John Webster

Abstract

Christoher Marlowe is usually regarded as one of Shakespeare’s forerunners, even though his plays were written around the same time that Shakespeare was beginning to write – that is, in the late 1580s. In the same way, John Webster (c. 1578-c. 1632) is often regarded as belonging to the generation of dramatists after Shakespeare, despite the fact that his two great plays, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malji, were written about the same time that Shakespeare completed his last major play, The Tempest (1611). This, in turn, suggests something of the sheer concentration of great drama produced during a thirty-year period at the turn of the seventeenth century. One extraordinary thing about many of these plays is that they seem to speak to us far more directly than many plays written in later times. A great deal of eighteenth-century drama, for example, seems light and inconsequential, while the Victorian age, before the revival of drama in the latter years of the nineteenth century, seems only to have produced rather trivial melodramas. Most Renaissance plays, by contrast, seem forcefully to consider universal human problems.