John Webster
c. 1578–c. 1632
Biography
John Webster was an English dramatist of the Jacobean period, the years of James I, and he is remembered mainly for two tragedies. He was probably born in or near London in the late 1570s and died around 1632, so his working life overlapped with Shakespeare's. Records of his private life are thin, and much of what is known about him comes from his plays and from the theatrical record of the time.
He began by writing with others. He worked with Thomas Dekker on the city comedies Westward Ho and Northward Ho, and he adapted a play by John Marston for the King's Men. His lasting reputation rests on two tragedies drawn from Italian sources. The White Devil, based on the intrigues around a real Italian woman, was staged at the Red Bull in 1612 and did not succeed. The Duchess of Malfi, first performed by the King's Men about 1614, was more successful and was printed in 1623.
In The Duchess of Malfi the heroine is a figure of virtue set against the cruelty of her brothers, and the play's dark, poetic view of power at court is what many readers remember. Webster was largely neglected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but twentieth-century critics and theatregoers came to value his tragedies as works of real poetic power. The Duchess of Malfi, in this catalogue, is one of his two best-known plays and a good place to meet him.
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Books
The Duchess of Malfi
by John Webster
The widowed Duchess of Malfi secretly marries her steward Antonio against the wishes of her brothers, the Cardinal and Ferdinand. Their revenge on her and her children is one of the cruellest in English drama and drives the court toward a bloody end. This book contains scenes of…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.