion of garments, and with an
angry voice asked who was there. *A poor gentle-
woman,' answered the party, 'that wish long life
unto you.' 'And I soon death unto you,' said he,
'for the horrible curse you have given me.' "
The Duchess of Malfi, IV. 1 (p. 85) :
Duchess. "^Vho must dispatch me?
I account this world a tedious theatre
For I do play a part in't 'gainst my will."
BosoLA. "Come, be of comfort; I will save your life.**
Duchess. "Indeed, I have not leisure to tend
So small a business."
BosoLA. "Now, by my life, I pity you."
Duchess. "Thou art a fool, then.
To waste thy pity on a thing so wretched
As cannot pity itself. I am full of daggers.
Puff, let me blow these vipers from me!
What are you.^"
Enter Servant.
Servant. "One that wishes you long life."
Duchess. "I would thou wert hang'd for the horrible
curse
Thou hast given me."
There are three explanations of all this.
Either Webster knew the Arcadia so well that
he had a lot of it by heart. Or he had the book
and worked from it. Or he kept a note-book,
into which he had entered passages that struck
him, and which he used to write the play from.
148 JOHN WEBSTER
It seems to me certain that the third is the true
explanation. We know that Elizabethan authors
did sometimes keep note-books in this way. Ba-
con did so, and Ben Jonson, whom Webster ad-
mired and rather resembled, worked most me-
thodically this way. The memory theory could
scarcely explain the verbal accuracy of so many
passages. But there are other considerations,
which make the note-book probable. The pas-
sages from the Arcadia or from Montaigne came
very often in lumps. You will get none, or only
one or two, for some scenes, and then twenty
lines or so that are a cento of them, carefully
dovetailed and worked together. It is very diffi-
cult to imagine a man doing this from memory
or from a book. But it is exactly what would
happen if he were using a note-book which had
several consecutive pages with Arcadia extracts,
several more with Montaigne, and so on. The
passage I quoted, which brings together an ex-
tract from Arcadia, III., and another from Ar-
cadia, II., exemplifies this. But there are better
instances. The first ten lines of The Duchess of
Malfi, IV. 1 (p. 84), contain three continuous
more or less verbal thefts from different parts
of the Arcadia, the first and third from Book II.,
the second from Book I. Better still; in II. 1
(p. 67) , Bosola has to utter some profound "con-
CHARACTERISTICS 149
templation," worthy of his malcontent type.
Webster could not think of anything at the mo-
ment. He generally seems to have had recourse
to his note-book when he was gravelled ; for a lot
of his borrowed passages make very little sense
as they come in, and that of a rather sudden na-
ture, in the way that generally betokens an in-
terrupted train of thought. He went to his note-
books on this occasion. He found, probably con-
tiguous there, several sentences of a weighty, dis-
connected sense. They are from Montaigne,
Florio's translation, pages 246, 249, 248, in that
order.^ Put together they have, as a matter of
fact, very little meaning.
BosoLA. "O, Sir, the opinion of wisdom is a foul
tetter that runs all over a man's body; if sim-
plicity direct us to have no evil it directs us to
a happy being; for the subtlest folly proceeds
from the subtlest wisdom ; let me be simply hon-
est."
Still, it did. And being at his Montaigne note-
books, Webster went on. Bosola's next speech
but one borrows from the first Book. For the
long speech that follows it, he goes back to Book
II.; and makes it entirely from two different
passages, one on p. 239, one on p. 299.
A last instance is still more convincing. It
* Professor Henry Morley's reprint.
150 JOHN WEBSTER
concerns A Monumental Column, lines 23-35,
and The Duchess of Malfi, III. 2 (p. 79), the
description of Antonio. The first passage is
mostly taken verbally from the two sources, Ben
Jonson's Dedication to A Masque of Queens and
the description of Musidorus in Arcadia, Book I.
The passage in the play contains one of the
same lines from Jonson, together with a different
part of the sentence describing Musidorus, and
a couple of lines from another part of Arcadia,
Book I. And the remainder of the description
of Musidorus duly turns up in The Duchess of
Malfi a few scenes later, in IV. 1 (p. 84), sand-
wiched between two passages from Arcadia,
Book II.
A good many of these passages Webster cop-
ied out identically, except sometimes for a few
changes to make them go into rough verse.
Others he altered in very interesting ways. It
was not necessarily part of his goodness as an
author to alter them. His genius comes out
equally in the phrases he used to produce far
greater eff*ect than they do in the original, by
putting them at some exactly suitable climax.
We are getting beyond the attitude, born of the
industrial age and the childish enthusiasm for
property as such, which condemns such plagiar-
ism, imitation, and borrowing. The Elizabethans
CHARACTERISTICS 151
had for the most part healthy and sensible views
on the subject. They practised and encouraged
the habit. When Langbaine, in his preface to
Momus Triumphans, "condemns Plagiaries"
(though he is only thinking of plots, even then),
it is a sign of the decadence towards stupidity.
The poet and the dramatist work with words,
ideas, and phrases. It is ridiculous, and shows
a wild incomprehension of the principles of lit-
erature, to demand that each should only use his
own ; every man's brain is filled by thoughts and
words of other people's. Webster wanted to
make Bosola say fine things. He had many
in his mind or his note-book : some were borrowed,
some his own. He put them down, and they an-
swer their purpose splendidly.
/ "I stand like one
l/^ That long hath ta'en a sweet and golden dream;
I am angry with myself, now that I wake/'
That was, or may have been, of his own inven-
tion.
"The weakest arm is strong enough that strikes
With the sword of justice."
That he had found in Sidney. There is no dif-
ference. In any case the first, original, passage
was probably in part due to his friends' influ-
ence; and the words he used were originally
152 JOHN WEBSTER
wholly "plagiarised" from his mother or his
nurse-maid. "Originality" is only plagiarising
from a great many.
So Webster reset other people's jewels and
redoubled their lustre. "The soul must be held
fast with one's teeth . . ." he found Mon-
taigne remarkably saying in a stoical passage.
The phrase stuck. Bosola, on the point of death,
cries : ^
"Yes I hold my weary soul in my teeth;
'Tis ready to part from me."
It is unforgettable.
Webster improved even Donne, in this way;
in a passage of amazing, quiet, hopeless pathos,
the parting of Antonio and the Duchess {Duch-
ess of Malfi, III. 5), which is one long series of
triumphant borrowings:
*'We seem ambitious God's whole work to undo;
Of nothing He made us, and we strive too
To bring ourselves to nothing back,"
Donne writes in An Anatomy of the World.
"Heaven fashion'd us of nothing; and we strive
To bring ourselves to nothing,"
are Antonio's moving words.
* It is only because there are scores of other certain borrowings
of Webster from Montaigne that I accept this one. By itself it
would not be a convincing plagiarism.
CHARACTERISTICS 153
This last example illustrates one kind of the
changes other than metrical Webster used to
make. He generally altered a word or two,
with an extraordinarily sure touch, which proves
his genius for literature. He gave the passages
life and vigour, always harmonious with his own
style. You see, by this chance side-light, the
poet at work, with great vividness. "Fashion'd"
for "made" here, is not a great improvement;
but it brings the sentence curiously into the key
of the rest of the scene. The metrical skill is
astounding — the calm weight of "fashion'd"; the
slight tremble of "Heaven" at the beginning of
the line; the adaptation from Donne's stiff heavy
combative accent, the line ending with "and we
strive too," to the simpler easier cadence more
suited to speech and to pathos, "... ; and we
strive"; and the repetition of "nothing" in the
same place in the two lines.
The long first example I gave of borrowing
from Sidney gives good instances of change,
among others the half-slangy vividness of
"Thou art a fool, then.
To waste thy pity on a thing so wretched
As cannot pity itself ...,'*
for Sidney's mannered, dim,
"and therefore besought him not to cast his
love in so unfruitful a place as could not love itself."
154 JOHN WEBSTER
But the same places in The Duchess of Malfi
and the Arcadia have a much finer example. The
description of Queen Erona is transferred to the
Duchess again. Sidney says that in her soitow,
one could "perceive the shape of loveliness more
perfectly in woe than in joyfulness." Webster
turned this, with a touch, to poetry in its sheerest
beauty.
BosoLA. "You may discern the shape of loveliness
More perfect in her tears than in her smiles."
It is just this substitution of the concrete for
the abstract — which is the nearest one could get
to a definition of the difference between a thought
in good prose and the same thought in good
poetry — that Webster excels in. Even where his
adjectives gain, it is in this direction.
"Or is it true that thou wert never but a vain
name, and no essential thing?"
says Sidney in a long passage on Virtue. Web-
ster makes it a shade more visual, and twenty
times as impressive:
"Or is it true thou art but a bare name.
And no essential thing.'*"
So Bosola gives life to a meditation of Mon-
taigne. Montaigne's democratic mind pondered
CHARACTERISTICS 155
in his study on the essential equahty of men.
"We are deceived," he says of princes; "they are
moved, stirred, and removed in their motions by
the same springs and wards that we are in ours.
The same reason that makes us chide and brawl
and fall out with any of our neighbours, causeth
a war to follow between princes ; the same reason
that makes us whip or beat a lackey maketh a
prince (if he apprehend it) to spoil and waste a
whole province. . . ." Bosola is the heart of
democracy. "They are deceived, there's the same
hand to them; the like passions sway them; the
same reason that makes a vicar to go to law for
a tithe-pig, and undo his neighbours, makes them
spoil a whole province, and batter down goodly
cities with the cannon." The tithe-pig carries
you on to Parnassus; Bosola has the vision of an
artist.
The liveliness of the "there's" for "there is"
in the last quotation is typical. Webster, like all
the great Elizabethans, knew he was writing for
the ear and not the eye. They kept in close
touch, in their phrases, rhythms, and turns, with
speech. Their language was greater than speech,
but it was in that kind; it was not literature.
But there is one example of adoption and
adaptation where Webster stands out quite clear
as the poet, with the queer and little-known men-
156 JOHN WEBSTER
tal processes of that kind of man suddenly
brought to the hght. Montaigne has a passage :
"Forasmuch as our sight, being altered, repre-
sents unto itself things alike ; and we imagine that
things fail it as it doth to them: As they who
travel by sea, to whom mountains, fields, towns,
heaven, and earth, seem to go the same motion,
and keep the same course they do."
The sense is clear and on the surface. He is
illustrating the general rule by an interesting
instance from ordinary experience. When you
go in a train, or a boat, the sky, the earth, and
its various features, all seem to be moving in one
direction.^ In The White Devil Flamineo is
tempting Vittoria with the happiness Brachiano
can give her.
"So perfect shall be thy happiness, that, as men
at sea think land and trees and ships go that way
they go, so both heaven and earth shall seem to go
your voyage/'
Webster took this instance of Montaigne's and
used it to help out quite a different sense. He
used it as a simile of that elusive, unobvious, im-
aginative kind that illuminates the more that you
can scarcely grasp the point of comparison. But
* Note, though, that Montaigne has made a slip. They really
appear to be moving in the opposite direction to yourself. Web-
ster takes the idea over, mistake and all.
CHARACTERISTICS 157
he did more. He was led to it by thinking, as a
poet thinks, only half in ideas and half in words.
Or rather, with ordinary people, ideas lead to
one another, suggest one another, through ideas.
With poets they do it through words, quite illogi-
cally. The paths of association in the brain are
different in the two cases. A word is an idea
with an atmosphere, a hard core with a fringe
round it, like an oyster with a beard, or Profes-
sor William James' conception of a state of
mind. Poets think of the fringes, other people
of the core only. More definitely, if the diction-
ary meaning of a word is a and the atmosphere
oc, the poet thinks of it as ( oo + a)^ and his trains
of thought are apt to go on accordingly. So
here, Webster found, vaguely, "heaven and
earth' ' . . . "going the same motion" . . . and
he leapt to the mystical conception of supreme
happiness. He took "heaven and earth" from
their original, half material, significance, and
transfigured them. He took them from the illus-
tration and put them into the thing illus-
trated. The meaning of the original suggested
one thing to his mind, the words another; he
combined them, in another world. And the re-
sult is a simile of incomprehensible appropriate-
ness and exquisite beauty, an idea in a Shelleyan
altitude where words have various radiance rather
158 JOHN WEBSTER
than meaning, an amazing description of the
sheer summit of the ecstasy of joy.
The note-book habit suited those idiosyncrasies
of Webster's slow-moving mind which distin-
guished him from the ready rhetoric of Fletcher
and the perpetual inspiration of Shakespeare.
The use of such a thing by a poet implies a dif-
ference from other poets in psychology, not, as
is often ignorantly supposed, in degree of merit.
It merely means he has a worse memory. All
writers are continually noting or inventing
phrases and ideas, which form the stuff from
which their later inspiration chooses. Some have
to note them down, else they slip away for ever.
Others can note them in their mind and yet feel
secure of retaining them. The advantage of this
method is that you unconsciously transmute all
"borrowed" ideas to harmony with your own per-
sonality — that when you hunt them out to re-
claim them you find them slightly changed. The
disadvantage, under modern conditions, is that
you may conmiit the most terrible sin of plagiar-
ism, and lift another man's work, and display it
in a recognisable form, without knowing it. So
Meredith in one of his last and best lyrics, an
eight-lined poem called "Youth and Age," re-
peats a line identically from Swinburne's best
poem, The Triumph of Time; and all uncon-
CHARACTERISTICS 159
sciously. The disadvantage of the note-book
method is that you have to perform the operation
of digesting your trophy, harmonising it with the
rest of the work, on the spot. Webster does not
always do this successfully. There are passages,
as we have seen, where he too flagrantly helps
himself along with his note-book. But as a rule
he weaves in his quotations extraordinarily well;
they become part of the texture of the play,
adding richness of hue and strength of fabric.
In The White Devil, in the scene of astounding
tragical farce where Flamineo persuades Vittoria
and Zanche to try to murder him with bulletles«
pistols, the quotations from Montaigne come in
entirely pat. For it is not, generally, when the
play goes slowest that Webster has most recourse
to his note-book. The swift passion of Ferdi-
nand's interview with the guilty Duchess {Duch-
ess of Malfi, III. 2) is, if you enquire closely,
entirely composed of slightly altered passages
from the Arcadia, This detracts no whit from
its tumultuous force.
The chief value of working through a note-
book, from a literary point of view% is this. A
man tends to collect quotations, phrases, and
ideas, that particularly appeal to and fit in with
his own personality. If that personality is a
strong one, and the point of his work is the
160 JOHN WEBSTER
pungency with which it is imbued with this strong
taste, the not too injudicious agglutination of
these external fragments will vastly enrich and
heighten the total effect. And this is, on the
whole, what happens with Webster. The heap-
ing-up of images and phrases helps to confuse
and impress the hearer, and gives body to a taste
that might otherwise have been too thin to carry.
Webster, in fine, belongs to the caddis-worm
school of writers, who do not become their com-
plete selves until they are incrusted with a thou-
sand orts and chips and fragments from the
world around.
It would be possible to go on for a long time
classifying various characteristics of Webster,
and discovering them in different passages or
incidents in his plays. And it would be possible,
too, to lay one's finger on several natural reac-
tions and permanent associations in that brain.
All have noticed his continual brooding over
death. He was, more particularly, obsessed by
the idea of the violence of the moment of death.
Soul and body appeared to him so interlaced that
he could not conceive of their separation without
a struggle and pain. Again, his mind was al-
ways turning to metaphors of storms and bad
weather, and especially the phenomenon of light-
CHARACTERISTICS 161
ning. He is for ever speaking of men lightening
to speech or action; he saw words as the flash
from the thunder-cloud of wrath or passion.
But, after all, the chief characteristic of Web-
ster's two plays and of many things in those
plays, is that they are good; and the chief char-
acteristic of Webster is that he is a good drama-
tist. The great thing about The Duchess of
Malfi is that it is the material for a superb play;
the great thing about the fine or noble things in
it is not that they illustrate anything or belong
to any class, but, in each case, the fine and noble
thing itself. All one could do would be to print
them out at length ; and this is no place for that ;
it is easier to buy Webster's AVorks (though, in
this scandalous country, not very easy). The
end of the matter is that Webster was a great
writer; and the way in which one uses great
writers is two-fold. There is the exhilarating
way of reading their writing; and there is the
essence of the whole man, or of the man's whole
work, which you carry away and permanently
keep with you. This essence generally presents
itself more or less in the form of a view of the
universe, recognisable rather by its emotional
than by its logical content. The world called
Webster is a peculiar one. It is inhabited by
people driven, like animals, and perhaps like
162 JOHN WEBSTER
men, only by their instincts, but more blindly
and ruinously. Life there seems to flow into its
forms and shapes with an irregular abnormal and
horrible volume. That is ultimately the most
sickly, distressing feature of Webster's charac-
ters, their foul and indestructibLgjotallty. It fills
one with tEeTepiHsiorrone feels at the unending
soulless energy that heaves and pulses through
the lowest forms of life. They kill, love, torture
one another blindly and without ceasing. A
play of Webster's is full of the feverish and
ghastly turmoil of a nest of maggots. Maggots
are what the inhabitants of this universe most
suggest and resemble. The sight of their fever
is only alleviated by the permanent calm, un-
friendly summits and darknesses of the back-
ground of death and doom. For that is equally
a part of Webster's universe. Human beings
are writhing grubs in an immense night. And
the night is without stars or moon. But it has
sometimes a certain quietude in its darkness;
but not very much.
APPENDICES.
Appendix A. — "Appius and Virginia"
[The original form of this appendix was rearranged
and shortened by the author for separate publication
in the Modern Languages Remew, vol. viii. No. 4 (Octo-
ber, 1913). I have here combined the two versions, fol-
lowing the order of the second, but restoring most of
the passages which were omitted from it to save space.
E. M.]
THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE LATER
"APPIUS AND VIRGINIA." '
It is startlingly obvious, and has been remarked by
every critic of Webster, that Appius and Virginia is
quite different from his other plays. It "stands apart
from the other plays," says Professor Vaughan.^ Dr.
Ward recognises it as a work of Webster's "later man-
hood, if not of his old age." Mr. Wilham Archer vastly
prefers it to the ordinary crude Websterian melodrama.
In fact, critics, whether of the Ehzabethans in general
or of Webster in particular, have always exhibited
either conscious discomfort or unconscious haste and
lack of interest, when they came to this play. As they
have never questioned its authenticity, their perfunc-
tory and unprofitable treatment of it is noteworthy.
They cannot fit it in. In summing up Webster's charac-
teristics, they have either quietly let it slide out of sight,
or else brought it formally and unhelpfully in, to sit
awkward and silent among the rest like a deaf unpleas-
ant aunt at a party of the other side of the family. But
never, so far as I am aware, has anyone suggested that
it is not by Webster.
We may sympathise with the critics. The more
closely Appius and Virginia is looked at, the less it
shows of the Webster we know. With Northward Ho
*The only other Appius and Virginia known is the old-fashioned
lumbering play by "R. B." (probably Richard Bower) of 1576.
a C. H. E. L., vol. vi, p. 182.
165
166 JOHN WEBSTER
and Westward Ho, one is not discomforted at finding
almost no such mark. You may imagine Webster a
young man, collaborating with an older, in a well-
defined, not very congenial, type of play, contributing
the smaller part. There are a hundred reasons against
what we mean by Webster being prominent in those
plays. Anyhow, a young man's work is frequently any-
body's ; especially his hack-work. Who could pick out
Meredith's war correspondence from anyone else's ? But
once he has developed his particular savour, it can
hardly fade into commonness again. It is as with faces.
You can often mistake two young faces. But once the
soul has got to work, wrinkling and individualising the
countenance, it remains itself for ever, even after the
soul has gone. The taste we recognise as Webster de-
veloped between 1607 and 1615. It is a clinging, un-
mistakable one. Later on he imitated models who pro-
voked it less powerfully. But a close, long scrutiny,
before which Appius and Virginia grows more cold and
strange, increasingly reveals Webster in The Devil's
Law-Case, even in A Cure for a Cuckold, of which he
only wrote part.
Examine Appius and Virginia sesthetically and as
a whole. Webster is a dogged, slow writer, and roman-
tic — in the sense that single scenes, passages, or lines
have merit and intensity on their own account. As a
rule, he finely proves that quintessence of the faith that
the God of Romanticism revealed to his inattentive
prophet. "Load every rift with ore." And there is a
kind of dusty heat over all. Appius and Virginia is
precisely the opposite. Its impression is simple and
cool. It seems more an effort at classicism — uncon-
APPENDICES 167
scious perhaps. There are not many lines or images
you stop over. You see right to the end of the road.
