Webster, JOHN, one of the great names of English Tragedy, was alive and writing for the stage between the years 1602 and 1624. But beyond this all is conjecture; when and where he was born and died it is impossible to ascertain. Webster is described on the title-page of one of his works as a merchant-taylor; and he was long supposed, on no sufficient authority, to have been at one time clerk of St Andrews, Holborn. For his name is not on the register of that parish, nor has research elicited any sound collateral evidence on the point. That he must be confounded neither with John Webster, the author of The Saint's Guide, nor with John Webster of Clitheroe, the careful investigation of the Rev. Alexander Dyce, the dramatist's first editor, has made certain. Here, then, the materials of the biographer end. Himself has said, 'I rest silent in my own work.' Webster's first recorded writing was a share in Lady Jane and The Two Harpies, a pair of patchwork productions, in which Dekker, Drayton, Chettle, and others were his collaborators; both are lost. In 1604 he made some additions to the Malcontent of Marston. How far these went we have no means of knowing, but we may conjecturally ascribe to him the 'Induction,' a sprightly prelude to what Marston well calls his aspera Thalia. In 1607 were printed The History of Sir Thomas Wyatt, a tragedy, and two comedies, entitled Westward Ho and Northward Ho, all three the joint work of Webster and Dekker. The History is merely remarkable for a text singularly corrupt, but the twin-companions are a notable contrast. Both are vigorous, breezy, humorous plays, interesting as documents on the manners of their day. But while Westward Ho is an ill-constructed combination of prose and poetry (the best of it clearly Dekker's), Northward Ho is symmetrical, strong in construction, and written throughout in a sturdy, homespun prose, without hint of poetry from beginning to end. Five years later came the White Devil, and with its publication Webster entered his kingdom, rising near the level of the greatest tragic writers of any time. Pathos, passion, truth to nature, combined with astounding art of execution, are qualities seldom if ever more consummately displayed than here. The Duchess of Malfi, published in 1623, is a yet more supreme achievement in tragic art. All the great qualities of the White Devil are revealed with a still greater perfection of poetic beauty and verbal fitness. The story too is infinitely sympathetic. Pity and terror, the tragic emotions, are wrought to their uttermost of endurance. Published in 1654, Appius and Claudius has poetry, pathos, simplicity, and constructive excellence in the plot. But set beside these others it seems cold, pale, and merely pretty, lacking, in brief, the signal qualities of Webster's best work. The Devil's Law Case (1623), excepting only the excellent passages quoted in Charles Lamb's Specimens, is disagreeable and sordid. An ode on the death of Prince Henry, with other fragments of verse (all inferior to the noble prose of his prefaces), makes up the sum of Webster's writings. In 1664 Kirkman the printer, an ignorant man and an unscrupulous, published two comedies, The Thracian Wonder and A Cure for a Cuckold, which he declared to have been written by Webster and Rowley. Kirkman's unsupported word proves nothing, and although some ingenuity has been exercised to prove Webster's paternity in the case of the former play, both actions may be unhesitatingly dismissed. In 1624 a tragedy entitled 'the recent murder of the son upon his mother, written by Forde and Webster,' was licensed for the stage. It is lost to us now, with how much more!
Not popular in his own day, Webster, in Mr Swinburne's happy phrase, 'found his first recognition at the pious and fortunate hands of Charles Lamb.' Since then he has been praised to reverence by various masters of criticism, and his name claimed by enthusiastic writers as the next in tragic art to Shakespeare's. An attempt at a detailed appreciation may be spared in the case of a dramatist whom Lamb and Hazlitt have praised in imperishable sentences. But a single word may be said of Webster's limitations as these are defined in Kingsley's Plays and Puritans, and elsewhere. Webster is charged with the faults of Tourneur—with having a diseased view of human nature, and the art of a poet of horror and the shambles. In support of the last part of the indictment the many terrible episodes of the White Devil and The Duchess are cited. But no poet should be judged by episodes and scenes removed from their context and considered in 'a cold abstraction.' The effect produced on the reader as he reads is the only just test, and to examine this is the true function of the critic as the other is that of the advocatus diaboli. To him who reads no episode in either of Webster's masterpieces seems forced and wrong; the atmosphere is charged with horror, and each point of terror is a just and natural step towards the catastrophe. For the rest it will suffice to say that no one ever rose from Webster's pages inspired with any but a more spacious, a loftier, and a braver view of life and its issues. There are instances without end in his best work where nature seemed to take the pen and write for him. But passion and pity and terror were the emotions that transcribed their secrets for him; not cynicism and nausea. The chosen epithet of Hazlitt in this connection, echoed by Mr Swinburne, is the last word on this dramatist: 'there is no nobler-minded poet than Webster.'
See C. Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, &c., and Hazlitt's Lectures on the Literature of Elizabeth, &c. Webster's works were first collected by the Rev. Alexander Dyce (4 vols. 1830), next by Hazlitt (1857-58). See also the edition by Mr J. A. Symonds in the 'Mermaid' series, and Mr Swinburne's admirable essay in The Nineteenth Century, June 1886.