About the Author

John Webster's fame rests on two remarkable tragedies, both set in Roman Catholic Italy and both evoking the common Jacobean stereotype of that land as a place of sophisticated and morbid corruption, sumptuous and evil. Both have at their centre bold and brave heroines who choose love for themselves and refuse to submit to male patriarchs. In The White Devil (1608/12), based on events that took place in Italy in 1581-85, Vittoria Corombona boldly defies a courtroom full of corrupt magistrates who convict her for adultery and murder. In The Duchess of Malfi (1614/23), based on an Italian novella, the spirited and noble ruler of Malfi, secretly marries her steward Antonio, for love, defying the commands of her brothers, a duke and cardinal, that she remains a widow. Their dark motives include greed for her fortune, overweening pride in their blood, and incestuous desire. The play weds sublime poetry and lurid gothic horror in the devious machinations set in motion against the duchess by her brothers' melancholy spy Bosola in the macabre mental and physical torments to which they subject her, in the desperate lunatic ravings of the duke after having her strangled, and in the final scenes, in which the stage is littered with the slaughtered bodies of the principal characters, as well as the small children of the duchess and Antonio. Webster's portrayal of the independent spirit and courage of the duchess invites comparison with the royal heroine of Elizabeth Cary's tragedy Mariam written at about the same date.

Webster was the son of a London tailor and a member of the Merchant Taylors' company, but we know little else about him. He wrote a tragicomedy, The Devil's Law Case (1612) and collaborated on several plays with contemporary playwrights, among them Thomas Dekker in Westward Hoe (1607) and John Marston in The Malcontent (1604). Of all the Stuart dramatists, Webster is the one who comes closest to Shakespeare in his power of tragic utterance and his flashes of poetic brilliance.