It is, of course, a very poor argument against at-
tributing a play to any particular author, that he has
not written this kind of play elsewhere. The very fact
that he hasn't, makes it all the harder to know what
his attempt in this manner would be like. And when
such an argument is used, as it is, to prove that A
Yorkshire Tragedy is not Shakespeare's, it is of no
value, though it may be on the right side. What is
permissible, however, is, when a writer has several dis-
tinct characteristics, to expect to recognise some of
them, when he is seriously attempting a kind of play
not very different from his ordinary one ; especially if
these characteristics are of certain kinds. A mere jour-
nalist, turning out his daily task, may sometimes write
an indistinguishable undistinguished play in a different
style. A great master of a certain type may possibly^
his tongue just perceptibly bulging the cheek, flash out
something quite good in an entirely other kind, as a tour
de force. Or a very brilliant and not at all serious per-
son, with a trick of writing, some Grceculus of literature,
may sink his own personality entirely in the manner of
another. But that is only possible if he is able to aim
entirely at parody, and not at all at art. Few artists
could ever do this. In any case, Webster and Appms
and Virginia do not fit into any of these potential ex-
planations. He worked (as he tells us, and we can see)
slowly and with trouble. Both his method and the result
show that he was no easily adaptable writer. His
clumsy, individual, passionate form betrays itself under
borrowed clothes. This does not mean that he strode
168 JOHN WEBSTER
always intensely and unswervingly along his own path.
He was, in an odd way, ready enough to put on other
people's clothes that did not suit him. But they. never
fitted all over. It is suggested that in Appius and Vir-
ginia he was trying to imitate Shakespeare's Roman
tragedies. This might explain the absence of some of
his peculiarities, and the presence of other marks ; the
change of atmosphere, the greater number of rhyming
lines, and so forth. But subtler questions of metre and
vocabulary go deeper, in proportion as they are more
unconscious. Consideration of such delicate points, to-
gether with a careful general aesthetic tasting of the
whole play, seem to me to warrant a very strong critical
doubt whether Webster wrote Appius and Virginia.
The characters of the play are slight and ordinary.
The clown is quite unlike anything we could expect Web-
ster to invent. Appius, the Machiavellian villain, has a
little fire. Virginius is a mere stage-creature, and, as
that, quite creditable. Virginia is a virgin. The crowd
of soldiers is a soldiers' crowd. Webster's characters,
in other plays, if they do not always (compared at least
with Shakespeare's) make a highly individual impres-
sion on the mind, always leave a dent.
The metre of Appius and Virginia is not Webster's.
The blank verse is much stricter. Webster's loose, im-
pressionistic iambics, with their vague equivalence and
generous handling, are very unlike these regular, rhe-
torical lines. Webster's great characteristic of begin-
ning a line with what classical prosodists would call
an anapaest finds no place here. And the general metri-
cal technique of which this is only the most obvious
manifestation — the continual use of substitution and
APPENDICES 169
equivalence in the feet, or, better, the thinking more in
lines and less in feet ^ — is strikingly absent in Appms
and Virginia. These prosodic habits are also almost as
little prominent in the possibly Websterian part of
A Cure for a Cuckold. But there is another point
which marks Appius and Virginia off from all the rest.
In the other plays, there is little attempt to keep a line
that is divided between two speakers pentametrical. If
one speech ends with a line of two and a half feet, the
next may begin with a line of two feet, or of three, or
with a complete line. Appius and Virginia keeps al-
most invariably to the old tradition, by which the
speeches dovetail perfectly.^
The first and almost the only characteristic in this
play to strike a casual reader, is the vocabulary. It
is full of rare Latin words, mostly wearing an air of
recent manufacture; "to deject" (in a literal sense),
"munition," "invasive," "devolved," "donative,"
"palped," "enthronised," "torved," "strage," and
many more. This particular vocabulary is a mark of
certain writers, especially of the period at the end of
the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth cen-
^E. g. Duchess of Malfi, III. 2:
"Did you ever in your life know an ill painter
Desire to have his dwelling next door to the shop
Of an excellent picture maker?"
' For the perplexing metrical part which Apj)ius and Virginia
plays, see the metrical table on p. 190 of Dr. Stoll's John Webster.
Its resemblance to A Cure for a Cuckold is only in some direc-
tions, and more statistical than real. The metre of both is rather
smooth; but in a very different way. It is, of course, rather
risky to lay much emphasis on A Cure for a Cuckold: it may have
been worked over by Rowley.
170 JOHN WEBSTER
turies, which had a joyous fertility in inventing new
words that soon drooped and grew sterile. It was
mostly employed by the slightly classicist authors. Of
the major dramatists, Ben Jonson had a touch of it;
Marston, Heywood, Chapman, and Shakespeare show
it chiefly. Shakespeare has this variety among all his
other varieties, neologisms, and airai Xeyofxeva: Chap-
man and Heywood this in especial.
In this and every notable respect the language of
Appius and Virginia is unlike Webster's. Whatever
linguistic point of detail you choose, the lack of re-
semblance is obvious. To take one instance: Dr. Stoll
(p. 40), in trying to prove the Webster authorship of
the major part of A Cure for a Cuckoldy uses as a test
the occurrence of the exclamation "Ha !" especially as
comprehending a whole speech. He says it is unusually
frequent in Webster. "It appears in The White Devil
thirteen times, six of them being whole speeches; in
Malfi ten times, two of them whole speeches; in the
Law-Case nine times, four of them whole speeches; in
Appius and Virginia twice ; in the main plot of the Cure
for a Cuckold seven times, two of them whole speeches."
The oddness of the Appius and Virginia figures does
not strike Dr. Stoll, who is on other business. He ex-
plains them, vaguely, by "the frigidity and academic
character of the play"; which is far from fair to the
slightly Marlovian and "Machiavellian" nature of much
of Appius and Virginia. It is not a Jonsonian Roman
play. There is no reason why Appius should not have
APPENDICES 171
said "Ha!" thirteen times, six of tliem whole speeches,
except that the author did not write like that.
Again, the word "foul" was, characteristically, a
common one with Webster. It occurs often in The
White Devil, on almost every page in The Duchess of
Malfi. "Think on your cause," says Contarino to
Ercole in The DeviVs Law-Case, II. 2 ; "It is a won-
drous foul one." And when the real "devil's law-case"
comes on (IV. S), the shameless Winifred desires,
"Question me in Latin, for the cause is very foul."
There was this habit in Webster of thinking of such
moral rottenness as "foul," slightly materialising it. A
reader would feel safe in betting that Webster would
use the word several times in connection with the trial
of Virginia. One knows his comment on it, as one
knows how a friend will take a piece of news. The
word does not occur in this passage.
Analysis might find a thousand more points, positive
and negative, in which the style and vocabulary of
Appius and Virginia are obviously not those of Web-
ster. The dissimilarity becomes still more obvious
when the language is unanalytically tasted as a whole.
It is throughout rhetorical and easy, with a slight
permanent artificiality. The style is rather imitative
of Shakespeare's, and alive, but not kicking.
In the general construction and handling of the
play there is an un-Websterian childishness and crud-
ity. Webster could be gauche enough at times, but
not in this shallow, easy way. I need only enumerate
some of the instances.
172 JOHN WEBSTER
The Elizabethans were splendidly unsubservient to
time. But the better dramatists tended to conceal their
freedom; Webster among them. The keenest-witted
spectator of A Midsummer Niglifs Dream or The Mer-
chant of Venice could not, unless he were looking for
them, discern the tricks Shakespeare has played with
time. The instance in Appius and Virginia is far more
flagrant, though it might strike an Elizabethan less
than us. Act V. scene 3 takes place in the prison.
Icilius, seeing Virginius relent towards Appius, vanishes
to fetch the body of Virginia. Seven lines after his
exit, a shout is heard. It turns out that in this time
Icilius has gone through the streets to where Virginia
is lying, taken up the body, and started back through
the streets carrying it; and the people have begun to
make an uproar. Eleven lines later, Icilius enters with
the body. If the play stands as it was written, it is
difficult to believe that Webster could have committed
such absurdities. They might possibly, but not prob-
ably, be explained by a theory, for which there is other
evidence, that we have the play in a cut and revised
state.* But nothing can be thought too childish to
come from the author of the crowd-effects in Act II. 2,
where the First Soldier asks :
Soldiers, shall I relate the grievances
Of the whole regiment?
You might expect Omnes to answer "Yes !" or "No !"
if they were all agreed. It is too startling when, with
^ See page 200.
APPENDICES 173
one voice, they cry "Boldly !" But a more amazing in-
stance of sympathy and intelligence follows. The First
Soldier ends a piece of rhetoric with:
from thence arise
A plague to choke all Rome !
Omnes. And all the suburbs !
There is a childishness that goes deeper, in the hand-
ling of the plot and episodes. It is all told with a
forthright and unthinking simplicity that is quite dif-
ferent from any Chapmanesque stark directness; the
simplicity of a child who wants to tell a story, not of
an artist who grasps the whole. It is apparent in the
soliloquies of II. 1, in the end of I. 3, and especially at
the beginning of the same scene, in the interview be-
tween Marcus and Appius. Appius is melancholy,
declares himself in love. Marcus asks with whom, offer-
ing to act pander. Appius tells him, Virginia.
Marcus. Virginia's !
Appius. Hers.
Marcus. I have already found
An easy path which you may safely tread.
Yet no man trace you.
He goes on to explain in detail his rather elaborate
plan.
It is difficult to imagine dramatic innocence of this
kind coming from Webster, whose humour and bizarrerie
are, if not always successful, always entirely conscious,
and whose simplicity, as playwright, is rather archais-
tic than childish.
174 JOHN WEBSTER
These are some of the immediate difficulties in be-
lieving Appius and Virginia to be by Webster. The
further difficulties of explaining the nature and date
of the play, if it is by him, strengthen our incredulity.
How Webster came to write such a play, his various
critics and commentators have not tried to ex-
plain; chiefly because they have not understood that
there was any need of explanation. They have realised
neither how astonishing a tour de force it is, for an
author so completely to sink his personality, nor that
Webster is the last man to be capable of such a feat.
The dumb evidence of their inability to make this play
fit in with or illuminate the rest of Webster's work,
speaks for them. When Webster wrote it, is a ques-
tion they have tried to answer, however dimly. Their
answers have all been different, and all importantly un-
convincing. In the first place, the whole style of the
play, in plot, characterisation, and metre, suggests an
early date, somewhere between 1595 and 1615; and
joins it, loosely, with Julius Ccesar (1601?), Coriolanus
(1608?) and Heywood's The Rape of Lucrece (1604?).
This is especially to be remarked of the metre, which
is rather formal, without being stiff. It has few
"equivalences," that is to say, the lines have nearly
always ten (or, if "feminine," eleven) syllables. The
licences are regular. They mostly consist of a few
limited cases in which elision occurs, always noticeably,
and almost conventionally — the chief example is be-
tween "to" and a verb beginning with a vowel.^ I have
* E. g. "To obey, my lord, and to know how to rule . . ."
APPENDICES 175
already noticed the metrical dovetailing of speeches.
All these prosodic characteristics suit, some rather
demand, a date between 1600 and 1610. So does the
influence of Marlowe and Machiavellism, and the char-
acter of the clown, Corbulo, who is staringly introduced
into the original story. Finally, the general and spe-
cific dissimilarity in style of Appius and Virginia and
Webster's other plays forbids a middle date, and re-
quires an early rather than a late one, if the play be
his. Only a young hand could have disguised its indi-
viduality so completely.
The other evidence, however, points in precisely the
opposite direction. When you try to suggest a possi-
ble date you meet bewildering difficulties. One of the
most certain things about Appius and Virginia is that
it is strongly influenced by Shakespeare's Roman plaj^s,
and especially by Coriolanus} Coriolanus is dated by
most critical opinion as 1608-9. So Appius and Vir-
gvnia must be at least as late as 1609. But that is
definitely in Webster's middle, most individual, period.
The White Devil appeared in 1611, and he was con-
fessedly a long time in writing it. If the author of The
White Devil wrote Appius and Virginia, it cannot have
been only a year or eighteen months before. Then
again you cannot slip the Roman play amazingly be-
tween The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi (c.
1613). It would be far easier to say that Shakespeare
wrote Titus Andronicus between As You Like It and
* StoU, pp. 193-197, illustrates this fully enough. A single read-
ing of the play will prove it.
176 JOHN WEBSTER
Twelfth Night. And you must leave a decent interval
after The Duchess of Malfi. You feel inclined to drop
it quietly in the vacant space between The Duchess of
Malfi and The DeviVs Law-Case. But the progression
in style here is so clear and gradual that it is nearly
as difficult to squeeze it in there as between the trage-
dies. Besides, if you get as late as 1617 or 1618, you
may as well listen to Dr. Stoll's evidence — that it is
not mentioned in Webster's dedication to The DeviVs
Law-Case (printed 1623), and that it shows such close
debts to Shakespeare that Webster must have written
if after reading the First Folio (1623). So, bufFeted
and confused, you take refuge in his spacious "1623-
1639"; a date which is in direct opposition to all your
first conclusions. And if you want to adorn the affair,
now you have settled it, with the circumstance and
charm of reality, you may attribute, with Dr. Stoll,
not only Webster's style and handling to his study of
the First Folio, but his Marlowe characteristics to his
recent study of The Massacre at Paris (1593) pre-
paratory to writing his own play The Guise, his clown
to his friendship with Heywood, his strange style to his
imitativeness of the fashion of his time, and his writing
this sort of play at all to his fancy for going back to
the fashions of twenty or thirty years earlier!
II
Well then, what reasons are there for thinking that
Webster did write Appius and Virginia? The reasons
APPENDICES 177
are two — the attribution in 1654, and repetitions or
parallels between Webster's other plays and this. They
require examination.
Appius and Virginia was printed and published in
1654, as by John Webster. The same edition was put
forth in 1659 with a new title-page "Printed for Hum-
phrey Moseley";^ and again in 1679, "Acted at the
Duke's Theatre under the name of The Roman Virgin
or Unjust Judge.'' It is possible that Moseley only
took over the edition between 1654 and 1659. In that
case the attribution has even less weight. But let
us put it at its strongest and suppose (what is most
probable) that Moseley was always the publisher. It
is being realised more and more how little importance
attributions of the second half of the seventeenth cen-
tury have. The theatrical traditions had been broken.
Publishers attributed by guess-work, or hearsay, or to
sell the book. In 1661, Kirkman pubHshed The Thra-
cian Wonder as by Webster and Rowley. "No one,"
says Professor Vaughan, "except the editor, has ever
supposed that Webster can have had a hand in it."
Yet it is as Websterian as Appius and Virginia. The
truth is, critics have at the back of their minds an
idea that good poets write good poetry, and bad poets
write bad poetry. Since this is as far as they can get,
they are ready to give any good poem or play to any
* For Moseley and his activities, v. Dictionary of National Biog-
raphy; Plomer, Dictionary of Booksellers and Printers, 1641-1667;
Masson, Life of Milton, iii. 448-457, vi. 352; Parrott, Tragedies
of Chapman, p. 683; Malone, Variorvm Shakespeare, iii. 229.
178 JOHN WEBSTER
good poet, and to refuse any bad one. Appius and
Virginia being a fairly good play, there is no reason
in the world why it should not be the work of Webster,
who was a good writer. The Thraciam Wonder, a bad
play, could not possibly be from that hand. . . . The
truth is very different. In actuality, a good poet or
playwright tends to write good and bad things in his
own style. An examination of the works of poets we
can be sure about — Keats, or Shelley, or Swinburne —
shows this. The author of the sonnet On first looking
into Chapman's Homer and the Ode to a Nighti/ngale
also wrote the sonnets To my Brother George and to
G.A.W. If the work of a century ago were largely
anonymous or doubtful, and if the principles of Eliza-
bethan criticism were applied, he might be given Alastor
or The Vision of Judgement; he would certainly be
robbed of the sonnets to George Keats and Georgiana
Wylie.
Humphrey Moseley was, as a matter of fact, one
of the more trustworthy publishers of the time. Ma-
lone and Professor Parrott are too hard on him. But
he had the faults and ignorance of his period. Among
other attributions he gives The Merry Devil of Edmon-
ton to Shakespeare, The Parliament of Love (Massin-
ger) to Rowley, The Faithful Friends to Beaumont and
Fletcher, Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany to Chap-
man, The Widow (Middleton) to Jonson, Fletcher,
and Middleton, Henry I and Henry II (Davenport,
probably) to Shakespeare and Davenport, and The
APPENDICES 179
History of King Stephen^ Duke Humphrey, and Iphis
and lantha to Shakespeare.
Webster's works have, in one way .and another, been
pietty thoroughly scrutinised for parallels. Resem-
blances in phrasing and thought between The White
Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, The DeviVs Law-Case, and
A Monumental Column are very numerous. A Cure
for a Cuckold and Appius and Virginia are far less
closely joined. In A Cure for a Cuckold there are cer-
tain minor echoes of phrase that have some weight.
I give a list of the only connections of Appius and Vir-
ginia with the other plays that have been discovered
previously, or that I have found.^
(a) Appius and Virginia, 149:
I have seen children oft eat sweetmeats thus.
As fearful to devour them:
Duchess of Malfi, 65 :
I have seen children oft eat sweetmeats thus,
As fearful to devour them too soon.
(&) A. and v., 151:
One whose mind
Appears more like a ceremonious chapel
Full of sweet music, than a thronging presence.
Duchess of Malfi, 79 :
His breast was filled with all perfection,
And yet it seemed a private whispering-room
It made so little noise of 't.
*The references are all by the pages of Dyce's one-volume edi-
tion.
180 JOHN WEBSTER
Monvmental Column, 11. 78, 79:
Who had his breast instated with the choice
Of virtues, though they made no ambitious noise.
(c) A. and F., 163:
Virginia. But she hath a matchless eye. Sir.
CoRBULo. True, her eyes are no right matches.
White Demi, 31 :
Brachiano. Are not those matchless eyes mine?
ViTTORiA. I had rather
They were not matches.^
{d) A. and v., 165:
I only give you my opinion,
I ask no fee for 't.
Westward Ho! 242:
Take my counsel: I'll ask no fee for *t.
White Devil 7:
This is my counsel and I'll ask no fee for 't.
{e) A, and v., 168:
As aconitum, a strong poison, brings
A present cure against all serpents' stings.
White Devil, 26 :
Physicians, that cure poisons, still do work
With counter-poisons.
* Quarto reading. Dyce reads "matchless": obviously wrongly.
APPENDICES 181
(/) A, and v., 171:
I vow this is a practised dialogue:
Comes it not rarely off?
Duchess of Malfl, 63 :
I think this speech between you both was studied.
It came so roundly off.
(g) A. andV,, 172:
For we wot
The Office of a Justice is perverted quite
When one thief hangs another.^
Duchess of Malfi, 90:
The office of justice is perverted quite
When one thief hangs another.
(h) A. and F., 180:
Death is terrible
Unto a conscience that's oppressed with guilt!
Duchess of Malfi, 99 :
How tedious is a guilty conscience!
(0 A. and F., 173:
I have sung
With an unskilful, yet a willing voice,
To bring my girl asleep.
*So Quarto. Dyce thinks this a mistake for "The office of jus-
tice. . . ." as in The Duchess of Malfi quotation. He is probably
right.
182 JOHN WEBSTER
White DevU, 45 :
I'll tie a garland here about his head;
'Twill keep my boy from lightning.
Besides these, there are various words: "dunghill"
(A. and v., 171, 166, White Devil, 25), "mist" (of ig-
norance) (A. and F., 167, 170, White Devil, 50 i) are
favourite and typical words of Webster. Note also
"pursenet" in the sense of "wile" (A. and F., 170,
DeviVs Law-Case, 130) and "not-being" {A. and F.,
180, Duchess of Malfl, 90).
Of the resemblances, (c) is a common joke, (e) a,
common idea (the Ben Jonson, Sejanus, quotation
which Dyce gives in a note is much nearer than the
passage from the White Devil to the A. and F. quo-
tation), and (d) sounds like a catch-phrase. In (h)
the two examples occur near the end of their pla3^s,
and slightly recall each other in atmosphere. In (i)
the same effect of tenderness is got by the word "my."
It seems to me that (6), a suggestion of Mr. Craw-
ford's, holds good only between The Duchess of Malfi
and A Monumental Column.
These six examples are such that they would be
important if they were ten or fifteen times as numer-
ous ; being so few they are of no account. And I do
not think many more could be found.
