Information AboutJohn Webster |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT JOHN WEBSTER | |
| english renaissance dramatists | |
| english dramatists and playwrights | |
| 1580 births | |
| 1634 deaths | |
|
John Webster (c. 1578 - c. 1634 ) was an English Jacobean Dramatist , a late contemporary of William Shakespeare . His tragedies '' The White Devil '' and '' The Duchess Of Malfi '' are often regarded as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage. LIFE AND CAREER Webster's life is obscure, but he was born in 1578 or 1579 as the son of a cartmaker in Smithfield, London . His interest in Theatre may have been sparked when his father was hired to make wagons for city pageants. Early collaborations Webster probably studied at the Merchant Taylor's School , before going on to the law schools at the Middle Temple . However, by 1602 he was working with teams of playwrights on history plays, most of which were never printed. These included a tragedy ''Caesar's Fall'' (written with Michael Drayton , Thomas Dekker , Thomas Middleton and Anthony Munday ), and a collaboration with Thomas Dekker entitled ''Christmas Comes but Once a Year'' (1602). With Dekker he also wrote ''Sir Thomas Wyatt'', which was printed in 1607. He worked with Thomas Dekker again on two City Comedies , ''Westward Ho!'' in 1603 and ''Northward Ho!'' in 1604. Also in 1604, he adapted John Marston 's ''The Malcontent'' for staging by the King's Men . The major tragedies Despite his ability to write comedy, Webster is best known for his two brooding English tragedies based on Italian sources. '' The White Devil '', a retelling of the intrigues involving Vittoria Accoramboni , an Italian woman assassinated at the age of 28, was a disaster when staged at the Red Bull Theatre in 1612 (published the same year), being too unusual and intellectual for its audience. '' The Duchess Of Malfi '', first performed by the King's Men in 1613 and published the same year, was more successful. Webster himself referred to the poor reception and small audience which his earlier play had received. He also wrote a play called ''Guise'', based on French history, in c.1614-1618, but it was never printed. ''The White Devil'' was performed in the Red Bull Theatre , an open air theatre that is believed to have specialized in providing simple, escapist drama for a largely working class audience, a factor that might explain why Webster's highly intellectual and complex play was unpopular with its audience. In contrast, ''The Duchess of Malfi'' was probably performed by the King's Men in the smaller, indoor Blackfriars Theatre , where it would have played to a more highly educated audience that might have appreciated it better. The two plays would thus have been very different in their original performances. ''The White Devil'' would have been performed, probably in one continuous action, by adult actors, with elaborate stage effects a possibility. ''The Duchess of Malfi'' was performed in a controlled environment, with artificial lighting, and musical interludes between acts— which allowed time, perhaps, for the audience to accept the otherwise strange rapidity with which the Duchess is able to have babies. Late plays Webster wrote one more play on his own: '''' (c.1621), co-written with Thomas Middleton , and '' A Cure For A Cuckold '' (c.1624), co-written with William Rowley . In 1624, he also co-wrote a topical play about a recent scandal, ''The Late Murder of the Son upon the Mother'' (with John Ford , Rowley and Dekker); the play itself is lost, although its plot is known from a court case. He is believed to have contributed to the tragicomedy ''The Fair Maid of the Inn'' with John Fletcher , Ford, and Phillip Massinger . His last known play is ''Appius and Virginia'', probably written with Thomas Heywood in 1627. REPUTATION Webster's major plays, '' The White Devil '' and '' The Duchess Of Malfi '', are macabre, disturbing works that seem to pre-empt the Gothic literature of the Eighteenth Century . Intricate, complex, subtle and learned, they are difficult but rewarding, and are still frequently staged today. Webster has received a reputation for being the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatist with the most unsparingly dark vision of human nature. Even more than John Ford , whose '' Tis A Pity She's A Whore '' is also very bleak, Webster's tragedies present an horrific vision of mankind. In his poem 'Whispers of Immortality', T. S. Eliot memorably refers to Webster as always seeing "the skull beneath the skin". In the 1998 film romance, '' Shakespeare In Love '', the young Webster is shown as a small boy who plays with wild mice (and feeds them to alley cats) and speaks admiringly of the macabre aspects Shakespeare's ''Titus Andronicus'' ("I like it when they cut heads off. And the daughter mutilated with knives"). While Webster's drama was generally dismissed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many twentieth century critics and theatregoers find ''The White Devil'' and ''The Duchess of Malfi'' to be brilliant plays of great poetic quality and dark themes. One explanation for this change is that after the horrors of war in the early . More recently, Webster's combination of extreme violence with complex wordplay and eloquent assassins has been compared with the films of Quentin Tarantino . WEBSTER IN OTHER WORKS The song "My White Devil" from Echo & The Bunnymen 's album Porcupine refers to John Webster as "one of the best there was" and mentions his two tragic plays by name. A young John Webster appears in Shakespeare In Love REFERENCES Dates of Webster's plays are taken from ''The Works of John Webster: An Old-Spelling Critical Edition'', ed. Gunby, Carnegie and Hammond (Cambridge, 1995). EXTERNAL LINKS |
|
|