Webster and Ford

Abstract

John Webster was born in about 1578. His father was a well-to-do coach-maker whose business included providing the carts used to carry prisoners to execution. Webster’s known work in the theatre dates from 1602 to about 1626, making it almost exactly coterminous with the reign of James I (1603–25). His earliest surviving plays are relatively undistinguished collaborative works, The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1602), Westward Ho! (1604), and Northward Ho! (1605), all written with Thomas Dekker. His final plays were also written collaboratively and have likewise failed to arouse much critical enthusiasm. They include Anything for a Quiet Life (c.1621) with Middleton, A Cure for a Cuckold (c.1625) with Rowley, and Appius and Virginia (c.1626) with Heywood. In between he wrote, unaided, the two tragedies on which his reputation depends, The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1613–14), plays which Hazlitt and many subsequent critics have thought “come the nearest to Shakespear[e] of any thing we have upon record.”1 His third independently written work was the flawed but fascinating tragicomedy The Devil’s Law-Case (c.1617). The dates of his two tragedies place them at the precise moment when Shakespeare was retiring from the theatre, and close to the mid-point of James’s reign. Since both plays contain ferocious outbursts against court life (“O happy they that never saw the court,/Nor ever knew great man but by report” (The White Devil V.vi.261–2)), it has seemed natural to many critics and teachers to situate them primarily within a Jacobean political context and to see them as exemplifying the growing hostility to the Stuart court which, a generation later, would help to cause the Civil War which began in 1642.

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