The rest, (a), (/) and (g), are another matter. It
is to be noted that (a) and (g) are exactly the sort
* Especially the similarity between "in a mist," A. and V., 167,
and "in a mist," White Devil, 50.
APPENDICES 188
of images and proverbial sayings (note the expression
"we wot") that Webster and others collected. If Web-
ster wrote Appius and Virginia, we can only say that
he must have used the same note-book that he wrote
The Duchess of Malfi with. If not, either the author
of Appius and Virginia compiled his note-book out of
The Duchess of Malfi among other books ; or else they
used common sources. (/) is an even more significant
parallel. For the circumstances are similar. In each
drama two "villains" play into each other's hands in
a dialogue which the "hero" discerns, suddenly, or
guesses, to have been rehearsed. It is not an obvious
thought. That it should be expressed at all is note-
worthy ; that it should be expressed with such similarity
of phrase and (which is important) metrical setting,
is a valuable proof of identity of authorship.
The words have little weight. The use of "mist" is
striking; but "dunghill," though it irresistibly recalls
Webster's manner, was not monopolised by him; and
"not-being" (the repetition of which Dr. Stoll seems
to think remarkable) is not rare enough or typical
enough to be of any significance.
There the proofs of Webster's authorship end. The
attribution of a late publisher, which is evidence of a
notoriously untrustworthy character, and three or
four passages of repetition or resemblance — that is all.
The conclusion, for any impartial mind, is that there
is very little evidence of the play being Webster's,
rather more for his having had a finger in it, but
184 JOHN WEBSTER
much stronger evidence still that he had practically
nothing to do with it.
Ill
If that is all there is to be said, we are left with an
impression of general confusion, and a strongish feel-
ing that anyhow Webster is responsible for very little
of the play.
But the question would be cleared, if anyone dis-
covered a more promising candidate. This I believe
I have done. I think I can show that Appius and
Virginia is largely, or entirely, the work of Thomas
Heywood. I shall give the direct proofs first: then
the more indirect ones, by showing how his authorship
fits in with the various facts that have made such havoc
of Webster's claims.
I have mentioned the queer distinctive vocabulary,
especially of Latin words, used in Appius and Vir-
ginia. The fact that Heywood uses a very similar
vocabulary, especially in all his more classical works,
would of itself be of little weight. But an individual
examination of all the very unusual words and phrases
in this play, together with a hurried scrutiny of Hey-
wood's dramas, provides very startling results. I give
a list. More minute search, no doubt, might largely
increase it. It serves its purpose. I begin with the
more striking words. ^
* The references to Heywood's plays are to the pages of the six-
volume Pearson edition, 1874,
APPENDICES 185
A. and v., 179:
Redeem a base life with a noble death.
And through your lust-burnt veins confine youi
breath.
"Confine," in this sense of "banish," was very rare.
The N.E.D. gives one more or less contemporary ex-
ample from Holinshcd, and one, the only one, from
Shakespeare. Dyce, in a footnote, gives five passages ;
he comments, "it is somewhat remarkable that they are
all from Heywood." I can add two. It was a very
special word of Heywood's.
Pleasant Dialogues, ii. p. 115:
The soul confine.
The body's dead, nor canst thou call it thine
Royal King and Loyal Subject, 82:
Which as your gift I'll keep, till Heaven and Nature
Confine it hence.
It is to be noticed that the context in these two ex-
amples is similar.
Other examples are in The Golden Age, 23, Th£ Rape
of Lucrece, 242, A Challenge for Beauty, 10, The
Brazen Age, 199, VwaiKetoVj iv, 207.
A, and V„ 174:
If the general's heart be so obdure.
"Obdure" is a very rare word. It does not occur in
Shakespeare. In the Elizabethan age it seems to have
186 JOHN WEBSTER
been used only by one or two religious writers and
Heywood. Heywood is always using it. This word
alone might almost be accepted as a proof that the
passage it occurs in was by him.
"Obdure" as adjective occurs in Lucrece, 219, 224,
Golden Age, 56, 60, Forttme hy Land and Sea, 375,
Pleasant Dialogues, 114: as verb, English Traveller,
90, VvvaiKeLovj i. 55, Brit. Troy^ vi. 11. "Obdureness"
comes in TwaiKtlov, i, 55.
A. andV.,lQ9.:''Palpedr
There are only three known instances of this extraor-
dinary word; this one, and two from Heywood's ac-
knowledged works: Brit. Troy, xv. xlii. and Brazen
Age, 206.
I add a short list of instances that are less per-
suasive individually, but have enormous weight collec-
tively.
A. and F., 152:
Why should my lord droop, or deject his eye.^
Rare in this literal sense: not in Shakespeare. Hey-
wood. // yoii know not me, 206:
It becomes not
You, being a Princess, to deject your knee.
Cf. also Lucrece, 173, "dejected," 174, "dejection."
APPENDICES 187
A. and F., 153, prostrate, in a very uncommon meta-
phorical usage:
Your daughter . . . most humbly
Prostrates her filial duty.
This is paralleled twice in Heywood's The Rape of
Lucrece, and once in another play:
Rape of Lucre ce, 173 :
This hand . . .
Lays his victorious sword at Tarquin's feet.
And prostrates with that sword allegiance.
Pp. 211, 212:
The richest entertainment lives with us (i.e. that
lives with us)
According to the hour, and the provision
Of a poor wife in the absence of her husband.
We prostrate to you.
Royal King and Loyal Subject, 42 :
To you ... my liege,
A virgin's love I prostrate,
A,andV.,15S:
An infinite
Of fair Rome's sons.
"Infinite" is sometimes, though rarely, used by itself,
more or less as a number. But used merely as a sub-
stantive, as here, it is very unusual. It is found in
188 JOHN WEBSTER
Hey wood's Rape of Lucrece, 234, Golden Age, 36 ; cf.
also Rape of Lucrece, 243 :
Before thee infinite gaze on thy face.
A, amd F., 153:
The iron wall
That rings this pomp in from invasive steel.
A rare word. Once in Shakespeare. The phrase is
repeated in Heywood's Golden Age, 40:
The big Titanoys
Plow up thy land with their invasive steel.
A, and v., 15^:
Let Janus' temple be devolved (i.e. overturned).
A very rare word in this sense. The N.E.D, gives only
two other examples, one of 1470, one of 1658. Not in
Shakespeare. Heywood, Lucrece, 244 :
For they behind him will devolve the bridge.
A, and v., 155:
You mediate excuse for courtesies.
{i.e. beg on somebody else's behalf.)
Rare: not in Shakespeare. In Webster's The White
Devil in the sense of "to take a moderate position!"
Marlowe and one or two prose-writers have used it in
APPENDICES 189
the sense of the text. It is found in Heywood, English
Traveller, 84:
Will you. . . .
Not mediate my peace?
A, and F., 161:
Upon my infallid evidence.
Very rare: not in Shakespeare. N.E.D. gives only
two other examples, of which one is Heywood, Hier-
arch., V. 308:
All these are infallid testimonies
A,andV„ 174:
Let him come thrill his partisan
Against this breast.
^'Thrill, i.e. hurl, — an unusual sense of the word," says
Dyce. He adds two quotations, both from Heywood's
Iron Age, e.g. p. 316:
All which their javelins thrild against thy breast.
Note the correspondence of phrase. This use is not
found in Shakespeare.
A. and v., 174:
Marshal yourselves, and entertain this novel
Within a ring of steel.
190 JOHN WEBSTER
An uncommon substantive, not found in Shakespeare.
Hejwood, English Traveller, 27, Golden Age, 55, Iron
Age, Second Part, 373, Brazen Age, 202.
A. and v., 178:
One reared on a popular suiFrage
Whose station's built on aves and applause.
For this sense, "shouts of applause," the N.E.D.
gives only two examples ; one from Shakespeare {Meas-
ure for Measure), the other from Hey wood, Golden
Age, 8.
And all the people with loud suffrages
Have shrilled their aves high above the clouds.
Note the conjunction with "suffrage." The human
brain works half mechanical along tiny associative
paths; and minute hints of this kind, as a backing to
more tangible instances of the uses of very rare words,
importantly help this sort of proof. Heywood also
uses the word uniquely. Golden Age, 47.
The people ave'd thee to heaven.
A.andV,, 179:
This sight has stiffened all my operant powers.
Dyee quotes Handet, iii. 2 :
My operant powers their function leave to do.
And it is quite probable that the author of Appius and
Virgmia is borrowing the phrase from Shakespeare,
APPENDICES 191
for the word is very uncommon. Heywood, in The
Royal King and the Loyal Subject, probably written
just about the same time as Hamlet, uses the word, in
the same sense (p. 6), only writing "parts" instead of
"powers." The sense of this passage is even nearer to
the Hamlet line: they are obviously connected —
through Heywood, as usual, echoing rather than imi-
tating Shakespeare.
When I forget thee may my operant parts
Each one forget their office.
It seems to me probable that Heywood echoed Shake-
speare immediately in The Royal King and the Loyal
Subject, and soon after, rather less closely in Appius
and Virginia,
A. and V., 179: Strage,
A rare Latinism: not in Shakespeare. Heywood uses
it in Pleasant Dialogues, iii. and in The Hierarchie?-
There are other general verbal resemblances. The
kind of word Heywood invents and uses is the same in
Appius and Virgi/nia and through the six volumes of
his collected "dramatic works." "Eternized," "mon-
archizer," "applausive," "opposure" occur in the lat-
ter; "imposturous," "enthronized," "donative," in the
former. Who could distinguish? In Appius and Vir-
* The earlier and longer form of this appendix contains about a
dozen further instances of verbal similarity, which were omitted
in the later version as being rather less striking than those given
here, and therefore unnecessary to the argument. Ed.
192 JOHN WEBSTER
ginia, 178, he invents (possibly adopts) the rare verb
"to oratorize." In The English Traveller, 68, he uses
the form "to orator." Resemblances of phrase are as
numerous, though not so striking. Heywood was too
ordinary and too hurried a writer to have much eccen-
tricity of phrase. He wrote in the common style of the
time, only slightly garnished by a few queer pet words
and a certain Latinism of vocabulary. He does not
repeat lines and metaphors as many writers do ; only,
occasionally, phrases and collocations of words, but
these of such a kind as all his contemporaries repeated
also. The result is that it is difficult to find parallels
of this nature between any of his works. What there
are between Appius and Virginia and the rest, there-
fore, have more weight than they would have in the
case of some other dramatists.
There is a rather puzzling expression just at the
end of Appius and Virginia (p. 180) :
Appius died like a Roman gentleman.
And a man both ways knowing.
It is, metrically and in a sense, very like a sentence at
the end of The English Traveller (p. 94) :
Dalavill
Hath played the villain^ but for Geraldine,
He hath been each way noble.
Cf . also Fortwne hy Land and Sea^ 386 :
Come ! I am both ways armed against thy steel.
APPENDICES 193
One of the few points which the author of Appi/iis
and Virgmia introduced into the stories of Dionysius
and Livy, is the plot to coerce Virginia by refusing
the army's pay and forcing Virginius to sell his goods
to pay them. In the first act of A Maidenhood Well
Lost (espec. iii fF.) Strozza lays much the same plot
against "the General" and his daughter, and what en-
sues, the army starving and the general paying the
soldiers himself, is exactly the same. This shows, at
least, that the idea was in Heywood's mind when he
was writing A Maidenhood Well Lost. What is more
significant is that another idea in the camp-scenes in
Appius and Virginia (also original) was in his mind
when he was writing The Rape of Lucrece. On page
205 the sentry makes the entirely unnecessary remark
about his occupation:
Thus must poor soldiers do;
While their commanders are with dainties fed.
And sleep on down, the earth must be our bed.
This is the nnotif of the whole mutiny-scene in Appkis
and Virginia (p. 156). See especially the lines:
I wake in the wet trench,
Loaded with more cold iron than a gaol
Would give a murderer, while the general
Sleeps in a field-bed, and to mock our hunger
Feeds us with scent of the most curious fare
That makes his tables crack.
It is obvious that Heywood's mind ran easily into
the same trains of thought. Suggest "Camp" to him,
194 JOHN WEBSTER
and he readily pictures, in his pleasant light water-
colours, the starving, cold soldiers suh divo and the
general feeding luxuriously and enjoying a bed. In-
deed, the parallels of idea with Lucrece are numerous,
as one would expect. Heywood felt that a great man
of that time was attended by a "secretary." Porsenna,
King of the Tuscans, in his tent (Lucrece, M5) wants
lights. He calls "Our Secretary!" The secretary ap-
pears with "My lord?" In Appius and Virginia (159,
160) when Appius is bearded by Icilius, he calls out
for help, "Our Secretary !" and summons him again at
the end of the interview, "Our Secretary! . . . We
have use for him." Marcus appears:
My honourable lord.^ . . .
There are other such small points — the bearing of
the dead, bleeding bodies of Lucrece, and of Virginia,
before the people, and their sympathy and rage; the
vagueness of locality in each play ; and so on.
But there is a more remarkable resemblance. It is
part of a general link with Heywood's works — the
clown. Dr. Stoll has three pages (197-200) pointing
out and illustrating the kinship of Corbulo in Appius
and Virgi/nia with Hey wood's clowns, and especially the
clown of The Rape of Lucrece} The Heywood clown,
an early type, was a simple, good-hearted creature, who
had little to do with the play, and poured out puns and
somewhat Euphuistic jokes to amuse the crowd. There
^ See also Eckhardt, Die lustige Person irri dlteren englischen
Drama, p. 433, etc.
APPENDICES 195
was a painstaking, verbal tumbling they all indulged in.
You can pick at random. "If they suddenly do not
strike up," says Slime of the lingering musicians,^ "I
shall presently strike them ^ down." It is the voice of
Corbulo. The clown in The Golden Age is precisely the
same. So is the one in Lucrece, and as the plays are
more alike, the similarity of his position is the more
easily seen. It is, in the first place, a very remarkable
coincidence that he should be there at all. Appius and
Virginia and The Rape of Lucrece are the only Roman
plaj^s of the adult Elizabethan drama to introduce such
a character. It was exactly like Heywood to modify
the tradition and genus in this way. It would not
have been at all like Webster. Dr. Stoll emphasises
and details this similarity so admirably, and as he
has no idea that Appius and Virginia is not by Web-
ster, his testimony is so valuable in its impartiality,
that I cannot do better than quote his description.
In both cases the clown is servant to the heroine, and he
appears in like situations. He is sent by his mistress on
errands, is taken to task by her for ogling at her maid (and
that in the latter's presence), and is left to chatter with
other servants alone. He jokes about his mistress's mis-
fortune, about the sinners in the suburbs, and, being a Ro-
man, out of the Latin grammar. And the comic side of both
is the same. It lies all in the speeclies — the clown plays no
pranks and suffers no mishaps — and it has an episodic,
random, and anachronistic character. It is all jest and rep-
artee, puns, quibbles, and catches, and those neither clever
nor new; and the drift of it all, whenever it gets beyond
^A Woman killed with Kindness, 97.
*01d Text "thee!"
196 JOHN WEBSTER
words, is satire on London life and manners. It is good-
humoured, moreover, naive and dirty.
The episode between the maid, or nurse, and the
clown, an entirely irrelevant excrescence, is especially
noteworthy. There is even a certain similarity in
phrasing and thought, of a kind that suggests the same
mind working at different times, rather than imitation.
Virginia and Lucrece both address the clown as "Sir,"
impatiently. Virginia begins:
You are grown wondrous amorous of late;
Why do you look back so often?
Lucrece. Sirrah, I ha' seen you oft familiar
With this my maid and waiting-gentlewoman,
As casting amorous glances, wanton looks.
And privy becks, savouring incontinence.
Dr. Stoll, supposing Appius and Virginia Webster's,
can of course only suggest that Webster, imitating
Shakespeare in the general conception of his play,
turned suddenly, picked out one favourite character
of Heywood's, and, with Heywood's authority for the
anachronism, introduced an extraordinarily good imi-
tation of it into his own work. He is like a ventrilo-
quist who has at least two lay-figures, each talking
with a different voice from the other's, and from their
master's. "Eclecticism" is a mild word for such a
method.
IV
Anyone who believes in Webster's authorship of
the play, has now got to explain away not only the
APPENDICES 197
date difficulty, not only the general aesthetic absurdity,
not only the borrowing of a pet character of Hey-
wood's, but also the sudden entire adoption of Hey-
wood's individual, distinguishing vocabulary. Twenty
years' friendship, you are to suppose, never affected
Webster's vocabulary in this direction in the slightest
degree. Then, in a transport of "senile" affection, he
hurled aside his own personality, and became mere
Tom.
In the next place, consider how the theory of Hey-
wood's authorship suits the facts of the play. If
Hey wood wrote Appius and Virginia, there is no diffi-
culty about words or handling. He wrote the play
most like it of all the plays in the world. There is
no difficulty about style. It is exactly like Heywood
when he is writing solemnly, as in parts of Lucrece,
parts of the various "Ages," and the beginning and
end of The Royal King and the Loyal Subject. Only
it is rather more mature, it has a little more freedom
and rhetoric, than the early style of Lucrece and some
of the "Ages." This suits the other indications of
date. For, again, there is no difficulty about the date.
The difference between Lucrece and Appius and Vir-
ginia is mostly due to the fact that Coriolanus (c.
1608) must have intervened. Any date after 1608
would do ; immediately after is the most likely, because
the resemblances of style and vocabulary are, on the
whole, to the rather earlier works.
I imagine- that the main part of Appius and Vir-
ginia, as we have it, was written then. It may, and
198 JOHN WEBSTER
indeed must, have been cut about and altered, by Hey-
wood or others, before it found a last home with "Bees-
ton's boys" in 1639, or a final resting-place with Mose-
ley in 1654.
The metrical characteristics noticed in Appius and
Virginia are Heywood's. Heywood's blank verse, says
Dr. Schipper,^ is "sehr gewandt und harmonisch ge-
baut." This applies perfectly to our play. He also
calls attention, of course, to the number of rhyming
couplets, ending off even short speeches. It is this
characteristic in Appius and Virginia that slightly puz-
zles Dr. Stoll and suddenly upsets his metrical tables
(p. 190). The only detailed examination of Hey-
wood's prosody that I know is in Dr. Franz Albert's
"tJber Thomas Heywood's Life and Death of Hector
of Trot/.'* ^ It is concerned mainly with certain sides
of Heywood's work, mostly undramatic, and it is not
very perspicacious, having most of the faults of Ger-
mans trying to understand English metre. But it
enumerates some of the more tangible characteristics,
and lays great stress on that trick of conscious and
rather conventionalised elision, especially between "to"
and a verb with an initial vowel, that I had already in-
dependently noticed in Appius and Virginia^ and have
remarked on earlier in this appendix.
The various characteristics of the play that are
no bar to Webster's authorship fit in equally well or
better with Heywood's. This is the case with the
^Englische Metrik, 1881, vol. ii. p. 335.
^ Especially pp. 22, 112.
APPENDICES 199
numerous slight imitations of phrases of Shakespeare,
which are rather more a mark of Heywood than of
Webster.-^
The sources of Appius and Virginia ^ are, ultimately,
Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Dr. Lauschke
believes he used both of these, and also Painter, who
paraphrased Livy, and Giovanni Fiorentino, the Ital-
ian translator of Dionysius. As Dr. Stoll points out,
there is no evidence for Giovanni Fiorentino, and very
little for Livy in the original, as against Painter.^
They do not seem, however, to have considered the pos-
sibility of Philemon Holland's well-known translation
of Livy (1600). In the passage where the question of
Virginia's custody till the trial is being discussed, Hol-
land introduces the technical legal word "forthcom-
ing." Appius and Virginia makes good use of the word
in the corresponding passage (p. 167). Painter does
not use it, and the Latin does not necessarily suggest
it. The author of Appius and Virginia may have
thought of it for himself, in reading the original. But
it decidedly points to Holland being used; and there-
fore does away with the necessity of either Painter or
^See Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. vi. p. 106.
' See Lauschke, "John Webster's Tragodie Appius and Virginia/'
and Stoll, pp. 160-162.
'There are two points: (<x) Livy has "sordidatus" ; A. and V.
"disguised in dust and sweat"; Painter nothing. This is very
little, and becomes nothing when you realise — Dr. Stoll does not
point it out, though Lauschke does — that "sordidatus" and "dis-
guised . . ." come in entirely different parts of the story. (6)
Minutius as the name of the general at Algidum occurs in Livy,
not in Painter or Dionysius. This has a little weight.
200 JOHN WEBSTER
Livy. It is certain that Dionjsius was used,^ in the
original or a Latin translation (there was probably
no English translation at this time). The sources,
then, favour Heywood if anything. Of Webster's
classical knowledge we can only say that he knew other
people's Latin quotations. Thomas Heywood, Fellow
of Peterhouse, translator of Sallust, Ovid, and Lucian,
author of the learned Hier archie. Apology for Actors,
TvvaLKehv, etc., was a lover of learning and a reader
of Latin and Greek all his life.
It remains to see what explanation, on the assump-
tion that Heywood is mainly or entirely the author of
Appius and Virginia, can be given of the exiguous
pieces of evidence that point towards Webster. There
is first Moseley's attribution. I have said how little
weight the attribution of a late publisher carries. In
this case it is impossible to do much more than theorise
about what can have happened. If Heywood's name
was on the play when Moseley got it, it is unlikely he
would have changed it for Webster's, not only because
he seems to have been fairly honest, but also because
there was not sufficient inducement. Of the two, how-
ever, Webster was the more famous and attractive after
the Civil War. Winstanley (1686) (who— it is an odd
accident — mentions all Webster's plays except Appius
* V. Stoll, p. 162, for conclusive proofs.
APPENDICES 201
avd Virginia) makes little of either of them. Phillips
(1674) says Webster was the author of "several not
wholly to be rejected plays"; on the identity of which,
however, he was terribly shaky. Heywood he dismisses
even more cursorily as the writer of "many but vulgar
comedies." Langbaine, who always takes a rather high
tone, describes Webster as "an author that lived in
the reign of King James the First, and was in those
days accounted an excellent poet." But he goes on to
confess that The Duchess of Malfi, The White Devil,
and Appius and Virginia, "have, even in our own age,
gained applause." It was true. The White Devil was
being acted at the Theatre Royal in 1671, and a quarto
of it was printed in the following year. The Duchess
of Malfl was acted in 1664 at Lincoln's Inn Fields, and
in 1667 at the Duke's Theatre. It was reprinted in
the same year. Downes {Roscius Anglicanus) de-
scribes it as "one of the best stock-tragedies." Appius
and Virgvnia, as Webster's, with Betterton's alterations,
was acted at the Duke's Theatre in 1670. Mrs. Better-
ton was Virginia. Genest quotes from Downes that
it ran for eight days, and was very frequently acted
afterwards. All this shows that Webster's name was
fairly well known in this period. There is no trace of
any known play of Heywood's being revived.
It is easy enough to imagine a play of his coming
without a name, or with a wrong name, into the hands
of a pubhsher of 1654. There were two hundred and
twenty plays "in which I have had either an entire
202 JOHN WEBSTER
hand or at least a main finger." ^ On any that came
to the press in his hfetime, he seems to have kept an
eye. For the others, when they had passed out of his
control, he seems not to have cared. "Many of them,
by shifting and change of companies have been negli-
gently lost; others of them are still retained in the
hands of some actors who think it against their pecu-
liar profit to have them come in print." ^ Appius and
Virginia may have belonged to either, more probably
to the latter class. And it is very easy to trace a pos-
sible and probable history of this play.^ We first hear
of it in 1639, in the possession of Christopher Beeston's
company of boys, who occupied the Cockpit Theatre
from 1637 onwards. Now Christopher Beeston and
Thomas Heyi70od were members of Queen Anne's com-
pany from its foundation in 1603. In 1617 the Cock-
pit opened, and Queen Anne's company went there till
1619. From 1619 to 1625 the lady Elizabeth's com-
pany held the Cockpit, and probably, though not cer-
tainly, Heywood and Beeston were of them. From
1625 to 1637 they were followed by Queen Henrietta's
company, managed by Beeston. And then came Bee-
ston's company of boys, who possessed the play in
1639. Among all the various strands of continuity in
the Elizabethan theatres and companies, this is a very
definite one, forming about Heywood and Beeston, in
connection first with Queen Anne's company, and then,
^Tke English Traveller: To the Reader. ^ Ibid.
' See Murray, English Dramatic Companies, vol. i. pp. 265-370,
and elsewhere.
APPENDICES 203
locally, with the Cockpit. And with Heywood, Bee-
ston, and, I believe, Appius and Virginia, on this long
journey, goes significantly The Rape of Lucrece,
It is also to be noticed that it was Queen Anne's
company that acted two of Webster's three original
plays. The White Devil (1611) and The Devil's Law-
Case (1620). He seems to have gone off to the King's
Men between these, with The Duchess of Malfi (1612-
1613). But we may suppose that he had most to do
with Queen Anne's company.
There remain the similarities and repetitions of
phrase in Appius and Virginia and Webster's plays.
As I have said, only three of these are of any im-
portance, two exact verbal repetitions and one strik-
ing similarity of phrase and idea; all connecting with
The Duchess of Malfi} If Heywood wrote the main
part or all of Appius and Virginia, there are six pos-
sible explanations of these passages. They are an
accident; or Heywood imitated Webster; or Webster
imitated Heywood; or the play was touched up by
some Queen's company actor or author who knew The
Duchess of Malfi; or Webster himself touched it up;
or Webster and Heywood wrote Appius and Virginia
together, Heywood taking the chief part.
The first is improbable, though far less improbable
than it seems. For both {a) and {g) are sententious
sayings such as the Elizabethans delighted to note
down and repeat. Webster is full of these. And the
identical repetition of one of them by him and Marston
*(«)» (/)» and {g) in my list (pp. 179-182).
204 JOHN WEBSTER
supported great theories of his imitation of Marston
till Mr. Crawford discovered it in Montaigne/ the
common source to which thej had independently gone.
Still, the coincidence of the two apophthegms is rather
much to account for in this way. It is possible, but
that is all. And there is the further difficulty against
it that Heywood was not wont to write in this note-
book manner. He worked too quickly.
This also counts against what might otherwise seem
an easier theory, that (/) is either an accident or the
imitation of reminiscence, but that these two (a) and
(g) are the result of Heywood directly copying Web-
ster — noting down and using two of his phrases. The
possibility of tliis is also lessened by the probability
on other grounds that Appius and Virginia is earlier
than The Duchess of Malfl. Webster may have imi-
tated Heywood. He was a great friend of his at this
time.^ And if Appius and Virginia was, as is prob-
able, written early, it must have appeared in the same
theatre and about the same time as The White Devil,^
Also it was Webster's habit to take down from other
authors and afterwards use sentences and similes of an
apophthegmatic or striking nature. We know that
he treated Donne, Montaigne, Jonson, Sidney, and
perhaps Marston and Dekker in this way. Why not
* Crawford, Collectanea, Series ii. p. 35.
' He wrote some lines "To his beloved friend Master Thomas
Heywood," prefixed to Heywood's Apology for Actors, 1612.
' It is an important indication of the date of Appius and Vif'
ginia that The White Devil (1611) does not borrow from it, and
The Duchess of Malfl (1612-13) does.
APPENDICES 205
Heywood, his friend and collaborator ? It is true Hey-
wood does not lend himself often so easily to such use.
That, and the fact that he has not been thoroughly
searched for such a purpose, may explain why there
are few other known parallels. This theory is the more
probable because the lines of (a) and (g), and their
ideas, seem more natural and in place in Appius and
Virginia than they do in The Duchess of Malfl. And
it is easier to imagine Webster finding {Appius and
Virginia, 149),
I have seen children oft eat sweetmeats thus,
As fearful to devour them.
and adding (Duchess of Malfl, 65) the words "too
soon" than Heywood doing the opposite.
There remain the various possibilities of two hands
having been at work, or the same hand at two periods.
These are favoured by the a priori probability of a
play that had at least thirty years of acting life being
altered in the period, and also by certain indications
that all is not right with the play as it stands. These
I shall shortly set out.
In the beginning of Act I. there is a queer and soli-
tary passage of prose which looks like an abbreviation
for acting purposes. Dyce suspects it ; and it is to be
noted that the speech following the prose contains one
of the two "repetitions" from The Duchess of Malfi.
In II. 3 (p. 160) there are difficulties which seem
to have passed unnoticed. Icilius comes to plead with
206 JOHN WEBSTER
Appius for the camp, and so for Virginius. Appius
counters with a proposal that Icilius should give up
Virginia, and marry into his own family. Icilius flies
out with the charge that Appius has been lustfully
tempting Virginia with presents and letters. Appius
is prevented by force and threats from either calling
for help or replying. At length the storm subsides.
Appius replies, pretending he knows nothing of it,
playing indulgent eld. Icilius crumbles completely.
I. I crave your pardon.
A. Granted ere craved, my good Icilius.
I. Morrow.
A. It is no more indeed. Morrow, Icilius,
If any of our servants wait without,
Command them in.
I do not think any good sense can be made out of that
"It is no more indeed." It looks, at first sight, like a
pun on "morrow." But that does not help. Indeed the
whole collapse of Icilius is oddly curt and sudden. It
seems to me probable that a cut has been made here,
or some other operation of hasty revision.
And in the next scene, III. 1 (pp. 161-2) Icilius
reports the interview to his friends and Virginia. He
went, he says, to Appius, took him by the throat,
forced him to hear, taxed him with his lust and his
behaviour, "with such known circumstance" that Ap-
pius could try to excuse it, but could not deny it.
They parted "friends in outward show" ; Appius swore
"quite to abjure her love"; but yet had continued his
messages.
APPENDICES 207
Now this is quite a different story from the truth.
In a play of this kind, simple in characterisation and
full of childishness in construction and episode, we
cannot suppose the author was attempting the subtle
irony Ibsen practised in The Wild Duck, where you
see the truth in one scene and Hialmar Ekdal's family
version of it in the next. Nor would such a sudden
spasm of Euripidean double-dealing help either the
character of Icilius or the play. Besides, there are
other indications of confusion. For when (III. 2, p.
164) Virginia is suddenly arrested, she cries out:
O my Icilius, your incredulity
Hath quite undone me !
which seems to refer to the first, true version of the
story, and to mean that Icilius' not believing her but
accepting Appius' defence had ruined her. These
seem to me to be plain signs that the scenes as they
stand have been written, to some extent at least, by two
people, or by the same person at different times.
Another discrepancy affecting the same point, the
interview and the report of it, is mentioned by Dyce
in his note on 11. 3 (p. 158). The scene would seem
to be an outer apartment in the house of Appius.
But presently, when Appius is left alone with Icilius,
a change of scene is supposed: for he says to Claudius
(p. 160):
To send a ruffian hither.
Even to my closet!
208 JOHN WEBSTER
And jet, in the first scene of the next act, Icilius
speaks of the interview as having taken place in the
lobby!
The only other suspicion of corruption in this play
which I know of may as well be mentioned here. Mr.
Pierce ^ believes that III. 4, the conversation between
Corbulo and the serving-men, was interpolated to please
the groundlings. His reasons are: (1) it is wholly in
prose; (2) the doggerel rhyme; (3) it does not ad-
vance the action; (4) the average number of three-
syllable Latin words (his particular test) is very low.
I do not feel convinced. The scene is extremely Hey-
woodian. The Latin-word test is not so important as
Mr. Pierce appears to think, especially when applied
to a short, rather comic, prose-scene. And it affects
Heywood far less than Webster. No doubt this scene
was put in "to please the groundlings." But it was
put in by the author.
The conclusion, then, that the play as we have it
has been revised and altered, helps any theory that
Webster and Heywood each had a finger in it. It
might, of course, have been changed by any member
of the Queen's Servants' Company. But he would
not be likely to have incorporated passages from The
Duchess of Malfi, a play belonging to the King's Men.
If it was Heywood himself that touched it up, in 1613
or so, he might quite well have done this, being a friend
of Webster's. But it is most easy to suppose Webster
the reviser. Either this, or his collaboration, is ren-
* The Collaboration of Webster and Dekker.
APPENDICES 209
dered rather probable by the presence through the
play of ten or a dozen passages, averaging perhaps two
lines, that seem to taste slightly of his style. Perhaps
it is true that any play, examined closely, would yield
the same. And certainly Heywood covld have written
them. But, at moments, there does seem to be the
flavour, almost imperceptibly present. If reviser or
collaborator, Webster obviously had recourse to the
same note-books as he used for The Duchess of Malft,
which suggests that he would be working on it about
161S or soon after. And in either case, we should
have a very good explanation of his name being con-
nected with the play. If he revised, we must sup-
pose that he shortened and made more dramatic the
very beginning of the play, and heightened, or even
rewrote, the trial scene (IV. 1). It is important to
notice that in this rather long scene (1) there are no
very characteristic words of Hey wood's, (2) there are
more of the phrases, words and lines that are faintly
reminiscent of Webster than anywhere else in the play,^
(3) two 2 of the three strong indications of a connec-
tion with Webster occur.
Give Webster the revision of these two scenes, and
you have satisfied his utmost claims. To yield him
more is mere charity. If he collaborated, it is impos-
sible to divide the play up between the two. In certain
1 "Dunghill," "mist," "pursenet," "to bring my girl asleep," "and
this short dance of life is full of changes," etc., etc.
U. e. if) and (^r).
210 JOHN WEBSTER
scenes (e.g. IV. 2 and V. 3) Hey wood's vocabulary
comes out more clearly than in the rest. But one can
only say that Webster's part is very small compared
with Heywood's, as unimportant as it is in Northward
Ho and Westward Ho.
In sum: general, critical, and aesthetic impressions,
more particular examination of various aspects, and
the difficulty of fitting it in chronologically, make it
impossible to believe that Appius and Virginia is by
Webster, while the evidence in favour of his authorship
is very slight. All these considerations, and also re-
markable features of vocabulary and characterisation,
make it highly probable that it is by Heywood. The
slight similarities between The Duchess of Malfl and
Appius and Virginia may be due to Webster borrowing
in The Duchess of Malfi from Heywood, or revising
Appius and Virginia, or having, not for the first time,
collaborated with Heywood, but very subordinately.
In any case, Appius and Virgima must be counted
among Heywood's plays ; not the best of them, but
among the better ones ; a typical example of him in
his finer moments, written rather more carefully than
is usual with that happy man.
Appendix B. — Miscellaneous
NON-EXTANT PLAYS
There are no difficulties about the dates of most of
the non-extant plays. Ccesar's Fall, Two Shapes^ and
Christmas Comes but Once a Year are dated 1602 by
the entries in Henslowe. Dr. Greg from the list of
collaborators and the nearness in date of the payments
thinks Ccesar^s Fall and Two Shapes must be the same
play ; it may be so, but it is not convincing. Henslowe
may very well have been employing the same people
in the same month to write two plays. There is a
doubt about the name of Two Shapes. That is Dr.
Greg's reading. Collier read Two Harpes; which some
construe Two Harpies.
A Late Murther of the Son upon the Mother by Ford
and Webster is entered in Herbert's Office Book for
September, 1624. Pamphlets of July, 1624, about
such a murder case are on record. The play must
have been written in that year.
The Guise, which Webster mentions in his Dedica-
tion to The DetriVs Law-Case, is of quite unknown date.
An entry in Henslowe for 1601 giving Webster a play
of that name turns out to be a forgery of Collier's.
The original entry probably referred to Marlowe's
211
212 JOHN WEBSTER
Massacre at Paris, Dr. Stoll, scenting Marlowe In
Webster's latest plays, has spun a theory of Webster
reading up Marlowe, especially the Massacre at Paris,
in his old age. He deduces that we can date Guise
about 1620. The whole theory rests on a quite wild
assumption that an Elizabethan dramatist, wishing to
write a play on a certain subject, began by reading
up all previous plays on that subject, like a professor
of English Literature. If Webster's own list of plays
is in chronological order. Guise is later than 1614.
We can say no more.
The Thracian Wonder, like A Cure for a Cuckold,
was first published in 1661 by Francis Kirkman as by
Webster and Rowley. No one believes it to be by
either. The reasons of this disbelief are entirely aes-
thetic. It is dangerous, as I have said elsewhere, to
take it for granted that a bad play cannot be by a
good author. It is conceivable that Webster and Row-
ley might have written or helped to write a play like
this at the beginning of their careers. Each has been
concerned in equally bad work. But if they did write
it, it does not increase our knowledge of them; and if
they did not write it, it does not matter who did.
So the affair is not very important. A rather unsuc-
cessful attempt has been made to explain Kirkman's
attribution. Another Webster in 1617 wrote a story,
which had no connection with this play, but which
APPENDICES 213
Kirkman may have thought had. It is not necessary.
Kirkman was one of the wildest of the Restoration
pubHshers. The fact that he was piibhshing one play
as by Webster and Rowley might quite likely lead him
to put their names on the title-page of its twin. Any-
how he has no authority. We do not know who did or
who did not write The Thracian Wonder,
Monuments of Honour is a quite ordinary city
triumph, there is nothing remarkable or important
about it. It was published in 1624 as by "John Web-
ster, merchant taylor." "John Webster" was a com-
mon enough name, and there is no proof that this one
is our author. The Latin tag on the title-page, which
also ends the preface to The WhiteDevil, was in common
use. There is only the probability that no other John
Webster would have been distinguished enough in liter-
ature to have been chosen to write this. The guilds
generally liked to get hold of some fairly accomplished
literary man for such a purpose. Neither the verse nor
the invention of this pageant affirms the authorship of
Webster. But there is also nothing to contradict it.
Appendix C. — Sir Thomas Wyatt
"the famous history of sir THOMAS WYATT"
Date.
The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt. With
the Coronation of Queen Mary and the Coming In of
King Philip. Written by Thomas Dickers and John
Webster, was printed in 1607.^ In October, 1602,
Chettle, Dekker, Heywood, Smith, and Webster were
paid, in all, £8 for Part I. of Lady Jane or The Over-
throw of Rebels; and Dekker was paid, in earnest, 5s.
for Part II. (Smith and Chettle may have received
small amounts for this, also.) All this was on behalf
of Worcester's Men, who passed under the patronage
of Queen Anne in 1603. As the 1607 Quarto of Sir
Thomas Wyatt says it was played by the Queen's
Majesty's Servants, and as the authors are the same,
there is no reason to doubt that Dyce was right in
supposing that Sir Thomas Wyatt consists of frag-
ments of both parts of Lady Jane. Dr. StoU thinks
perhaps we have only Part I., as The Coronation of
Queen Mary and The Coming In of King Philip are
only promised and not given. Dr. Greg suggests that
the cut version of Part I. ends and Part II. begins,
* V. Greg. Henslowe's Diary, Pt. ii. pp. 232, 3. There was an-
other edition in 1612.
214
APPENDICES 215
with Mary's audience (p. 193, column 2; Scene 10).
Professor Schelling makes the credible suggestion that
the censor had cut out a great deal; especially, no
doubt, the Coming In of King Philip. As it stands,
the play is extraordinarily short. In any case, the
date is 1602. It must have been played at "The Rose" ;
and, as there are two editions, it was probably revived.
Sources.
The source of Sir Thomas Wyatt — that is, of the
two parts of Lady Jane — is Holinshed ; and, as far as
we know, nothing else.^
CoUahoration.
Opinions have differed as to the respective amounts
contributed by Dekker and Webster. Dr. Stoll, argu-
ing from metre, sentiment, style, phrases, and the gen-
eral nature of the play, can find Dekker everywhere,
Webster nowhere. Dr. Greg gives Webster rather more
than half, mostly the first half. Mr. Pierce ^ says that
Webster wrote "most of Scenes 2, 5, 6, 10, 14, and 16,
although some of these scenes were certainly retouched
by Dekker, and all of them may have been." I shall
discuss Mr. Pierce's method of assigning scenes more
closely in the Appendix on Westward Ho and North-
ward Ho. In the case of Sir Thomas Wyatt none of
his metrical tests seems to me to have any validity.
* V. Stoll, p. 45.
' The Collaboration of Webster and Dekker. I use his division
into scenes, which is the same as Fleay's.
216 JOHN WEBSTER
They depend, like Dr. StoU's, on the assumption that
Webster's metrical characteristics were the same in
1602 as in 1610 or 1620 — an assumption Mr. Pierce
himself confesses to be absurd. It must be recognised
that we have only three plays on which we can base
our generalisations about Webster's metre, two slowly-
written Italian tragedies of about 1610 or 1612 and
a tragi-comedy of 1620. In Sir Thomas Wyatt Web-
ster was writing a different kind of play, together with
a lot of other people, probably in a great hurry; and
it is likely he was immature. To take the statistics
for rhyme in The Duchess of Malfi and the other plays
and use them, as proving that Webster uses rhyme less
than Dekker, to apportion the scenes in Sir Thomas
Wyatt, is a glaring example of that statistical blind-
ness and inert stupidity that has continually spoilt the
use of the very valuable metrical tables that have been
prepared for EHzabethan Drama. The evidence that
metre gives in Sir Thomas Wyatt can only be of the
vaguest description.
So, too, with characters. The reason why there are
certain kinds of character and incident in any of these
three partnership plays, is not that Dekker wrote
them. It is that they are that kind of play. If Web-
ster wrote a citizen's-wife-gallant play, he must have
introduced citizens' wives and gallants, even if he did
not do so in an Italian tragedy. On page 2 of his
book Mr. Pierce claims that his study is useful as
throwing light on Webster's range as an author. "If
Webster wrote ... the parts of Captain Jenkins and
APPENDICES 217
Hans Van Belch in Northward Ho, then he showed an
element of pleasant humour and manysidedness which
is not indicated anywhere else." In Chapter VII.,
dealing with "The Character and Atmosphere-Test,"
he quotes with approval, as proof of what is and what
is not Dekker's, Dr. Stoll on these characters. "Mani-
festly Dekker's too are the Dutch Drawer and Mer-
chant, and the Welsh Captain. A Dutch Hans had
already appeared in the Shoemaker . . . and Captain
Jenkins ... is the counterpart of Sir Vaughan ap
Rees in Satiro-Mastix'' That is to say, these charac-
ters of common types are Dekker's, because Dekker
uses similar ones elsewhere, and not Webster's because
Webster doesn't. You start out to see if Webster,
having written only in a certain style elsewhere, wrote
in another style here. You conclude that he has not
written in this other style here, because he has written
only in a certain style elsewhere!
Considerations of style (in the narrower sense of
literary individuality) and vocabulary are more con-
vincing. The only one of Mr. Pierce's tests that has
any value in the case of Sir Thomas Wyatt — except,
of course, the parallel-passages, taken with caution —
is his three-syllable-Latin-word one.-^ A large propor-
tion of Latin words, and any other characteristic we
recognise clearly as one of the later Webster's, do tend
to prove his presence in a scene — though their absence
does not disprove it. These slight indications of style,
if they had arisen and become unconscious so early,
* See the Appendix on Westwa/rd Ho and Northward Bo,
218 JOHN WEBSTER
are the things that would be apparent in plays of dif-
ferent species by the same author. But the eight or ten
years, and the probable presence of so many authors
in this play, must make us sceptical. The latter point,'
indeed, would falsify most of Mr. Pierce's work if it
were sound on other grounds. He remembers, on his
last page, that Heywood, Chettle, and Smith also have
to be accounted for. He dismisses them too magnifi-
cently. "It would be useless to discuss such questions
as these at present, since no practical results could
follow. We have offered such evidence as we possess
on the shares of Dekker and Webster; and here we
stop." But though you may not have "discussed" the
question of the relative shares of C, D., and E., in a
play, you have definitely answered it, if you say A.
wrote six scenes and B. the rest. The Latin-word test
is no good unless we have Heywood's, Chettle's, and
Smith's figures, as well as Dekker's and Webster's. It
does not prove that Dekker wrote certain scenes and
Webster did not, to say that Dekker employs a "sweet
personal tone," or a market-girl with her eggs, else-
where, and Webster does not. You have to be able to
say that Heywood and Chettle and Smith also are
strangers to these things.
Miss Mary Leland Hunt, in her careful and useful
monograph on Dekker,^ also discusses the question of
the partition of this play. Her most original sugges-
tion is that the main plan of the play is due to Chettle.
She advances various indications of this ; that he was
* Thomas Dekker: A Study, by Mary Leland Hunt.
APPENDICES 219
older than Dekker (and Webster, no doubt); that
Henslowe mentions his name first ; that he was specially
at home in the chronicle history; and that he is more
old-fashioned — and so more likely to have planned the
old-fashioned structure of Sir Thomas Wyatt — than
Dekker. Against Dekker and Webster this certainly
holds true ; and, in the midst of our uncertainties, the
conjecture may be allowed to stand as more persuasive
than any alternative. Beyond this, Miss Hunt has
not much of value to contribute. She hints a vague
approval of Fleay's attribution of scenes 1-9 to Web-
ster, 11-17 to Dekker. But she qualifies this by giving
Dekker parts of 7 and 9, and probably 4, and Web-
ster 10. The pathos of the trial-scene (16), she thinks,
points to Dekker.
Her judgment is not very trustworthy. It is on
emotional rather than aesthetic grounds — she attri-
butes, I mean, a tender scene to Dekker and a gloomy
scene to Webster, because Dekker is a tender, and
Webster a gloomy, dramatist.
Welcoming a suggestion of Dr. Greg's, she finds the
speeches of Wyatt in 6 and 10 very un-Dekkerish, and
therefore gives these scenes to Webster. (Mr. Pierce,
more "scientifically" notices the same thing.) For
myself, speaking with all due mistrust of human ability
to pick out one author from another in these cases, I
thought I too found a different note in these scenes.
But if it is not Dekker's, it is as certainly neither the
Webster's of 1612 nor the "Webster's" of the fancied
220 JOHN WEBSTER
Websterian parts of this play. It seems to me far
more probably Heywood.^
The whole position is this, Sir Thomas Wyatt con-
sists of the fragments of the first or of both of two
plays, one by Chettle, Dekker, Heywood, Smith, and
Webster, the other certainly by Dekker, and probably
by the others as well. It is issued as by Webster and
Dekker — either because they originally had the larger
share, or because they did the editing, or because their
names were at the moment the more likely to secure a
sale, or because they were known as the authors of the
play to the publisher. In any case, it was not the cus-
tom to put more than two names to a play. On the
whole, therefore, one must begin with an a priori prob-
ability that most of the play as we have it is by Web-
ster and Dekker, but that some is by Heywood or
Smith or Chettle. In addition, the state of the play
(the text is very uneven, sometimes fairly good, some-
times terribly mangled), and its history of slashing and
patching, make it likely that the different contributions
are fairly well mixed together by now. In some places,
certainly, a delicate reader will fancy he detects re-
peated swift changes between more than two styles.^
It is obvious, then, that it is very presumptuous
to assign different portions of the play with any com-
pleteness to the different authors. Reading the play,
with careful attention to style and atmosphere, I have
* Note especially the word "ostend," p. 194.
*e. g. the change towards the end of scene 11, at the top of
page 196, after Suffolk's entry.
APPENDICES 221
seemed to myself to recognise in the bulk of two scenes
and in one or two scattered places (e.g. the opening
lines of the play) a voice that may well be that of the
younger Webster. Taking, therefore, cautiously a cer-
tain amount of positive evidence from Dr. Stoll and
Mr. Pierce, and comparing it with my own impression
of the play and the general impression of other critics,
I suggest the following conclusions as all that we can
fairly pretend to be more than amiable dreaming.
Webster probably wrote scene 2 and most of scene 16.
No doubt he poured indistinguishably forth other parts
of this commonplace bit of journalism; but, except one
or two lines, it is impossible to pick them out. A good
deal of the rest of the play is by Dekker. Heywood's
hand is occasionally to be suspected.
Appendix D. — "Westward Ho" and
"Northward Ho"
These plays are so closely connected, and evidence
about either reacts so much on the other, that it is
convenient to consider them together.
Dates.
These plays can be dated fairly closely.
Westward Ho was registered to print on March
2nd, 1605. It was printed in 1607.
Northward Ho was registered on August 6th, 1607,
and printed in that year.
Northward Ho contains an amiable farcical attack
on Chapman.^ For this reason and others, it must
have been written as an answer to Eastward Ho, which
was registered to print September 4th, 1605, and ap-
peared in several editions in that year, and was prob-
ably written in 1604, perhaps in 1605.^ Eastward Ho
was written, again, more or less in emulous succession
*This is fairly conclusively proved by Dr. StoU (pp. 65-69). The
only doubtful point is that Bellaraont (whom we suppose to mean
Chapman) is called "white" and "hoary." Chapman was only
forty-seven in 1606. But even in this age, when people live so much
more slowly, they are sometimes silver-haired before fifty. And
the other evidence is very strong.
'v. Eastward Hoe, ed. F. E. Shelling. Belles Lettres Series,
Introduction.
222
APPENDICES 223
to Westward Ho} So we have the order of the plays
fairly certain. Dekker and Webster wrote theirs for
the Children of Paul's; Eastward Ho was written for
the rival company, the children of the Queen's Revels,
by Chapman, with the help of Jonson and Marston.
Westward Ho, therefore, could have been written
any time before March, 1605. The probable date of
Eastward Ho makes it slightly desirable to put the
performance of Westward Ho back, at least, towards
the beginning of 1604. There are various references;
to Kemp's London to Norwich Dance (1600) ;2 per-
haps to James' Scotch Knights ; ^ and to the famous
siege of Ostend.* Ostend was taken in September,
1604, and the second quotation, at least, looks as if
it was written after that. It may, however, have been
written during the last part of the siege. And these
references may, of course, not be of the same date as
the rest of the play. But it seems fairly safe to date
it as 1603 ^ or 1604, with a slight preference for the
autumn of 1604.^
* V. Eastward Ho. Prologue. ' Westward Ho, p. 237.
» Westward Ho. pp. 217, 326. * Westward Ho, pp. 210, 235.
''The end of 1603, of course. All the summer the plague was
raging.
"a. Dr. StoU (p. 63) finds in the Earl's discovery {Westward
Ho, 233), of a hideous hag in the masked- figure he had thought
a beautiful woman, a possible reminiscence of Marston's Sopho-
nisba, which may have been on the stage in 1603 or 1604. But the
idea is a common enough one in all literatures. And if there is
a debt, it might almost as easily be the other way. In any case, the
date is not influenced.
b. If the autumn of 1604, then, of course, Eastward Ho must be
put on to 1605.
224 JOHN WEBSTER
Northward Ho, then, must have been written in 1605,
1606, or 1607. In Day's The Isle of Gulls (printed
1606) there seems to be a reference to these three
plays, ^ in a passage that must have been written for
a first performance; which cuts out, at least, 1607,
and the last part of 1606. Dr. Stoll records also ^ a
close parallel with a passage in Marston's The Fawn,
He thinks The Fawn is the originator, and that it was
written in 1606.^ But he dates it by a very uncertain
reference to an execution. It is generally dated earlier,
and Marston may have imitated Northward Ho, or the
passages may, as in another Marston-Webster case,
have been taken independently otherwhence. So the
safest date for Northward Ho is 1605.*
Sources,
Westward Ho and Northward Ho are ordinary
citizen-comedies. The sources of these are generally
unknown. The plots were probably invented or
adapted from some current event or anecdote. As
Mr. Arnold Bennett says (thinking of such bourgeois
subjects as these plays deal with), there is no difficulty
about a plot; you can get a plot any time by going
into the nearest bar and getting into conversation over
^Ed. Bullen: pp. 5, 6. The reference is the more probable that
The Isle of Gulls was written for the same company as Eastward
Ho.
' P. 16. " Stoll, p. 17.
*Miss Hunt (Thomas Dekker, pp. 101-103) comes to much the
same conclusion; i.e. Westward Ho, 1604, Eastward Ho, 1604-5,
Northward Ho, 1605, as probable.
APPENDICES 225
a drink. The Elizabethans, no doubt, did this. All
that was wanted was some intrigue on the old citizen's-
wives-gallants theme that would allow of practical jok-
ing, bawdy talk, and a little broad conventional char-
acter-drawing. Dr. Stoll ^ and Mr. Pierce ^ have
pointed out that various incidents in these plays have
similarities in other plays of Dekker's earlier or later.
The "borrowing" from Sophonisba I have dealt with.
The ring story in Northward Ho is paralleled in Male-
spini's Ducento Novelle,^ as Dr. Stoll points out. It
can be traced further back (to the detriment of Dr.
StoU's suggestion that it originated in an exploit of
some attendants on Cardinal Wolsey), to number sixty-
two in La Sale's Les Cent nouvelles Nouvelles, a collec-
tion of the middle of the fifteenth century.* From
La Sale it could easily have come into any of the
Elizabethan books of stories, directly or by degrees.
Or it might even have been merely reinvented.
Collaboration,
Dr. Stoll has given some pages, and Mr. Pierce two-
thirds of his book, to an elaborate attempt to divide
up these plays between Dekker and Webster. It is
not possible here to examine either their methods or
their results in detail. I can only suggest some prin-
ciples which should be kept in mind in attempting such
questions, and which they have not always kept in mind,
*Pp. 72-74.
^ The Collaboration of Webster and Dekker, Chap. VI.
' Novella II., not I., as Dr. Stoll gives it.
*v. Celio Malespini und seine Novellen: Misteli.
226 JOHN WEBSTER
and summarise their results, indicating how far they
seem vahd and valuable. I shall mostly consider Mr.
Pierce's work, as it is later and far more detailed than
Dr. Stoll's and includes it.^
Dr. Stoll finds that the general outline and spirit
of the plays, the characters, and most of the incidents
are repeated in Dekker's other city-plays. On these
grounds, and on grounds of style and phrase, he gives
Dekker, in a general way, the whole of the plays. Mr.
Pierce adopts a more systematic method. He employs
various tests, "scientific" and "aesthetic," separately,
and tabulates and compares the results. His tests are
of the following kinds ; parallel passages ; use of dia-
lect ; metrical ; incidents ; "character and atmosphere" ;
and the "three-syllable Latin-word test," an invention
of his own. The last needs explanation. Mr. Pierce
discovered that the difference in typical passages of
Webster and Dekker, the difference of weight and
rhythm, is partly due to the number of long Latin
words used by the former. He has made this into a
regular and usable test, by reducing all Webster's and
Dekker's plays to a common line measure, and finding
the percentage of three-syllable words of Latin or
Greek origin, in each scene and act. An ingenious
plan. The results are superficially of immense decision
and value. Webster's known plays have a high aver-
age ; Dekker's known plays a low one. A few scenes in
these two collaborate plays have a high average, and
* See also a very sensible review of Mr. Pierce's book by Dr. P.
Aronstein in Beiblatt zur Anglia, 1910, p. 79.
APPENDICES 227
the rest a low one. There is a wide, almost empty gap
in between. The conclusion, especially if other tests
agree, is obvious.
But this test makes certain assumptions which Mr.
Pierce does not seem to have considered. It assumes
that the use of these three-syllable Latin words is al-
ways independent of the subject-matter. It assumes
that it was, even at this date, not only a habit of Web-
ster's, but an ingrained one, and probably unconscious.
If (and it is very probable) he was merely forming his
style at this time, by imitating such writers as Marston,
he could and would drop this trick a good deal, or for-
get to keep it up, in writing this sort of play. Writers
are not born polysyllabic. The habit may supremely
suit them; but they acquire it. And the process of
acquiring it is generally conscious. When Webster
wrote (or copied out)
"I remember nothing.
There's nothing of so infinite vexation
As man's own thoughts."
or
"I have caught
An everlasting cold: I have lost my voice
Most irrecoverably."
he knew what he was doing as well as Mr. Henry James
does when he writes, "She just charmingly hunched her
eyes at him."
If the investigators of the future draw up lists of
the average number of adverbs to a uniform line in
Mr. Henry James' works, they will find, probably, that
228 JOHN WEBSTER
in the early works it is practically normal, in the early-
middle period uneven, varying from chapter to chap-
ter, and for the last twenty years immense. Who they
will think wrote the early, and collaborated in the mid-
dle, Henry James's, it is impossible to guess.
That this Latinism could be put on at will we have
Dekker's The GulVs Horn-Booh and passages in his
more serious plays to witness. In spite of that it may
be admitted that a quite high average in any scene in
Northward Ho or Westward Ho, where Dekker would
have no temptation to Latinise, does point to Webster.
But what Mr. Pierce does not seem to realise is that
a low average does not point in the same way to Dekker.
For as there is no play of this kind by Webster extant,
it is impossible to say how much he might have de-
scended from Latinity at times. It is all part of the
general error of taking, as Webster's normal usages, his
practices in a definite kind of play in his mature period.
Still, with these restrictions and in this way, Mr.
Pierce's Latin-word test has a good deal of value ; that
is to say, for deciding what is Webster's, not what is
not. The only thing that can be urged against it is
that it is unnecessary ; being only a symptom of a dif-
ference in style which a subtle taste should distinguish
on its own qualities, or, if more, misleading. This is
mostly true; and the aesthetic tests are ultimately the
most valuable. But then it is so hard either to fix or
to communicate them.
The tests of metre, incident, and character and at-
mosphere seem to me to have practically no value, ex-
APPENDICES 229
cept in so far as "atmosphere" means literary style.
What it mainly means is the complexion of the whole,
with regard to which Westward Ho is of course much
nearer to, say, TJie Honest Whore, than it is to The
Duchess of Malfi. No doubt there are minor, barely
visible, effects and individualities of metre, phrase, or
character-drawing, and turns of incident, which might
easily betray the Dekker of this period, whom we
know, or even the Webster, whom we fear we mightn't
recognise. Dr. Stoll, indeed, has used these a little, for
distinguishing Webster. But as a rule these details
are just those one cannot tabulate. The grosser ones,
that can be defined and listed, are the attributes of the
species of play, such as a dramatist can put on and
off at will. The subtler, less extricable peculiarities,
however, are what influence the "unscientific" critical
taste to feel, "This is Webster!" and "This Dekker!"
They have an ultimate voice in deciding attributions,
though by a diff*erent method from metrical or word-
tests ; by representation rather than plebiscite.
The second trustworthy kind of evidence, then, for
a passage or scene being by some author, is a percep-
tion that the literary and linguistic style is his. To
use this, which Swinburne called judging by the ear in-
stead of the fingers, is a very important method, if
not so supreme as he thought. It is without rules ; but
in this case there are certain general features of style
which can be mentioned, if not tabulated. For Dekker
there is the half-comical, quick, repetition of phrases,
that Dr. Stoll has noticed. There is an important un-
230 JOHN WEBSTER
observed characteristic of Webster's, which is ex-
tremely noticeable in his later works, and seems to ap-
pear in those portions of these plays which, on stylistic
and other grounds, we are led to believe his. It is in
marked contrast to Dekker. It is the use of involved
sentences with subordinate clauses, as against a style
where the ideas are expressed in a series of simpler,
shorter, co-ordinate sentences. Northward Ho, II. 2,
one of the only certainly Websterian scenes in the two
plays, strikes the ear immediately as different in this
way. The whole ring of the sentences is — mainly for
this reason — slower, deeper, more solemn. The Ger-
mans have invented a way of distinguishing collabora-
tors. Read the play, they say, and you find your
voice instinctively assumes a different pitch for the
work of different authors. They profess to tell to half
a sentence where Webster begins and Dekker leaves off.
One can smile at their whole claim. But, for these two
authors, it is not, essentially, unmeaning.
The third admissible way of dividing the authorship
of these plays, is by parallel passages. It is not gen-
erally kept in mind that if this method is used for de-
ciding between collaborators, it implies an assumption
that the collaboration was of a certain kind, namely,
by taking so many scenes each. This was the usual
practice in contemporary collaboration, we know; and
it is, obviously, far the quickest and easiest way, as a
rule. So we have a right, generally, to suppose that
collaboration was of this sort, and, therefore, that a
certain parallel or repetition is strong proof of au-
APPENDICES 231
thorship of that scene. All the same, there is always
the possibility of both authors working over the same
scene, in which case, of course, a parallel helps to prove
nothing except its own source. In the present case,
though we do not know so certainly as with Webster's
earlier plays, Sir Thomas Wyatt or Christmas comes
hut once a year, that the collaboration was real and
contemporary, it is very likely. The likehhood is made
smaller than usual by the facts that Dekker was a
much quicker worker than Webster, and that he was
by standing and experience the senior partner. He
might very well have gone over Webster's scenes.
On the whole then a single parallel or repetition
does not prove much, in these plays ; a row of them, in
one scene, goes far to establish the authorship of that
scene.
Mr. Pierce has collected a great number of possible
parallels, most of them insignificant, some of them
very valuable. In using them, one must remember that
we have only a very few, and quite different, later plays
by Webster to draw on, and a great many, some con-
temporary and similar, of Dekker's. Once again, ab-
sence of proof that a scene is Webster's does not prove
it is not.
By these methods of proof, and any outstanding
evidence of another kind, one reaches much the same
conclusions as Mr. Pierce; but, I think, they should
be applied differently. In Northward Ho, II. 2, and
the first part of V., are almost certainly in the main by
Webster. In Westward Ho there is not, it seems to
232 JOHN WEBSTER
me, the same certainty. But I. 1 and III. 3 show very
strong traces of his presence. With Northward Ho,
1. 1 and III. 1 the probability is smaller, but still con-
siderable. There are also one or two phrases or sen-
tences scattered about the plays that arrest one's at-
tention as recognisably Webster's, or at least not Dek-
ker's. But these do not extend their atmosphere be-
yond themselves. There are these few scenes, which,
with varying degrees of probability, can be given to
Webster. There are a few more {Westward Ho, II. 1,
2, V. 3 : Northward Ho, IV. 1 ) where all the evidence
points to Dekker being mainly responsible. In the
rest, while we cannot detect the Webster of 1612, we
have no right to deny the presence of the Webster of
1605. In any case the collaboration seems to have been
of an intricate and over-laid nature.
To pretend to more precise knowledge is, I think,
silly.
Since I wrote this. Miss Hunt's book on Thomas
Dekker has appeared. On pages 106, 107, and 108 she
discusses the shares of Webster and Dekker in these
plays. She principally follows Fleay, whose methods
were rough. She discusses the responsibility for the
plots, which other critics have been inclined to leave
vaguely to Dekker. She would give most of it to Web-
ster, and also "the more unusual subtle or abnormal
incidents" ; the device of the diamond in Westward Ho
and that of the ring in Northward Ho, perhaps also
Greeneshield's betrayal of his wife, although that may
have been borrowed from Eastward Ho, Also Jus-
APPENDICES 233
tiniano's disguise as a hag; and his and Mayberry's
jealousy. Other kinds of evidence she does not con-
sider. In Westward Ho she finds signs of incomplete
collaboration and change of plan in construction. Still
following Fleay she thinks Webster wrote most of Acts
L, II., and III., and some of IV. ; Dekker, the rest.
Northward Ho is more homogeneous. Dekker is given
the Chapman-ragging and the Doll scenes ; Webster the
rest. Dekker probably went over the whole.
Her proofs and judgments are very superficial, and
almost valueless. It is, perhaps, probable that Web-
ster had more share in the planning of the plots and
incidents than he has been allowed. Her assignments
in general are based on a feeling that these two plays
are "gross," "offensive," and "sinning against the
light," that her protege Dekker, being a pure-minded
man, can have had little to do with them, and that
Webster "who dealt with lust" must be held guilty.
Her sex, or her nationality, or both, have caused in
her a curious agitation of mind whenever she ap-
proaches these plays. This prejudice destroys what
little value her very cursory investigation of the prob-
lems of their authorship might otherwise have had.
Appendix E. — "The Malcontent"
The Malcontent was published in 1604, in two edi-
tions. The title-page of the first reads :
THE
MALCONTENT.
BY JOHN MARSTON.
The title-page of the second reads:
THE
MALCONTENT.
AUGMENTED BY MARSTON.
WITH THE ADDITIONS PLATED BY THE KIKGS
MAJESTIES SERVANTS.
WaiTTEN BY JOHN" WEBSTER.
The second edition differs from the first in having an
Induction, and the insertion of twelve passages in the
play.
Much fuss has been made about the amount of the
play that Webster wrote. Dr. Stoll ^ has conclusively
shown that all we can deduce to be Webster's is the
*Pp. 55-60,
234
APPENDICES 235
Induction ; and Professor Vaughan has called attention
to a final piece of evidence — that the Induction itself
practically says that this is the case.
The matter is quite clear. The full-stop after
"Servants" on the second title-page is what Dr. Stoll
calls "purely inscriptional." That the whole theory
of Elizabethan punctuation rests on a psychological,
not, as now, on a logical basis, has recently been shown
with great force by Mr. Simpson.^ The whole look of
the page makes it obvious that the intention was to
connect Webster with the "Additions," and only with
the additions, and to make Marston responsible for the
augmentations as well as the bulk of the play. An aes-
thetic judgment of the play declares that the extra
passages are all Marston's and that the Induction is
probably not by Marston and probably is by Webster.
And Burbadge, in the Induction, describing how the
play fell into the hands of the King's Servants (from
the Children of the Queen's Revels) and being asked
"What are your additions?" makes answer, "Sooth,
not greatly needful; only as your salad to your great
feast, to entertain a little more time, and to abridge
the not-received custom of music in our theatre." That
probably, though not quite necessarily, identifies the
"additions" with the Induction. There are three pos-
sible theories; that Marston wrote The Malcontent
(first edition) and the extra passages, and Webster
^Shakespearian Punctuation. See also Professor Grierson's re-
marks on Elizabethan punctuation, The Poems of John Donne, vol.
ii., pp. cxxi.-cxxiv.
236 JOHN WEBSTER
the Induction; that Marston wrote The Malcontent
(first edition) and Webster the extra passages, and
probably the Induction ; or that originally Marston
and Webster wrote the play together, and that for
some reason only Marston's name appeared on the
title-page. I think there is no reason to believe the
third, every reason not to believe the second, and sev-
eral reasons to believe the first. I do not think the
arguments for The Malcontent dating from 1600, and
for the "augmentations" being really restorations by
Marston of cut pieces of his play in its first state, are
decisive. But I think the case stands without these
conclusions.^
Date,
As the first edition appeared without the Induction
during 1604, and the second with it in the same year,
and as it was obviously written for a special piratical
revival by the King's Majesty's Servants, who claim
the second edition, it is fair to suppose that the In-
duction was written during 1604.
* On the date of The Malcontent Dr. Stoll goes off pursuing the
wildest of geese through the undergrowth of a footnote. He
"proves" a phrase to be in the "Ur-Hamlet" by taking it for
granted that a play printed in 1604 is exactly as it was when it
was written in 1600. The old assumption of the integrity of plays. ,
Appendix F. — "The White Devil"
Date.
The White DevU was printed in 1612. It obviously
belongs to the same period as The Duchess of Malfi.
That it is the earlier of the two is probable on general
grounds, and proved by the advance of metrical li-
cense ^ and the absence of phrases and adaptations
from the Arcadia, which are present in all Webster's
later work.^
There are various clues, of more or less relevance,
to its date:
Mr. Percy Simpson has pointed out ^ that the puz-
zling and much emended passage about Perseus (p. 21 ;
last line) is an allusion to Jonson's Masque of Queens
(1609); a work Webster knew, for he borrows in A
Monumental Column from the dedication to it.
P. 23. MoNTiCELSo. Away with her!
Take her hence!
ViTTORiA. A rape! a rape!
MONTICELSO. How?
ViTTORiA. Yes, you have ravished Justice;
Forced her to do your pleasure.
* V. StoU, p. 190, metrical table.
» F. Crawford, Collectanea, i., 20-46. It is very noticeable, and
only to be explained by Webster having filled his notebook from
the Arcadia after The White Devil and before The Duchess of
I, A Mormmental Column, and The Devil's Law-case.
* Modern Language Review: January 1907.
237
238 JOHN WEBSTER
Dr. StoU suggests that Vittoria's cry, in its sudden-
ness as well as in the words, is very like Sebastian's
in Tourneur's The Atheisfs Tragedy, I. 4. But any
connection between the two is doubtful ; if there is any,
Tourneur may have imitated Webster ; and anyhow the
date of The Atheisfs Tragedy is still quite uncertain
— 1607-1611 is the most definite limit one can venture,
and even that rather depends on accepting the anony-
mous Revenger^s Tragedy as Tourneur's. This pas-
sage is more likely to be connected with The Tragedy
of Chahoty V. 11, 122, "unto this he added a most
prodigious and fearful rape, a rape even upon Justice
itself. . . ." Professor Parrott thinks Chapman may
have written this (it is in his part of the play) about
1612. And Webster admired and imitated Chapman.
But the whole thing is too cloudy for the resemblance
to be more than interesting.
The number of references to Ireland in the play is
remarkable.^ Either Webster had been in Ireland, or
he had been hearing about it, or he had been reading a
book on it. If it was a book, Barnaby Rich's A New
Description of Ireland, 1610, has been suggested. It
is very probable ; for the book mentions the various sub-
jects of Webster's references. But as there is no ver-
bal connection, and as they are all things one could
easily pick up by hearsay, the proof is not conclusive.
No doubt, too, there were other books on Ireland at
*See p. 6. Irish gamesters: p. 16, no snakes in Ireland: p. 28,
Irish rebels selling heads: p. 29 "like the wild Irish. . . .": p 31,
Irish funerals.
APPENDICES 239
the time which might have contained such obvious jour-
nahstic prattle as this. Still, Rich's book is the best
explanation of Webster's mind being so full of Irish
facts at the time: and the references are scattered
enough to make a little against them having been intro-
duced in a revision. For what this sort of evidence is
worth, it points to 1610 or after.
Dr. Stoll attaches importance to the preface and
postscript. These, it would in any case be extremely
probable, were written in 1612 for the publication
of the book. And a pretty conclusive borrowing of
phrase from Jonson's preface to Cat aline (1611)^ con-
firms this. Dr. Stoll thinks the tone of the preface
shows that the performance was recent. It is difficult
to see why. Webster merely says that the play has
been performed, without much success. His only hint
about the time that has elapsed since lies in "and that,
since that time [^i.e. the time of the performance], I
have noted most of the people that come to that play-
house resemble those ignorant asses, who, visiting sta-
tioners' shops, their use is not to inquire for good
books but new books. . . ." This looks as if some time
had gone by between the performance and the writing
of the preface. He had had time to see and deplore
The White Devil being forgotten by the "ignorant
asses" who only wanted "new" goods. An interval of
some months should be allowed at least.
The preface gives the further information that the
*See Stoll, pp. 20, 21. Webster borrows most of this preface
from prefaces of Jonson and Dekker.
240 JOHN WEBSTER
performance had been in winter, and that the play had
taken a long time in writing.
There is one more point. Dekker, writing an Epistle
Dedicatory to // This be not a Good Play ^ addressed
to the Queen's Servants (who produced The White
Devil), wishes well to a new play by a "worthy friend"
of his. It has been suggested that this means The
White Devil. Dekker and Webster were old friends,
and the vague complimentary epithets of the play
apply. ^ It may be so. But as between twenty and
thirty new plays were produced every year,^ and the
Queen's Servants, no doubt, contributed their share,
there were a good many other plays Dekker might have
been thinking of, and we cannot regard this as more
than a possible conjecture. // This be not a Good Play
was probably written and played in 1610 or 1611. The
Epistle Dedicatory for the printed edition would prob-
ably be written for the occasion, i.e. in 1612 or the
end of 1611. So any weight this conjecture has would
point to Webster's play being produced in the begin-
ning of 1612.*
* Printed 1612.
'"Such brave Triumphs of Poesy and elaborate industry . . ."
' V. Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, ii. pp. 371, 373. Malone and
Fleay both suggest an average of twenty-three or four a year.
This period was more prolific than the average, of course. For
1601-1611 Professor Schelling surmises a yearly average of nearer
thirty.
* Dr. StoU offers the additional proof that Dekker is speaking of
a maiden effort, which The White Devil is. Mere assumptions.
Dekker does not say the object of his interest is a maiden work.
And nobody can state that The White Devil is.
APPENDICES 241
The similarity of style and atmosphere and the close
resemblance of a great many passages^ (not verbal
repetitions, far more subtle and convincing things than
that) make it desirable to put The White Devil and
The Duchess of Malfl as close together as possible.
The tenuous evidence we have noticed points, if any-
where at all, to agreement with this — that is, to put-
ting The White Devil on towards its final hmit of 1612.
Acknowledging that it is all quite uncertain, I think
it is most probable that the play was written during
1611 and performed at the end of that year or in
January or February, 1612. It may have been writ-
ten 1610 and performed 1610-1611. It would need
some strong new evidence to put it back further.
Sources.
Some time and trouble have been spent in seeking
an exact printed source for The White Devil, but, so
far, in vain. The actual events, which took place in
the end of the sixteenth century — Vittoria was born
in 1557, was murdered in 1585 — were well-known.^
Did Webster get the story from an accurate history,
from some romantic version, or from hearsay? One
can only surmise. Professor Vaughan, who goes at
greatest length into this question, thinks it quite pos-
sible the source was a novel or play, or an oral account,
^See, for examples, Sampson, Introduction to The White Devil,
etc., pp. xli.-xliii. and Stoll, pp. 80-82.
^ For detailed accounts see D. Gnoli, Vittoria Accoramhoni. J.
A. Symonds, in Italian By-ways (1883) : L. M'Cracken, A Page of
Forgotten History.
242 JOHN WEBSTER
but is most in favour of Webster having read some
fairly accurate contemporary account, and altered it
for dramatic purposes. Webster's unusually accurate
pronunciation of Italian names, and his quoting Tasso,^
allow us to believe he may have known Italian. But the
tale may well have got into an English or French ver-
sion by 1610. The differences between Webster's ver-
sion and the facts are queer. Many of them look cer-
tainly as if they had been made consciously (by Web-
ster or someone else) for dramatic purposes; such as —
besides the additions of madness and murders — the
toning down of Lodovico to make him a minor figure,
and the purification of Isabella. But there are others
that have no such obvious point, the exchange of names
between Marcello and Flamineo, the writing of Monti-
celso for Montalto,^ and Paul IV. for Sixtus V. The
first of these may be purposeful. Even one who has
not read the Sixth ^neid may be able to perceive that
Marcello is a pure young hero and Flamineo an amaz-
ing villain. Is it fanciful to more than suspect that
The White Devil would be less effective if he were called
Flamineo who died so innocently, and a Marcello playeii
amazing tricks with bulletless pistols, or screamed in
mock-death :
* The Duchess of Malf,, p. 78.
*Dr. Greg {Modern Language Quarterly: Dec. 1900) suggests
that Webster may have misread (in, perhaps, a MSS. account)
Moncelto for Montalto, and euphonised it into Monticelso. But
the other difficulties remain.
APPENDICES 243
"O I smell soot.
Most stinking soot! The chimney is a-fire!
My liver's parboil'd like Scotch holly-bread;
There's a plumber laying pipes in my guts,
it scalds !"
It is not for nothing that you dare not call a hero
Lord John or a villain George. And Webster, who had
above all things a nose for irrelevant details that inex-
plicably trick you, unconscious, into the tone he desires,
may have had a purpose in writing also Paulus for
Sixtus, Monticelso for Montalto. Still, it is hard to
think memory or report or notes did not play him false.
On the other hand such minute details from the
actual story have been preserved by Webster — names,
the summer-house by the Tiber, and so on — that it is
difficult to imagine that he got it from any scanty or
oral report. And there are certain consideration^
which seem to favour his having worked from some ex-
tensive version, whether dramatic or in pamphlet form.
Why should Brachiano and the Conjuror conduct their
interview in Vittoria's house (p. 18)? No reason is
given for the absurdity. There is an equally unex-
plained and apparently pointless incident in the trial-
scene ; where Brachiano refuses a chair, and sits on his
cloak (pp. 19 and 22), to show, one gathers, his con-
tempt for the Court. The labour and time Webster
spent on the play, and his care in publishing this edi-
tion to wipe out the failure of the performance, forbid
our explaining these things by hurry in composition, or
by the text being printed from an acting version. They
244 JOHN WEBSTER
might well be the result of Webster's obvious lack of
ordinary skill in dramatising a story of which he had
a lengthy version before him. Such incidents as Fran-
cisco's sight of Isabella's ghost, and the spectacular
and fairly accurate ceremony of choosing a Pope, as
well as the divergencies in the characters of Francisco
and Flamineo, as the play proceeds, also fit in well with
this theory.
If Webster was working from some detailed account,
it might either be a play or a narrative. In favour of
the play are some of the extraordinary old-fashioned
tags in The White Devil, and particularly the amazing
mixture of extremely fine and true lines and distress-
ingly ludicrous couplets or phrases in the final scene
(though such incongruities are far more possible for
Webster than for any other great writer of the period).
In this case, the characteristics of the dramatisation
are due to the earlier play-wright.
On the other hand, the general line of the play gives
the impression that Webster himself dramatised it di-
rectly.
In any case, from the details of names mentioned
above, it looks as if someone, either Webster or an
intermediate, had read some accurate account with
care, making a few notes perhaps, had let it simmer
into shape in his mind, the characters taking life and
individuality, and then, later, written it out. Only so
can the mistakes of memory be explained. Whether
it was Webster who did this, or whether, as Professor
APPENDICES 245
Vaughan implies, he had someone else's account before
him as he worked, it is impossible to say.
The State of the Play.
The White Devil is certainly entirely Webster's. It
is also almost certain we have the whole play. There
are no sure traces of revision for acting, or of abbrevi-
ation. Webster obviously, from his Preface, brought
the play out with great self-consciousness and care, and
a desire to see its merits recognised. So he would
naturally print it complete. And both the Preface and
general probabilities point to it having only been played
once, not very successfully, before publication. So we
need not suspect our copy of having been revised for a
revival.
Appendix G. — "The Duchess of Malfi"
Date.
The history of the various opinions about the date
of The Duchess of Malfi is both entertaining and in-
structive. Dyce used to guess at 1616. Fleay put it
back to 161S, a date which many slight indications
favoured. These were mainly on stylistic and general
grounds. Professor Vaughan, however, in 1900, made
a suggestion which Dr. Stoll, in 1905, worked out and
regarded as providing conclusive evidence. So, accord-
ing to the ordinary methods of dating plays, it did.
It is not necessary to detail Dr. Stoll's arguments.
They refer to the oddly introduced passage in I, i. (p.
59) on the French King and his court. Dr. Stoll
rightly says it is very probable a passage like this in an
Elizabethan play would refer to current events. He
exhaustively proves that it does exactly fit what hap-
pened in France in the early part of 1617, when Louis
XIII. had the evil counsellor Concini killed, "quitted"
his palace of "infamous persons," and established a
"most provident council" ; events which made some stir
in England at the time. As all this would have ap-
peared in a different light in 1618 or after, and as there
is other evidence that The Duchess of Malfi was being
played in England at the end of 1617, we seem to have
the date, the latter part of 1617, fixed with unusual
246
APPENDICES 247
certainty.^ It is rare to be able to be so certain and so
precise about an Elizabethan play. And having the
date of composition of some thirty lines fixed, people
would no doubt have gone on for ever believing they
had the date of the whole fixed ; had not Dr. Wallace,
delving in the Record Office, discovered that William
Ostler, who played Antonio, died on December 16th,
1614 ! 2 The explanation, of course, is that The Duchess
of Malfl was written and performed before December,
1614, and revived with additions in 1617. All the evi-
dence we have shows that this habit of altering a play
and putting in topical references whenever it was re-
vived, was universal. Our modern reverence for the
exact written word is the result of regarding plays as
literary objects, and of our too careful antiquarian
view of art. The Elizabethans would have thought it
as absurd not to alter a play on revival as we think
it to do so. They healthily knew that the life of a play
was in its performance, and that the more you inter-
ested people by the performance, the better it was. The
written words are one kind of raw material for a per-
formance; not the very voice of God. So, naturally,
they changed the play each time ; and when we have the
text of a play, all we can feel in the least certain about,
is that we have it something as it was for the latest
*See, for instance, Professor Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, vol.
i, p. 590. "This fixes the date of The Duchess of Malfi at a time
later than April, 1617, and puts to rest once and for all former
surmises on the subject." This eternal rest lasted nearly five years.
» See The Times, Oct. 2 and 4, 1909.
248 JOHN WEBSTER
previous revival. Editors and critics have come to ad-
mit this, in general. But in individual instances they
never remember to allow for it. Occasionally, as here,
other circumstances are discovered, and put them right.
But, on the whole, the common credulous assumption
of certainty about dates in Elizabethan literature is as
startling to an onlooker as the credulous assumption of
certainty about authorship.
The Duchess of Malfi, then, was acted before Decem-
ber, 1614; and as Webster obviously took as long over
it as he confessedly did over The White DevU, the latest
date we can give him for writing it is during the whole
year of 1614. As it is later than The White Devil, we
do not want to put it back beyond 1612, though as The
White DeviVs date is uncertain we could do so.
Strong internal evidence for the date of The Duchess
of Malfi has, however, been pointed out by Mr. Craw-
ford.^ His arguments rest mainly on the great sim-
ilarity between The Duchess of Malfi and A Monumental
Column. These are connected far more closely than any
of Webster's works in several ways. The poem repeats
both more words and lines and more ideas from The
Duchess of Malfi than from any of the other plays. In
metre it is, allowing for the different styles, nearer. If
you examine the particular sources Webster borrowed
from, the resemblance becomes even more obvious. In
The White Devil he does not borrow from Sidney's Ar-
cadia at all. In The DeviVs Law-Case the borrowing is
^Collectanea, Series i. pp. 20-46, and especially Series ii. pp.
1-63.
APPENDICES 249
faint and patchy. In The Duchess of Malfi and A Morv-
umenial Column the borrowing is incessant and similar,
and includes imitation of style. Another work both
pieces borrow from, and only these two pieces among
Webster's, is Donne's An Anatomy of the World, which
was published in 1612.^ There are also ^ in The Duch-
ess of Malfi several imitations and borrowings of phrase
from another book of 1612, Chapman's Petrarch's
Seven Penitential Psalms. But the similarity itself of
A Monumental Column and The Duchess of Malfi puts
the date of the play further on than this. A Monumen-
tal Column is an elegy written in memory of Prince
Henry, who died on November 6th, 1612. It was pub-
lished in 1613, with similar elegies of Tourneur's and
Heywood's. It appears to have been rather belated, for
(lines 259-268) he refers to other elegies that had al-
ready appeared, and adds:
"For he's a reverend subject to be penn'd
Only by his sweet Homer and my friend."
i.e., only Chapman should write about the dead Prince.
From this and from various reminiscences in A Monu-
mental Column^ Mr. Crawford deduces that Webster
must have seen Chapman's Epicedium on Prince Henry.
I do not think it is proved ; for the passage may only
mean that Chapman ought to write an elegy. In any
case. Chapman's poem followed the Prince's death so
^In its entirety. Without The Second Armiversary in 1611. But
Webster borrows from the whole.
' Crawford Collectanea, ii. 55-58.
250 JOHN WEBSTER
closely (as the other elegies Webster refers to also may
well have done) that we cannot put A Monumental Col-
umn much later for this. But (lines 102-5) there is a
probable, though not certain, reference to Chapman's
The Masque of The Middle Temple performed Febru-
ary 15, 1613. A Monumental Column, therefore, may
be dated any time in the half-year December, 1612-
May 1613, with a slight preference for February and
March 1613. As The Duchess of Malfl was certainly
before the end of 1614, and certainly after the begin-
ning of 1612, and as there is so much evidence that the
play and the poem were being written at the same time,
we may date the play with fair certainty at 1613, in-
cluding perhaps the latter part of 1612.
There is no other evidence of any value for the date
of The Duchess of Malfl. It may appear that I have
been trying to establish the earlier limit by that method
I have always decried elsewhere, namely, by dating the
whole by the date of various passages. The answer is
that in the case of The Duchess of Malfl and A Monu-
mental Column the borrowings from other authors are
so numerous, so widespread, and so much part of the
whole play, that the likelihood of them having all been
introduced in revision is very small. Such a revision
would have to be a complete rewriting of the play. And
while we must allow for the possibility of revision in any
Elizabethan play, we cannot suppose that the writers of
that age took the trouble to rewrite their plays, in tone,
from beginning to end.
APPENDICES 251
Sources,
It Is certain that Webster got the story of The Duch-
ess of Malfi from Painter's Palace of Pleasure, Novel
XXIII. Painter had it from Belleforest, who had it
from Bandello. A recent Italian book shews that Ban-
dello probably based his account on the testimony of
actors in the actual events, and suggests that he may
even have been himself one of them, the one whom we
know as Delio.^ It is an alluring speculation.
Beyond this, the tortures of the Duchess were sug-
gested, probably, by incidents in Sidney's Arcadia. The
same book, which gave Webster so much even in phrases
and sentences, may have been responsible for much in
the Duchess's character, and for the echo-scene (V. 3).
These are less certain. Mr. Crawford with greater
probability thinks that V. 1., the scene of Delio's and
Julia's suits to Pescara, was suggested from Montaigne,
Book 1.2
State of the Play.
I have already explained some of the reasons for
thinking there was a revival of The Duchess of Malfi
in the latter half of 1617. They are, briefly, these.
The first fifty lines of the play obviously refer to events
which happened in France in April 1617, and roused
immediate interest in England. They could not have
^ Giovanna d'Aragona, Duchessa d'Amalfi, da Domenico Morel-
lini, 1906. V. review by W. W. Greg in Modern Language Re-
view, July 1907.
* Collectanea, ii. pp. 14, 15.
252 JOHN WEBSTER
been written after about May 1618, when these events
were seen in a quite different light. Also, the chaplain
to the Venetian Ambassador in England has left a de-
scription of a play he saw in London, which is probably,
but not certainly. The Duchess of Malfi} He did not
get to London before the beginning of October 1617,
and he seems to have seen the play a little time before
the 7th February 1618.
The Actors' list in the first edition allows of a revival
of this date.
The Duchess of Malfi, then, was revived in a revised
form in the latter part of 1617. That the beginning
of the play was revised we know. If the Italian chap-
lain's account of the play be accurate, there must have
been a good deal in the performance he saw which is
not in the play as we have it — even allowing for his
misinterpretation.
One passage in the play itself may point to a com-
bination of two versions. In I. 1., (p. 61) Delio use-
fully questions Antonio about the other chief charac-
ters. Antonio gives a long description of the Cardinal ;
then a long description of the Duke, his brother ; then,
before going on to the Duchess, he reverts suddenly to
the Cardinal, as if he had not mentioned him, with:
**Last, for his brother there^ the Cardinal. . . ,"
On the other hand, the inclusion in the first quarto
(1623) of Middleton, Rowley, and Ford's commenda-
» F. StoU, p. 29.
APPENDICES 253
tory verses, and of Webster's dedicatory letter, as well
as, and more forcibly than, the avowal of the title-page,^
go to show that this edition of the play is as Webster
would have had it. It must, therefore, be fairly near
the original version (1613); containing most of that,
with whatever of subsequent additions or changes Web-
ster supposed improvements. And we cannot doubt
that practically all of the play, as we have it, is by
Webster.
*"The perfect and exact Copy, with divers things printed, that
the length of the play would not bear in presentment."
Appendix H. — "A Monumental Column"
Date.
The question of the date of A Monumental Column
is discussed in Appendix G in connection with The
Duchess of Malfi. It must have been written within
some six months after November 1612 ; probably about
March 1613.
Sources.
There is, of course, no special source for a poem like
this. It repeats the usual thoughts in elegies of its
kind ; and borrows largely in expressions and in general
style from Donne ; also from Sidney, Chapman, and Ben
Jonson.
254
Appendix I.— "The Devil's Law-Case"
Date,
The DeviVs Law-Case was published in 1623. There
is little evidence to decide the date of its writing.
(1) There is a reference (IV. 2) to an affray in the
East Indies :
"How! go to the East Indies! and so many Hollanders
gone to fetch sauce for their pickled herrings!
Some have been peppered there too lately."
This almost certainly refers to a Dutch attack in
August 1619 on some English ships engaged in loading
pepper. News seems to have taken from nine to fifteen
months to travel between England and the East Indies.
London might learn, then, of this pepper business any
time in the latter half of 1620. The word "lately,"
and still more the comparative unimportance and tran-
sience of the event, suggest that the form of the play in
which this sentence occurred was being acted towards
the end of 1620 or in the first half of 1621. If that
form was the only form, we cannot tell ; and we have no
right to assume it. The whole of the reference to the
East Indies is comprised in a few sentences in this one
place. It is entirely unnecessary to the plot, and it
could easily have been inserted at a moment's notice.
255
256 JOHN WEBSTER
(2) It is said that the chief idea in the play, Leo-
nora's attempt to bastardise her son by confessing a
long-past adultery that as a matter of fact never took
place, resembles stories in the pseudo-Marlovian Lusfs
Dominion, The Spanish Curate, by Fletcher and Mas-
singer, and The Fair Maid of the Inn, by Massinger
and another. The Fair Maid of the Inn was probably
not written before 1624. The Spanish Curate was writ-
ten between March and October 1622. It is only just
possible that The DeviVs Law-Case can have been writ-
ten after it.^ Gerardo the Unfortunate Spaniard, an
English translation from the Spanish, which appeared
in March 1622 and was the source of The Spanish
Curate, may also have suggested this part of The
DeviTs Law-Case. But resemblances are tricky things.
This one, closely examined, turns out to depend largely
on having the confession of a past misdemeanour at a
public trial. And to bring in a public trial is exactly
the thing that would independently occur to the mind of
a dramatist of circa 1620, if he imagined or heard of
the rest of the story. The only resemblance that really
may mean anything is to Lusfs Dominion, where a
widow has a grudge against her son, because of a man
she is in love with. So, to defame him and deprive him
of the inheritance, she invents, with details, and publicly
confesses, a story which makes him a bastard. The
motives and feelings of the characters in this play cor-
respond far more than in those others, to The DeviTs
Law-Case situation. It is true Lusfs Dominion is an
» V. StoU, p. 32.
APPENDICES 257
old play of 1590. But it may have been revived and
revised many times. Perhaps it "suggested" the idea
of The DeviVs Law-Case — in any of the million ways,
direct and indirect, in which, in real life, ideas are sug-
gested. But the truth is that, unless a very certain
source is known, the search for the suggestion of so
unexotic an idea as this becomes rather foolish. A half-
remembered story, a friend's anecdote, an inspiration —
anything may be responsible for any proportion of it.
It may be useful to trace John Keats' hippocrene ;
not his porridge.
(3)^ The title-page says that the play was "ap-
provedly well acted by Her Majesty's Servants." This
company, which also performed The White Devil, was
called by this name until March 1619, when Queen
Anne died. It appears to have gone gradually to pieces
after that. Thomas Heywood, for instance, seems to
have left it by 1622. In July 1622, it was recon-
structed, with children as well as adults, as "The
Players of the Revels." It probably broke up in the
next year. The point is, under what name did it go
between 1619 and 1622.? Under the old one of "Her
Majesty's Servants," thinks Dr. Stoll. Mr. Murray,
the latest investigator of the history of the Dramatic
Companies, says it was called by the name of "The Red
Bull," its theatre. What evidence there is seems to in-
dicate this. The corresponding (or same) company on
tour was generally known as "The late Queen Anne's
* For this paragraph v. English Dramatic Companies, 1558-1642,
by John Tucker Murray: esp. vol. i. pp. 193-200.
258 JOHN WEBSTER
players." We should have expected one of these two
latter names, if the play had been performed only be-
tween 1619 and 1622. This consideration by itself
makes a slight, a quite slight, probability of the play
being acted before March 1619.
Altogether, therefore, we can only say that the play
is earlier than July 1622, and was almost certainly
being acted in some form in about August 1620-July
1621. Everything else is quite uncertain; except that
the nature of the play forbids you to look earlier than,
at earliest, 1610. The tiny probability of 1620 or
after, for the whole play, established by the East Indies
reference, is about balanced by the tiny probability of
before 1619, established by the name of the Company.
For charts and lists one would say 1620.
Sources.
Perhaps, for the main idea, Lusfs Dominion. See
under Date (2). The episode of Romelio's remedial
stabbing is from Goulart's Histoires Admirahles, prob-
ably in Grimeston's translation (1607) ; a source Web-
ster used also for his lycanthropy in The Duchess of
Malfi.
The State of the Play.
There is no reason to suppose that any part of the
play is not by Webster, or that it has been much ab-
breviated or revised. The title-page (1623) avows it
"the true and perfect copy, from the original." It
may be true. But that the original may have borne
APPENDICES 259
signs of alterations for stage purposes, is suggested
by the fact that (pp.126, 127) on three separate occa-
sions in III. 3, the 1623 edition has "Surgeon" where
it ought to be "Surgeons," for there were two surgeons
in the case. It would have lessened the dramatic effect
but not hurt the plot to reduce these two to one, and
it is just the kind of change that might have been made
in order to use fewer actors. Her Majesty's Servants
were on the downhill when they acted this play. And
if this change was made for acting, others may have
been.
Appendix J. — "A Cure for a Cuckold"
Date,
A Cure for a Cuckold was published in 1661.
(1) It is necessary at one point that a sea-fight
should have taken place and be narrated. The Enghsh
merchant-ships are reported to have been attacked by
three Spanish men-of-war, off Margate. From its style
this play must date from the end of James', or from
Charles', reign. At any period the dramatist would be
likely to attribute fighting, in a play of contemporary
life, to the actual enemies of England of the time ; and
at this period he would be especially unlikely to offend
by suggesting enmity with any friend of the rulers of
the country. So we may find it probable these lines
were written between 1624 and 1630 (inclusive), when
England and Spain were at war; not earlier, while
Charles' fantastic matrimonial expedition was going on,
and not later, when peace had been patched up. The
fact that England was more importantly at war with
France from 1627, tends a little to narrow it to 1624-
1627. This is a moderate proof of the date of these
lines, or one of them; a proportionately smaller one,
therefore, for the whole play.
(2) The plot of "Webster's portion" of A Cure for
a Cuckold is the same as, or similar to, that of other
plays. It is a particular form of the favourite Eliza-
260
APPENDICES 261
bethan motif, Mistress — ^Lover — Friend. On this point
I have little to add to and not much to subtract from
Dr. Stoll's arguments. The bulk of mine are a sum-
mation of his. He seems to me to prove his point ; not
as conclusively as he believes ; still, to prove it.
In giving a synopsis of the relevant parts of the plots
of these plays I shall, for clearness' sake, call the pro-
tagonist — the lover — A, the friend F, and the Lady L.
(a) In Mars ton's Dutch Courtezan (1604) L (a
courtezan) and F are in love first. F chucks her. L,
for revenge, encourages A, who has conceived an over-
whelming passion for her; and promises herself to him
if he will kill F. A promises to do so; on reflection
repents, and warns F. They agree on a trick together,
feign a quarrel, and pretend to fight a duel. F hides,
and is given out as slain in the duel. To punish A for
his folly he hides also from him. L, to complete her
vengeance, has A arrested for murder. As A finds he
cannot produce F to clear himself, he is in a bad way.
At the last moment F, present in disguise, reveals him-
self. L is led off^ to prison. A is cured of his passion ;
and all is for the best.
(b) In Massinger's The Parliament of Love (1624)
A and L have been contracted in marriage ; A has, im-
patiently, first proposed, and then forcibly attempted
copulation before the marriage-ceremony ; and L is con-
sequently possessed by hatred for him. The tale is told
in four scenes. (II. 2) A insists on seeing L and off*ers
to do anything she likes to obtain her pardon, and her.
262 JOHN WEBSTER
She accepts the bargain and bids him find out his best
friend and kill him.
(III. S) A soliloquises that he has tried many friends
with a proposal and none of them has turned out a
true one. Enter F, who is ecstatic over an unhoped
meeting with his mistress, which she has appointed for
two hours hence. A is melancholy and tries to slip
away. F insists on knowing the reason. A says he has
to fight a duel shortly, and can't find a second. F in-
sists on coming as second, and cutting his mistress, in
spite of A's protestations.
(IV. 2) They arrive at the duel-ground. A makes F
swear to fight relentlessly; then reveals the truth, he
himself (A) is the ever detestable enemy. He insists on
fighting, is beaten, but not killed.
(V. 1) It is common talk that A has killed F, and
that L has had A arrested for trial before "The Parlia-
ment of Love."
At the trial A is found guilty of murder, L of
cruelty, and condemned. L repents and forgives A. F,^
supposed (by a trick arranged, presumably, with A)
to be dead, rises from his bier. All is put right, and A
and L marry.
(c) In A Cure for a Cuckold, L (Clare) is secretly in
love with F (Bonvile), who has been married, on the
morning the play begins, to somebody else. The tale
is told in five scenes.
(I. 1) L is sad. A (Lessingham) renews a previous
proposal to her. L will accept on one condition. A
APPENDICES 263
agrees. L tells him it is to find out and kill his best
friend.
(I. 2) A soliloquises. Enter some friends, and de-
mand the reason of A's sadness. A says he must fight a
duel next morning at Calais, and has no second ; sec-
onds to fight. He asks each to be his second. They re-
fuse and exeunt. Enter F ; demands to know the reason
of A's sadness. A reluctantly explains. F offers to
come, and cut his wedding-night. A protests. F in-
sists, in spite of the arrival on the scene of his newly-
married wife.
(III. 1) They arrive at the duel-ground. A says
he has come to fight an innocent enemy ; i.e. F, he re-
veals. And he is so deep in love, he says, he must kill
him. F quibbles that as a "friend" he now is dead.
They part.
(IV. 2) A reports to L F's death. L confesses her
unhappy love for F and declares herself overjoyed. A
turns against her.
After some complications with the other part of the
plot,
(V. 2) A and L are reconciled, and marry.
Before we can proceed to the comparison of these
plots there is one point in A Cure for a Cuckold to be
got clear. That is, Clare's motive in giving Lessing-
ham the command. There are various remarks about
it in the play. In I. 2, Lessingham, in his soliloquy,
rather meekly wonders "what might her hidden purpose
be in this?" He can only suggest that she has a psy-
chological interest in proving the proposition that there
264 JOHN WEBSTER
is no such thing as friendship. In II. 4, Bonvile's ab-
sence is commented on. Clare, in an aside, says :
I fear myself most guilty for the absence
Of the bridegroom. What our wills will do
With over-rash and headlong peevishness
To bring our calm discretions to repentance!
Lessingham's mistaken, quite out o' the way
Of my purpose, too.
In III. 1, in the dialogue between the friends, Lessing-
ham has a new reason to suggest :
. . . She loathes me, and has put.
As she imagines, this impossible task.
For ever to be quit and free from me.
In III. 3. When the news comes that Bonvile is at
Calais, as Lessingham's "second," Clare guesses the
truth, and cries, aside again:
fool Lessingham
Thou hast mistook my injunction utterly.
Utterly mistook it ! . . .
1 fear we both are lost.
In IV. 2. Lessingham reports to Clare that he has
fulfilled her injunctions.
Clare. Then of all men you are most miserable :
Nor have you ought furthered your suit in this.
Though I enjoined you to 't; for I had thought
That I had been the best esteemed friend
You had i' the world.
Less. Ye did not wish, I hope,
That I should have murdered you.
APPENDICES 265
Clare. You shall perceive more
Of that hereafter. . . .
She asks who the slain friend is, and hears "Bonvile."
At first she is "lost for ever." Then she suddenly
changes and professes great pleasure, promises in-
stantly to marry Lessingham, because he has rid her of
her "dearest friend and fatalest enemy" — she was in
love with Bonvile.
And beholding him
Before my face wedded unto another.
And all my interest in him forfeited,
I fell into despair; and at that instant
You urging your suit to me, and I thinking
That I had been your only friend i' the world,
I heartily did wish you would have killed
That friend yourself, to have ended all my sorrow.
And had prepared it, that unwittingly
You should have done 't by poison.
Later, Lessingham turns against her, and leaves her.
She, in a soliloquy, expresses great remorse :
I am every way lost, and no means to raise me
But blessed repentance . . .
. . . Now I suffer.
Deservedly.
Bonvile appears. She rejoices to find him alive.
After some conversation —
Clare (giving Bonvile a letter)
. . . had you known this which I meant to have
sent you.
An hour 'fore you were married to your wife.
266 JOHN WEBSTER
The riddle had been construed.
Bon. Strange! This expresses
That you did love me.
Clare. With a violent affection.
Bon. Violent indeed; for it seems it was your purpose
To have ended it in violence on your friend :
The unfortunate Lessingham unwittingly
Should have been the executioner.
Clare. 'Tis true.
In V. 2 she again expresses contrition to Lessing-
ham:
Clare. It was my cause
That you were so possessed; and all these troubles
Have from my peevish will original;
I do repent, though you forgive me not.
Dr. Stoll's impression is that Clare's motive is mainly
meant to be jealousy of Bonvile (F) and a desire for
his death, but that occasionally obscurity comes in and
that she seems to have meant something else. As the
motive in The Dutch Courtezan was also jealous hatred
of F, while that in The Parliament of Love was hatred
of A, this tells a little against Dr. StolPs idea that The
Parliament of Love came between The Dutch Courtezan
and A Cure for a Cuckold. He brings the "obscurity
of motivation" into service, however, by an ingenious
theory of Webster starting with a plot where the motive
was jealousy of F, and introducing phrases and ideas
{e.g. "Kill for my sake the friend that loves thee dear-
est") from the other. Parliament of Love, motivation
of offended modesty.
APPENDICES 267
But this will not do. It is impossible to imagine
that Webster had a mind with so extraordinarily feeble
a grasp. And an inspection of the relevant passages,
quoted above, shows the truth. Lessingham's own
conjectures, of course, are astray. He is meant not to
know what Clare is at. The only place which favours
the view that her motive was a jealous desire for Bon-
vile's death is where she confesses it to him, near the
end of the play. If this is true, it is absolutely at vari-
ance with the rest of the play, which is perfectly con-
cordant with itself. We do not know, at the beg-inningr
of the play, that Lessingham's best friend is Bonvile.
Nor, as far as we can see, does she. She once says, and
once practically admits, to Lessingham, that her com-
mand really meant that he was to kill her. And — which
far outweighs anything said to another person, for that
might be a lie — she twice, in an aside, says that Les-
singham mistook her words and is doing something she
did not intend. It is perfectly plain and indisputable.
She was not aiming at Bonvile. Her remorse for her
folly was natural, and does not demand the jealousy-of-
Bonvile theory. And her statement to Bonvile must be
explained away.
It might be suggested that it was a desperate lie, and
that the whole thing is a bad attempt at subtle psychol-
ogy. Or much more probably, that it is an instance
of the dangers that lurk for collaboration, especially if
it is not contemporaneous ; and that one of the two
authors, probably Rowley, misunderstood a part of the
plot the other was responsible for, and innocently
268 JOHN WEBSTER
roused confusion. But I think the severer course of
emendation can be shown to be absolutely necessary.
For if you look at the passage (the last one quoted
from IV. 2) you will see it is really impossible that
"your friend" can refer to Bonvile, as it seems to. It
makes nonsense of the whole passage! For in that
case all the information he gets from the letter is that
she loves him. And how would that have construed "the
riddle .?" For the "riddle" included, by this hypothesis,
her queer injunction to Lessingham and its hidden in-
tention to end in Bonvile's death ; all of which Bonvile
would be ignorant of, an hour before his marriage, and
which she'd be scarcely likely to reveal to him ! More-
over, what does "unwittingly" mean! How do you
kill a man "unwittingly," if you challenge him to a duel
in order to kill him.? The whole thing is mad.
Of course, some small change has to he made in the
text. Either "on your friend" must be changed to "on
yourself" ; or, more probably, "and" should be read for
"on," and the whole should be punctuated :
"To have ended it with violence ; and your friend.
The unfortunate Lessingham^ unwittingly," etc.
and the whole tale is this. She gives him a letter which
he was to have opened just before his marriage. He
reads it. It tells him, first, that she loved him. He
goes on reading, "Violent, indeed; ... for it seems
. . ." It seems, from the letter, that she had intended
to "end" (the word fits, by this interpretation) her
APPENDICES 209
violent love with violence on herself. She was going to
have had poison given her. And Lessingham was go-
ing to have done it, "unwittingly." She has told Les-
singham the whole story five minutes before (p. 309)
in the same scene (v. the preceding quotation but one).
She even used the same word, "unwittingly." Bonvile
was to have learnt of her love and of her death at the
same moment, and "the riddle had been construed."
I have spent some time over this point in order to
show that Webster (or Webster and Rowley) is per-
fectly clear in his motivation in A Cure for a Cuckold^
and that the motive was this. For it removes the only
argument in favour of A Cure for a Cuckold preceding
The Parliament of Love; and it may counteract the im-
pression that might be produced by Dr. Stoll's harping
on Webster's inability to make a plot with coherence
or even normal sanity.
To go back to the comparison of Massinger's, Mar-
ston's, and Webster's plays ; when they are summarised
in that way, it becomes immediately obvious either that
there is some special connection between The Parliament
of Love and A Cure for a Cuckold, or that they have
a common source other than The Dutch Courtezan:
There are so many similarities ; the whole dramatisation
of the tale and division into scenes, the "dearest friend"
command, the search for him under pretext of asking
for a second in a duel, the unsuccessful application to
other friends, F cutting his mistress, the duel scene,
the supposed death of F, and so on. They cannot pos-
270 JOHN WEBSTER
sibly have arisen from independent study of Marston's
play.
There may have been an intermediate step, a source,
perhaps, in the first twenty years of the seventeenth
century, and, if so, probably founded on Marston's
play. Dr. Stoll does not consider the possibility of this.
But we cannot rule it out. It would explain the general
similarity, with such differences of motivation, etc., in
Webster's and Massinger's plays. This intermediate
source must have been either itself a play or a story
that fell very easily and necessarily into certain scenes,
as an apparently whole, already carved, chicken drops,
as soon as you touch it, into neatly severed limbs.
More than this one cannot say. There is little proof
for or against an intermediate source. One can only
admit its possibility.
But if only these three plays are left us, which was
intermediate. The Parliament of Love or A Cure for a
Cuckold? The former is nearer to The Dutch Courte-
zan in one point, the law-case at the end, in which L
accuses A ; the latter in no point. This is some evidence,
but not so strong as it seems, for the law-case at the
end of The Parliament of Love is required anyhow by
the whole plot, independently of this part. Then there
are certain differences in treatment that may be signifi-
cant. Webster comments on the strangeness of the
seconds having to fight in the duel. Massinger accepts
it without comment. Dr. Stoll thinks this a proof that
Webster was the later. To me it seems more likely that
the inventor of the story should have commented on a
APPENDICES 271
detail like this, and the man who took the story over,
accepted it. Again, Webster directly presents A try-
ing several friends in vain before he tries F ; Massinger
only relates it. Is it more likely that Webster drama-
tised what Massinger reported, or that Massinger made
indirect what Webster gave directly .^ The former, I
think ; so that this piece of evidence favours Massinger
being the intermediary. Dr. Stoll suggests several
pieces of more general evidence. (1) A Cure for a
Cuckold shows the influence of Fletcher and Massinger.
This would have happened if Webster had been imi-
tating The Parliament of Love. Therefore he was imi-
tating it. (2) Webster could not have invented so
dramatic a sequence of scenes himself; and Massinger — •
and only Massinger — could. (3) Webster's muddling
of motivation shows that he was trying to work The
Parliament of Love motives into a different plot. (4)
The mass of word-play and quibbling in Webster shows
he was, later, an embroiderer. (5) Some of the later
invented incidents, e.g., the duel-scene, and also the
struggle in A's soul, are Massingerish.
These are not really at all strong. (1) is bad logic.
Webster would have shown — and did show — the influ-
ence of the time anyhow. (2) These generalisations
about Webster's capabilities, founded on such small
data, are very dangerous. Possibly Webster could
have invented these scenes. Certainly Rowley, his col-
laborator, could. Massinger was not the only person.
(3) I have disposed of. (4) has some weight: but as
272 JOHN WEBSTER
Webster was fond of these queer notions and verbal
tricks (he still kept something of his heritage from
Donne), and Massinger was less fond, it is not very con-
vincing. (5) also has a Httle weight, but it is again
dangerous to suppose that Webster and Rowley, writ-
ing in the manner of Massinger's period, could not have
caught something of that very second-rate magic. In
any case the struggle in A's soul comes in The Dutch
Courtezan, and ex hypothesi Webster could have used
it, even if he hadn't the brains to think of it.
Parts of some of these arguments, it may also be
worth remarking, especially of (2) and (5), depend on
The Dutch Courtezan, or something equally remote,
being the immediate source of whichever of The Parlior
ment of Love and A Cure for a Cuckold was the earlier.
So far there has been a little evidence of the priority
of Massinger's play. Dr. Stoll advances one more
proof. He shows the evolution of various fragments of
the Dutch Courtezan — Parliament of Love story,
through forms that must have been familiar to Massin-
ger. To begin with, there is The Scornful Lady (1609,
or 10) by Beaumont and Fletcher. Massinger, who was
a close student of their work, must have known it. In
this play the elder Loveless has forced a kiss in public
from the Lady. She condemns him to face the Channel,
a year in France, and a French mistress. He goes and
soon returns in disguise, to report his own death : which
scares her, for a minute, into confessing that she did
love him. There is really very little of relevance in
APPENDICES 273
this : far less than Dr. Stoll makes out.* But it has a
certain resemblance to The Parliament of Love.
The next instance is more interesting. The Little
French Lawyer (1619 or 20), by Fletcher and Massin-
ger, has a variant of the story. In this, A and F are
going, as principal and second, to fight a duel. L gives
A a sudden command, which will cause him to cut the
duel and sacrifice his friend. There is the struggle be-
tween love and friendship, in A's breast. Love wins.
This is a curious modification of the other theme; but
the similarity is not really great. There are minor de-
tails of resemblance, which Dr. Stoll brings out clearly,^
though he exaggerates the main points. Most, at least,
of this story in The Little French Lawyer, comes in
Massinger's portion of the play.^
These two steps do not amount to much, but they
help a little. We can see that Massinger's mind was
* Dr. Stoll's great fault is that he is given to pressing evidence,
carelessly and unfairly, in his own direction. He is too eager to
prove a case. In this instance, a notable one, he says, that the elder
Loveless "elicits" from the Lady, "a rueful declaration, like Leo-
nora's in the Parliament of Love, that were he alive she would
marry him." It is a concoction of untruths. All the Lady says is
that if she had been warned when Loveless was setting out, "these
two arms had been his sea." As for Leonora she says nothing of
the kind. All she says is that, rather than that Cleremond be exe-
cuted and she live and die an anchoress in an eight-foot room built
on his grave, she'll marry him. Cleremond is not dead, and nobody
thinks he is. Perhaps Dr. Stoll was thinking of Bellisant, who
is driven by the supposed death of Montrose to confess she loved
him. But that belongs to another part of the plot.
'Stoll, 168-170.
*i.e., in Act. I. (C. H. E. L. VI, pp. 139, 9).
274 JOHN WEBSTER
familiar with variants of the story and similar situa-
tions. Since a comparison of his variant and Webster's
has also made it seem more likely that Webster imitated
him, we may conclude that if The Dutch Courtezan,
The Parliament of Love, and A Cure for a Cuckold are
the only plays in the matter, that was probably the
order in which they were written. The Parliament of
Love was licensed in November 1624, so 1625 — is, by
this department of the evidence, a probable date.
We can only say then that this play was very likely
written between 1625 and 1642; and rather more prob-
ably before 1630 than after.
QUESTIONS OF AUTHOESHIP
A Cure for a Cuckold was first printed in 1661 by
Kirkman, as by Webster and Rowley. This evidence
is of very little value. That Webster's hand is to be
found faintly in several parts of the play is shown with
probabihty but not certainty, by Dr. Stoll.^ His
parallel passages seem to be the only proofs of his thai?
have any validity. Beyond this we can say nothing;
except that the under-plot, the Compass affair, is prob-
ably not by Webster, and certainly might be by Rowley.
How much share Rowley or anybody else had in the
other part of the play, cannot be settled, at least with-
out much more minute investigation than this problem
has yet received. Mr. Spring-Rice's and Mr. Gosse's
» Pp. 37-41.
APPENDICES 275
subtraction of the main plot of the play, and publica-
tion of it by itself (as by Webster), satisfies one's ar-
tistic feeling, more than one's desire for correct attribu-
tion.
7
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A, EDITIONS
B, CRITICISM, SOURCES, ETC.
A. Editions
The Works of John Webster. Collected by the Rev. Alex-
ander Dyce. Four volumes, 1830.
Reprinted 1857, one volume.
The Dramatic Works of John Webster. Edited by Wil-
liam Hazlitt. Four volumes. Library of Old Authors.
1857.
The White Devil and Duchess of Malfy. Ed. Sampson.
1904. Belles Lettres Series.
The Mermaid Series: Webster and Tourneur. Edited by
J. A. Symonds, with introduction. 1888. Contains
The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi.
The White Devil; or, The Tragedy of Paulo Giordano
Ursini, Duke of Brachiano, with The Life and Death
of Vittoria Corombona, the famous Venetian Curtizan.
Acted by the Qwenes Majesties Servants. I6l2,
quarto.
Reprinted 1631, quarto.
Reprinted 1665, quarto.
Reprinted 1672, quarto.
Injured Love; or. The Cruel Husband. By N[ahum] Tate.
A Version of The White Devil. 1707.
The White Devil. A Select Collection of Old Plays, vol.
iii., Dodsley. 1744.
Reprinted 1780. Notes by Isaac Reed. Dodsley.
The White Devil. The Ancient British Drama, vol. iii.
Edited by Sir Walter Scott. 1810.
277
278 JOHN WEBSTER
The White Devil. A Select Collection of Old Plays. Notes
by Reed, Gilchrist, and the Editor (Collier 1825).
Vittoria Corromhona, ou le Diable Blanc. Contemporains
de Shakespeare. J. Webster et J. Ford. Traduits
par Ernest Lafond. Paris, 1865.
Vittoria Coromhona. Alt-englisclies Theater.
Herausgegeben von Robert Prolss. Two volumes.
Leipzig.
The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy. Quarto, 1623.
Reprinted 1640, quarto.
Reprinted 1678, quarto.
The Duchesse of Malfy. 1660 (circa) , quarto. Probably
reprint of first Quarto (v. Sampson, Webster's White
Devil, etc., p. 404).
The Unfortunate Dutchesse of Malfy; or The Unnatural
Brothers. Written by Mr. Webster. 1708, quarto
(printed from 1678 edition for stage purposes).
The Fatal Secret. A Tragedy. As acted at the Theatre
Royal. By Lewis Theobald. A version of The Duch-
ess of Malfi, 1735. (Preface avows Webster's author-
ship.)
The Duchesse of Malfy. The Ancient British Drama.
1810. (Printed from 1670 Ed.)
The Duchess of Malfi. Tallis's Acting Drama, part i.,
1851. (Altered and expurgated.)
Die Herzogin von Amalfi. Shakespeare's Zeitgenossen imd
ihre Werke, 1858-1860. F. von Bodenstedt. ("The
Duchess" is translated, the other plays summarised.)
La Duchesse d* Amalfi. 1865. (Translated by Lafond.)
The Duchess of Malfi. The Works of the British Drama-
tists. John Keltic. 1870.
The Duchess of Malfi. Dick's standard Plays. 1883.
The Duchess of Malfi. The Best Elizabethan Plays. Ed-
ited by W. R. Thayer. 1892. (Expurgated.)
The Duchess of Malfi. Temple Dramatists. Edited C.
Vaughan. 1896.
The Duchess of Malfi. Ed. W. A. Neilson.
The Malcontent, By John Marston. l604.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 279
The Malcontent. Augmented by Marston. With the addi-
tions played by the King's Majesty's Servants. Writ-
ten by John Webster. l604.
The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat. With the Coro-
nation of Queen Mary and the Coming in of King
Philip. As it was plaid by the Queens Majesties'
Servants. Written by Thomas Dickers and John Web-
ster. 1607. Reprinted in Two Old Plays. Ed. W. J.
Blew. 1876.
North-Ward Hoe. By Thomas Decker and John Webster.
1607.
West-Ward Hoe. Sundry Times acted by the Children of
Paules. Written by Tho. Dekker and John Webster.
1607.
The DeviVs Law-Case; or. When Women goe to Larv, the
Devil is full of businesse. A new Trage-comedy by
John Webster. 1623.
Appius and Virginia. A Tragedy by John Webster. 1654.
A Cure for a Cuckold. A Pleasant Comedy. Written by
John Webster and William Rowley. I66I.
The Thracian Wonder. A Comical History by John Web-
ster and William Rowley. I66I.
Love's Graduate. A Comedy by John Webster. 1885.
Edited by Stephen Spring-Rice. With an introduc-
tion by Edmund Gosse.
[Merely A Cure for a Cuckold with the sub-plot, the
Compass story left out.]
Monuments of Honor. Derived from remarkable antiquity
and celebrated ... at the sole munificent charge . . .
of the Worshipfull Fraternity of the Eminent Mer-
chant Taylors. Invented and written by John Web-
ster, Merchant Taylor. 1624.
A Monumental Columne erected to the living Memory of the
ever-glorious Henry, late Prince of Wales. By John
Webster. I6l3.
280 JOHN WEBSTER
B. Criticism, Sources, etc.
Retrospective Review. 1823. John Webster [anonymous
article].
A True Relation of the deserved Death of that base and
Insolent Tyrant, the most unworthy Marshall of
France. . . A True Recital of those things that have
been done in the Court of France since the Death of
Marshall D'Ancre. I6l7.
J. Q. Adams, Junior. Greene's Menaphon and The Thra-
cian Wonder. Modern Philology, iii. I906.
W. Archer. Webster, Lamb, and Swinburne. New Review,
1893. [Decrying Webster and the "Lamb Tradition"
about the Elizabethans.]
M. Bandello. Novelle. 1554-73.
F. de Boaistuau and P. Belleforest. Histoires Tragiques.
1580-2.
J. le G, Brereton, IQOQ. Elizabethan Drama.
[Contains revised version of the review of Prof.
Sampson's The White Devil and The Duchess of
Malfi, which appeared in Hermes, November 1905.]
J. le Gay Brereton. The Relation of the Thracian Wonder
to Greene's Menaphon. Mod. Language Review, Oc-
tober 1906.
Englische Studien. xxxvii., 1907.
Crawford, C. Collectanea. Two Series. 1906-7.
Series I., pp. 20-46. Webster and Sidney.
Series IL, pp. 1-63, Webster, Marston, Montaigne,
Donne, etc.
Reprinted from Notes and Queries.
Gnoli, D. Vittoria Accoramboni. 1870.
Gosse, Edmund. Seventeenth Century Studies, 1883. John
Webster.
Greg, W. W. Webster's White Devil. Modern Language
Quarterly, Dec. 19OO.
Grimeston. Translation of Goulart's Histoires admirables
et memorables de nostre temps. I607.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 281
Hatcher, O. L. Sources and Authorship of the Thracicun
Wonder. Modern Language Notes, vol. xxiii., 1908.
^ Hazlitt, William. Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of
the Age of Elizabeth. 1821.
Hunt, Mary Leland. Thomas Dehher. Columbia Uni-
versity, 1911. [v. Appendix D.]
Kiesow, K. Die verschiedenen Bearbeitungen der Novelle
von der Herzogin von Amalfl des Bandello in den Lit-
eraturen des xvi. und xvii. Jahrhunderts. 1895.
Lamb, Charles. Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets.
1808. 2nd Ed., 1813.
Lauschke, Johannes. John Webster's Tragodie Appius and
Virginia. 1899-
Lee, Sidney. John Webster. Dictionary of National
Biography, 1899-
I^Lowell, J. R. The Old Dramatists. Webster. 1892.
MacCracken, L. A Page of Forgotten History. 1911-
{i.e. The Story of Vittoria.)
Meiners, Martin. Metrische Untersuchungen iiber den
Dramatiker, John Webster. 1893.
Michaelis, S. The Admirable History of the Passion and
Conversion of a Penitent Woman, seduced by a Magi-
cian. 1613.
Murray, J. Tucker. English Dramatic Companies, 1585-
1642. 2 vols., 1910.
Painter, W. Palace of Pleasure. 1566. Two volumes.
Pierce, F. E. The Collaboration of Webster and Dehher.
1909. Reviewed by Dr. P. Aronstein in Beiblatt sur
Anglia, 1910, p. 79-
Rich, Barnabe. New Description of Ireland. I6IO.
Scheffler, W. Thomas Dehher als Dramatiher. 1910.
Sidney, Sir Philip. Arcadia. 1590.
Stoll, E. E. John Webster. The Periods of his Worh.
1905. Reviewed by W. W. Greg in Modern Language
Review, Oct. I906.
Swinburne, A. C. The Age of Shahespeare. 1908. John
Webster,
282 JOHN WEBSTER
Swinburne, A, C. Prologue to the Duchess of Malfy.
Nineteenth Century, 1899-
Studies in Prose and Poetry. John Webster, 1894.
Symonds, J. A. Italian Byways. 1883. Vittoria Acco-
ramboni.
Reprinted in his Studies in Italy and Greece. Second
Series.
The Repentance of Nathaniel Tindall that hilled his mother.
July 2, 1624.
A most bloody and unmatchahle murder committed in
Whitechapel by Nathaniel Tindall upon his own
mother, written by John Morgan.
(I cannot find either of these in the British Museum.
They may not be extant.)
Vaughan, C. E. Tourneur and Webster. Article in Cam-
bridge History of English Literature, vol. vi.
Reviewed, Aronstein in Beiblatt zur Anglia, April
1911.
Vopel, C. John Webster. 1888.
Wurzbach, Wolfgang von. Jahrbuch der deutschen
Shakespeare-Gesellschaft. 1898. John Webster.
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